Doors Open for Turkey as the Kurds Disarm

Hey, all Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from a frosty Colorado morning. Today we’re going to talk about what’s going on in Turkey. Specifically a guy by the name of Abdullah. Let’s forget this region or Geelong or Geelong or Dillon. Is a Kurdish leader of a group called the PKK, which is a militant group has called upon his compatriots to lay down their arms and dissolve their military arm, completely becoming a political party. 

In his words, the days when, the Turks were oppressing the Kurds are gone and Kurds now have rights, and it’s time to move on. This isn’t the first time he said this. This guy has been in prison since 1999. And you can understand he kind of wants to get out of prison and maybe into something a little more cushy, like house arrest before he dies. 

But this time, it’s probably going to work. So let’s dial the clock back and explain how we got to where we are, then look forward. the Kurds predominate in the part of the Middle East that is in southwest Turkey, which is where most of them live. 

And then there are others in northwestern Iran, northeastern Syria and northern Iraq, starting in the early 80s, a group formed called the PKK that started a civil war against the Turkish government for independence for Turkish Kurdistan. And, Odilon was part of that process. And again then he was arrested in 1989. In the early parts of the war, over 30,000 people died. 

We’re up to about 40,000 in total. Now, 25 years later. And it’s wrapped up in issues of identity for the Turks. You see, in the days before World War one, when it wasn’t Turkey, when it was the Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman Empire was a plurality government. You had the Turks who were large in charge, but they weren’t a majority in their own empire. 

And so they knew that they needed other ethnicities, other peoples, to do everything from keeping the trains running on time, even before there were trains to manning the army. And so there was a relatively robust respect for the ethnic and religious autonomy of every group. And the in this system, the Kurds, just like the Greeks, just like the Serbs, just like the Romanians, just like the Arabs, all enjoyed probably the most robust rights of any minorities in any system in human history, with the possible exception in the early United States itself. 

And because of this, this multi-ethnic entity, persevered for centuries. It allowed the Turks at the head of this multi-ethnic coalition to be a world power, to be the world power for centuries. But after century and century and century of military defeats at the hands of the Europeans, primarily as the Europeans industrialize and the Turks did not, the Turks found themselves stripped of a lot of these outer territories that were home to most of these other ethnicities that had joined more or less willingly with the Turkish cause. 

And by the time you get to World War One and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, there wasn’t a lot left, except for what we know today as contemporary Turkey. And so the Turks changed their governing strategy because in what is today contemporary Turkey, the Turks were over 75% of the overall population. They changed from having a multi-ethnic strategy to a nationalist one. 

And Turkey was the land of the Turks for the Turks ruled by the Turks. And if you happen to be another minority in contemporary Turkey, well, you were to shit out of luck. So we had a couple of, up routines, where Armenians were removed from eastern Turkey in a genocide, and ran to what is today contemporary Armenia. 

And in the West, you had a willing population exchange between the Greeks and the Turks in the province of Thrace, where they basically just swapped populations. And that took care of most of the ethnic, complications, with the exception of the Kurds, of which there were too many to move and there was nowhere to move them to. 

So the Kurds became persecuted in what they saw as their own homeland, because it was also the Turkish homeland. And the definitions have changed. Now you go from 1917 until roughly 2010, 2015, and you had this duology and Turkish identity was are we modern? Are we European? Are we Turkish? Are we Islamic? And those different ideas of identity agreed on one thing we weren’t Kurdish. 

So no matter where you were on the Turkish political spectrum, the Kurds were always the odd man out. And that was reflected in their electoral system as well. The Kurds had an independence minded party in the parliament, but no one would work with it. And it was never enough of a vote to really sway the balance of power. 

But the ebb and flow of Turkish politics continued, and you basically had it consolidate into two major camps. First, you had the Kamala’s or the European US who saw Turkey as a modern nation state, maybe not quite in the Western model, but pretty close. Begun industrialization, big on militarization, and big on making sure that, everybody’s noses were faced in the right direction. 

And so the Kurds were a problem there. On the other side, you had the Islamists who wanted to go back to the old Ottoman roots, with identity being more rooted in culture. And the interior, shifted away from Europe more, religiosity. As a rule, in free elections, the Islamists tended to win because they had more people. 

And then you would usually have a military coup, as the military, would decide that they would give strain away from the ideals of the Turkish Republic. This continued into about 2000, with the rise of a guy by the name of Erdogan, who was still, the leader of the country has been for it’s been 25 years now. 

Yeah. Anyway, Erdogan, definitely hailed from the Islamist side of things. But over his first 15 years of rule, he largely succeeded in merging the two identities into one. So Turkey is modern and Islamic, is of the countryside and of the city, is of Europe and is of the Middle East. And in doing so he brought both the more, militant aspects of Islamism to heel, made him more of a political force. 

At the same time, he tamed the military and, included the secularists in the ruling coalition. Now, this is a very non-Western country, and I don’t want to overplay this. It is not a democracy in the way we think of it. Erdogan is a strong man, but he’s created a degree of economic and cultural unity in Turkey that is really quite impressive, especially considering the history of the country. 

The one thing that this all has in common is the Kurds were on the island, the odd man out of all of it. And once we get to about 2015, towards 2020, the fact that the military has been tamed and put under civilian control and that civilian control includes both secular and Islamic elements, the military, instead of having to police the political field, has become far more professional at doing what militaries do. 

And so the uprising that the Kurds have had, led by the PKK, of which, everyone is part of, became tamped down, because the military was able to do it, it was able to focus on what it does. Well. So you fast forward to 2025, all of a sudden, turkey is in a new world. Its domestic politics are the calmest and most unified they have been since at least the Ottoman period. 

You’ve got a leader who is large and in charge but is getting on an edge. He’s right up there with Biden and Trump. It’s probably not going to be with us much longer. And so it’s time to turn the page for any number of reasons. The PKK is on the outs. And if you look across the border from Turkish Kurdistan to the rest of the Kurdish territories, the situation has changed as well. 

Going south into Iraq, it used to be that the Americans preferred working with the Iraqi Kurds to first counter Saddam and then to inject a degree of stability into the Middle East. But the Americans are largely gone. The total number of American forces in all of Iraqi Kurdistan is probably well under a thousand, mostly for Intel operations against Iran. 

If you go straight south into Syria, you just had, the first phase of the Syrian civil war wrap up. And at the moment, all of the various factions are attempting to get along and they’re attempting to form a national government. I have my doubts as to whether this work, but I, you know, I applaud the effort. But what all of the factions, whether they are Alawite or Sunni or Arab or Druze, they all agree upon, is that the Syrian Kurds have no role in that. And so the Syrian Kurds are finding them self squeezed politically. And just like in Iraq, the Americans considered the Syrian Kurds to be the primary partners. But the Americans are leaving Syria as well. 

So all of a sudden, that diplomatic squeeze and political squeeze is also becoming a strategic squeeze. And the Turks have a very strong opinion about what the role of the Kurds in Syria should be in the role they believe should be zero. And then you’ve got Iran. The Iranians have their own Kurds, but because the Iranians have lost all of their proxies across the Middle East, they’re not in a position to stir up trouble. 

It used to be that you’d have Turkey and Syria and Iraq and Iran basically straight, everybody else’s Kurds up while pressing their own. Well, that’s not the math today. So there’s this interesting opportunity for the Turks to actually put this situation to bed forever. And, you know, forever’s a long time. There are complications. Of course. You still have what is, in essence, the largest ethnicity without a state in the world. 

But it’s split within four countries. Their prospects are very weak right now. And there’s an old saying in the Middle East is that every Kurd will fight to the last Kurd to determine who’s in charge. And there was a moment during the American occupation, Iraq, where it looked like it might have gone a different direction. But with the Americans largely gone, that is, a period is now over, and the Kurds in each individual region are basically at each other’s throats. 

So the the Turkish goal here is pretty straightforward. If you can get the PKK to disarm, if you can fold them into the political process, if you can do this with the blessing of folks like Ocalan, who can oversee it and provide the diplomatic gravitas, to make it stick, then as the militant Syrian Kurds find themselves squeezed out, some of them will try to cross the border into Turkey, but there won’t be anywhere for them to base. 

And so they’ll be faced with the choice of going the way of the PKK and folding into the political process, or facing a unified Turkey that all of a sudden has far fewer strategic problems to wrestle with. And they will lose and they will lose badly. And if you’re Turkey, wow. How much has changed in the last couple of years? 

Syria has gone, and the role of Turkey in Syria is basically whatever it wants. It will probably be able to occupy portions of the border region, including the Syrian Kurdish territories it wants to do. Something similar is shaping up in Iraq, where the Kurds, if Iraq are no longer a threat, Iran is going to take in the best case scenario, a few years to regenerate its efforts. 

And that means, for the first time, since at least World War one, the entire Turkish southern and southeastern periphery is clear. Turkey is an interesting power. It’s by far the most politically unified, economically powerful, industrially powerful, militarily powerful country in its region. But it’s never really had the power necessary to deal with all of its borders all at the same time. 

But all of a sudden, three of those borders are pretty much nipped and tucked. There’s still issues to deal with. There’s always Europe and NATO to wrestle with, for better or for worse. To the northwest, the Ukraine war continues to rage. The Russians are always there, and the caucuses are always a mess. But having half of your borders largely taken care of. 

That’s great. So it’s just a question of what the Turks decide to focus on next. And whichever direction they go, that’s going to get really interesting really fast. But all of a sudden they’re back is clear.