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By Halil Karaveli
Read the full article in Foreign Policy here.
In an illiberal world, the Turkish opposition can no longer convince voters that democracy alone is a source of strength.
Much has been written about how U.S. President Donald Trump is pursuing an authoritarian agenda at home while embracing dictators abroad. But even this criticism does not fully capture the way he has reconfigured the global order to strengthen the logic of authoritarianism itself.
The results can be seen with regrettable clarity in Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a leading beneficiary of Trump’s force-based international disorder. Erdogan has simultaneously denounced the United States and cozied up to Trump, all while personifying the national strength that Turkey relies on in an anarchic and illiberal world. Turkey’s opposition, meanwhile, is animated by an idealistic faith in the discarded liberal order and vows to abandon Erdogan’s nationalist foreign policy. Unless it reconsiders and doubles down on nationalism, Turkish voters will return to Erdogan.
Erdogan presents himself as the incarnation of Turkish aspirations for regional and global power. He has long advocated for a multipolar global order not dominated by great powers, saying, “The world is bigger than five”—a reference to the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. In pursuit of this vision, Ankara has cultivated strong relations with Venezuelan President Nicólas Maduro. When Maduro was captured by U.S. forces in January, Erdogan’s chief advisor, Mehmet Ucum, stated, “There is no option other than power-based struggle against imperialist aggression.”
At the same time, Erdogan has also acted as an acquiescent Trump ally who is keen to cooperate with the United States when it serves his purposes. Thus, as his advisor condemned imperialist aggression, Erdogan himself abstained from expressing any criticism of the Maduro raid. After a conversation with Trump on Jan. 27, Erdogan said, “We will continue to develop the cooperation between the United States and Turkey,” adding, “It’s in our common interest that the relations progress in all areas.” Turkey accepted the invitation to join Trump’s Board of Peace, while most NATO allies declined.
The relationship that Erdogan enjoys with Trump provides Turkey with opportunities to promote its national interests in tandem with the United States. According to a recent survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations, only 11 percent of Turks see the United States as an ally with whom they share values, but 42 percent see it as a necessary partner, with whom Turkey must strategically cooperate.
This opportunistic approach helps Erdogan make Turkey into a significant geopolitical actor, capable of projecting military and economic power from the Middle East and the Balkans to Africa and Central Asia. Disparaged by critics as an expression of imperial delusion, the extension of Turkish influence is a source of national pride and an unquestionable asset for Erdogan in today’s uncertain world.
What’s more, changing international conditions have increasingly fused the case for projecting power internationally with Erdogan’s case for projecting power in domestic politics.
Continue reading the full article in Foreign Policy here.
AUTHOR'S BIO: Halil Karaveli is a senior fellow with the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program Joint Center. He is the author of Why Turkey is Authoritarian: From Ataturk to Erdogan.
By Halil Karaveli
Now, with the perceived threat from Rojava having been removed, the Turkish government has less reason to fear a Turkish nationalist backlash after meeting the demands of the Kurds, and has a free hand to re-commit to the peace process. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is in fact compelled to accommodate the Kurds to secure his hold on power. Meanwhile, the Kurds’ best bet is to team up with Turkey: there’s no potential foreign patron left after the U.S. abandoned them. The Kurds may eventually find it in their hearts to forgive Erdoğan; the question however is whether the Turks will empathize with the Kurds and accept them as their equals. Ultimately, society must internalize the change that the state has deemed is in its interest. Otherwise, social cohesion, and the state’s century-long quest for a stable base will continue to elude Turkey.
BACKGROUND:
A lightning offensive by Syrian government forces in late January undid over a decade of Kurdish self-rule in northeastern Syria, where the Syrian offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its military wing, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), supported by Arab tribes – with whom the PYD formed the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) -- had established a proto-state since 2012. The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, also known as Rojava or western Kurdistan, comprised around a quarter of Syria – even though the Kurds make up less than ten percent of Syria’s population -- and included most of the country’s critical resources, oil and water.
Rojava represented the greatest achievement of the PKK in its more than four decades long struggle for an independent Kurdish state. The organization, which officially dissolved in May 2025, lost its military campaign in Turkey a decade ago and was hemmed in by Turkey in northern Iraq, from where it was no longer able to mount any military threat against Turkey. Absent continued U.S. endorsement, its statelet in Syria was no longer viable.
The Syrian government offensive followed after the United States, which had relied on the Kurdish forces to prevent the return of the Islamic State (IS) and to the chagrin of Turkey had armed and financed them made a volte-face. Tom Barrack, the U.S. special envoy to Syria, and ambassador to Turkey, stated that the rationale for the partnership with the SDF had largely expired because Damascus was ready to assume responsibility for security.
The fall of Rojava is a victory not only for the Syrian government, but also for Turkey that had seen the existence of a PKK-statelet, backed by the United States, along a 600 kilometer-stretch of its southern border as an existential threat. In December 2024, Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan described the elimination of the YPG as Ankara’s “strategic objective.” Nonetheless, Kurdish and pro-Kurdish politicians and activists in Turkey expressed consternation and deplored that Turkey had thrown its weight behind Syria’s Sunni Arab regime – Ankara has developed a close military and security relation with Damascus – instead of siding with the Kurds. They argue that Turkey should have taken the Kurds “under its wings” and hold that Turkey’s choice, and not least the fact that the Turkish nationalist public rejoiced at the Kurdish defeat, has caused an unprecedented “emotional rupture” among the Kurds in Turkey. Tuncer Bakırhan, the co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Democracy and Equality (DEM) Party, warned that the Kurds were now “lost” for Turkey.
IMPLICATIONS:
Yet what’s lost is rather the prospect – never openly acknowledged -- of eventually establishing a Greater Rojava, a Kurdish entity that would have re-united the Kurds on both sides of the Turkish-Syrian border. It’s easy to understand why the survival of the PKK statelet in northeastern Syria mattered to the Kurdish political movement in Turkey, and correspondingly why it struck fear in the Turkish government: the border between Turkey and Syria separates the same Kurdish communities, and the continued existence of Rojava would have emboldened the aspirations of the Kurds in southeastern Turkey to wrest self-government from Ankara.
In 2013, Turkey, fearing that the empowerment of the PKK’s Syrian offshoot would embolden the broader organization, initiated peace negotiations with the PKK’s imprisoned leader Abdullah Öcalan. As Turkey had feared, the PKK was indeed emboldened and did not commit to the peace talks, preferring to use Rojava as a base for an attempt to seize control of urban centers in Kurdish-majority provinces of southeastern Turkey, after which Turkey terminated the talks with Öcalan in 2015. The peace process that re-started in late 2024, when Devlet Bahçeli, the leader of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), the key ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, proposed that Öcalan could receive parole if he disbanded the PKK and renounced violence, similarly stalled when the PKK’s offshoot in Syria refused to yield territorial control and subordinate to the central Syrian government.
Now, with the perceived threat from Rojava having been removed, the Turkish government has less reason to fear a Turkish nationalist backlash for meeting the demands of the Kurds, and has a free hand to re-commit to the peace process. As long as the PKK maintained a statelet in Syria -- and enjoyed the backing of the United States -- Erdoğan could not afford to accommodate the Kurds. Although there is broad support in Turkish society for the peace process, Turks and Kurds have different expectations; while the former endorse the process as a means to end violence, the latter crave dignity and equality. Accommodating the Kurds becomes politically less costly for Erdoğan and Bahçeli after the U.S.-backed – and therefore all the more threatening -- Kurdish security challenge across Turkey’s southern border has disappeared.
On February 3, Bahçeli reiterated that Öcalan should receive parole, that the former Kurdish party leader Selahattin Demirtaş must be freed and the two Kurdish mayors Ahmet Türk and Ahmet Özer be reinstated to their posts. Meanwhile, Feti Yıldız, the deputy party leader of the MHP, stressed that Turkey must abide by the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights. The court has ruled that the imprisonment of Demirtaş violates his human rights, a ruling that Turkey has so far ignored. Bahçeli’s statements signal to the Kurds that the peace process continues, while also preparing the Turkish public for forthcoming moves.
In Syria, the fall of Rojava has precipitated a political integration of the Kurds, with President Ahmed al-Sharaa recognizing the Kurds as a constitutive element of Syria, making Kurdish an official language and appointing the first Kurdish mayor in the country’s history. Turkey experts Aslı Aydıntaşbaş and Henri Barkey – in the New York Times and Foreign Policy respectively -- argue that the integration of the Kurds in Syria offers a model for Turkey to emulate. Yet it’s less likely – at least in the shorter term – that the Kurds in Turkey will be offered far-reaching cultural rights such as the right to education in the mother tongue or will be recognized constitutionally as the co-equals of Turks.
Nonetheless, the consolidation of the regime that Erdoğan and Bahçeli have put in place requires that Erdoğan is reelected and that makes it imperative that the Kurds are co-opted. Indeed, shoring up the regime was likely always the main rationale of the opening to Öcalan. The reverence that Bahçeli shows Öcalan is intended to demonstrate respect for the Kurds. That – together with the release of Demirtaş and other Kurdish political prisoners and the planned amnesty for PKK members -- will go a long way toward healing Kurdish wounds and may well win them over and secure another term for Erdoğan.
And while Erdoğan is compelled to accommodate the Kurds to secure another presidential term, the Kurds’ best bet is to team up with Turkey: there’s no potential foreign patron left after the U.S. Statements made by Israeli officials since 2023 have made clear that the Jewish state is eager to use the Kurds as an asset against not only Iran but also Turkey, which has raised the hopes of some Kurds, but Israel would need U.S. sanction.
CONCLUSIONS:
Turkey is a nation that was created top-down, by a bureaucratic elite that set about to construct a uniform base for the new state, suppressing ethnic and cultural differences. The PKK’s four decades long insurrection was proof that the nation-building endeavor remained unaccomplished. The present, state-decreed accommodation of the Kurds is in a sense another version of the old top-down approach. The question today is if the Turkish state, which was unsuccessful in imposing a homogenous identity on a diverse population will now be able to enforce social harmony.
Because while Devlet Bahçeli can be ruthlessly pragmatic in the pursuit of the interests of the state -- like his predecessors at the helm of the Turkish republic have generally been -- ordinary Turks have been raised to think of themselves as the sole owners of Turkey; at best, they condescendingly tolerate the Kurds, at worst they view them with racist-tinged contempt. The Kurds may eventually find it in their hearts to forgive Erdoğan; the question however is whether the Turks will empathize with the Kurds and accept them as their equals. Ultimately, society must internalize the change that the state has deemed is in its interest. Otherwise, social cohesion, and the state’s century-long quest for a stable base will continue to elude Turkey.
AUTHOR'S BIO: Halil Karaveli is a Senior Fellow with the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program Joint Center and the Editor of the Turkey Analyst. He is the author of Why Turkey is Authoritarian: From Atatürk to Erdoğan (Pluto Press).
By Michaël Tanchum
Turkey’s geo-political clout has steadily risen across Eurasia in the past half decade since Ankara’s decisive military assistance to Azerbaijan in the 2020 Karabakh War, propelled further in 2022 by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Moscow’s ongoing military campaign. Turkey’s enhanced position in the wider Black Sea region has solidified its role as a geopolitical agenda-setter for Eurasian connectivity with Ankara proceeding to promote its long-aspired, Turkish-led connectivity program for greater economic integration with the Central Asia via Azerbaijan under the framework of Organization of Turkic States (OTS). However, Turkey faces one force that poses a significant challenge to the realization of its strategic ambitions as a wider Eurasian power: Turkey’s own demographic decline. With the Central Asian republics’ experiencing robust demographic growth, enhanced strategic and economic integration among OTS members could result in a larger Central Asian Turkic influence on Turkey’s policy orientation and even a greater Central Asian Turkic presence with the Turkish population itself.
Source: TÜİK
BACKGROUND: Turkey is starting to witness patterns of demographic decline resembling those experienced in the European Union (EU), where the death rate exceeds the birth rate by 32 percent and among the northeast Asian nations such as Japan, whose population is decreasing by over half a million people per year. The issue is not only population decline but the rapidly aging profile of Turkey’s population. Since 2001 when its total fertility rate was 2.38 children – healthily exceeding the replacement level of 2.1, Turkey has seen an astounding plummet in its fertility rate, declining to 1.48 in 2024. For comparison, the average fertility rate across the EU, last calculated in 2023, was 1.38, with eight of the 27 EU member states exceeding Turkey’s fertility rate and 19 member states with a lower fertility rate.
To grasp the magnitude and speed of Turkey’s demographic decline, a 1.48 fertility rate means that for every 100 Turks, there will be only 41 great-grandchildren, under the most optimistic circumstances. The accelerating nature of Turkey’s declining birthrates becomes apparent when mapping the geography of its fertility. Out of Turkey’s 81 provinces, 71 are below replacement level. Only the ten southeastern and eastern provinces of Gaziantep, Şanlıurfa, Diyarbakır, Mardin, Batman, Şırnak, Siirt, Bitlis, Muş, and Ağrı had rates above replacement level, with Şanlıurfa being the sole province with a fertility rate higher than 2.9. The geographic concentration of provinces with replacement level fertility in the southeast, means that the proportion of ethnic Kurds in the overall population is likely to grow significantly, affecting Turkey’s domestic politics and regional foreign policy. This dynamic is further compounded by the fact Turkey’s entire Black Sea coast, northern Anatolian region, and western region have fertility rates at or below 1.49.
Turkey’s demographic demise is correlated with urbanization, among other factors. The provinces containing Turkey’s three largest cities Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir – cumulatively over 25 percent of Turkey’s population – have even lower fertility rates of 1.2, 1.15, and 1.17 respectively, placing these region’s birth rates on par with Italy, Spain, and Japan. With a median age for women of 35.2 years, Turkey is an aging country, and aging at an accelerating pace. Turkey now finds itself in a state where its population aged 65 and above is about double its population under the age of 5. By 2030, the Turkish government forecasts the country to have 20 elderly citizens for every 100 citizens of working age (15-64 years). This figure is expected to climb to 27 per 100 by 2040.
Turkey is staring at an Italian-style crisis where its declining working age population will have to support an increasing number of elderly. While facing the possibility of an Italy-like scenario of declining economic growth amidst ballooning costs of healthcare and pensions for the elderly, Turkey’s nominal GDP per capita is currently 3 times lower than that of Italy. In short, Turkey will become old before it becomes rich, without European-level economic resources to cope with a European rate of demographic decline. Besides being a socio-economic timebomb for domestic politics, the current downward demographic trend has consequential implications for the future of Turkey’s power projection across Eurasia.
IMPLICATIONS: Turkey’s hard power projection, like any other country, depends on the reach of its military intervention capabilities. In 2024, Turkey spent $25 billion on its military, representing a 12 percent increase over the previous year and totaling 1.9% of the country’s GDP, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. While ranking as the world’s 17th highest military budget, the expenditure ranked significantly lower than major international powers such as China (2nd), Russia (3rd), the UK (6th), and France (9th) as well as regional powers such as Saudi Arabia (7), Israel (12th), and Poland (13th). Absent increasing the productivity of its workforce, Turkey will face a conflict between the expense of caring for its aging population and increasing military spending. Resorting to debt financing, where sufficiently low interest rates are obtainable, would only exacerbate the problem by increasing the amount of Turkey’s national budget needing to be allocated to debt servicing.
The impressive rise of Turkey’s weapons industry can somewhat offset the cost of military platforms, but it would require an expansion of Turkey’s arms export market sales. Turkey would also need to develop manufacturing capacity for strategic platforms that it currently does not make. The Turkish military may also develop new tactical and strategic uses for cheaper platforms that Turkey already produces domestically, to offset costs.
Beyond its rising weapons industry, the size of the Turkish armed forces is key to its ability to project power. Turkey maintains the second-largest military in NATO, second only to the United States, comprising 355,200 active military personnel. However, Turkey requires a large number of forces to adequately defend its land and sea borders on multiple fronts from the Mediterranean to land borders with Syria, Iraq, and Iran to land and sea borders in the wider Black Sea region.
Turkey also maintains overseas bases in northern Cyprus, Qatar, and Somalia, requiring the presence of 40,000-50,000 Turkish military personnel, with an additional 10,000-20,000 personnel deployed in forward operating bases for a variety of missions in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere. At Turkey’s current levels of power projection, about one out of seven Turkish military personnel is deployed abroad. The expansion of Turkish power projection in Central Asia, particularly if Ankara extends some form of security guarantee, would require a significant commitment of Turkish troops. Given the decline in the number of men of fighting age in the near future, Ankara is facing the strong possibility of a shortfall in combat-ready troops.
The concern over shortfalls in military personnel also applies to the availability of seasoned senior staff. In 2025, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) moved a bill in the parliament to revise the Turkish Armed Forces Personnel Law to deal with a shortage of generals and admirals by raising the mandatory retirement age to 72 and by increasing the number of generals and admirals who service terms can be extended from 36 to 60 each year.
More generally, Turkey’s demographic decline will challenge its leadership role among the Turkic states. Ankara will find it more difficult to project itself as the geopolitical big brother of the Turkic republics of Central Asia as the size of these countries’ populations reach closer parity to the size of Turkey’s population. While China and Russia are each experiencing a deep demographic crisis, the Central Asian republics are bucking global trends in Eurasia and experiencing robust demographic growth.
The combined populations of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan (21 million and 37 million, respectively) currently equal two-thirds of Turkey’s population. In contrast to Turkey, the populations of these Central Asian republics are much younger with Kazakhstan’s median age at 29.7 years and Uzbekistan’s at 27. Their fertility rates are not only above replacement level, they are more than double Turkey’s fertility rate, with Kazakhstan’s fertility rate standing at 2.95 children and Uzbekistan at 3.45 children. While there will only be 41 great-grandchildren for every hundred 100 Turks, there will be 321 great-grandchildren for every 100 Kazakhs and 527 great-grandchildren for every 100 Uzbeks. Given these trends, the combined working-age populations of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan could exceed the size of the Turkish working-age population by 2040.
Additionally, the smaller Central Asian republics are also experiencing robust demographic growth. The populations of Turkmenistan (7.6 million) and Kyrgyzstan (7.3 million) are even younger than Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and have above replacement level fertility rates of 2.63 and 2.75 respectively.
Given the decline in the numbers of Turkey’s future workforce, Turkish-driven economic integration with Central Asia could come in the form of large-scale wave of immigrants looking for work. On October 10, 2025, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan signed an amendment to prior Turkish law to simplify the procedures for Turkic-speaking foreigners to work in Turkey. The amendment removes the requirement for Turkish citizenship for residence and employment. While the changes seem primarily aimed at Turkic peoples without their own sovereign states, such as Meskhetian Turks, Uyghurs and Crimean Tatars, the new rules could incentivize workforce migration from other OTS member to Turkey. The amendment did not remove the prohibition of migrants joining the Turkish armed forces.
CONCLUSIONS: In October 2025, the Turkish Ministry of Education officially replaced the term “Central Asia” with the term “Turkestan” across its entire educational curriculum. The change reflects President Erdoğan’s "Century of Türkiye" vision, which he reiterated in his October 29, 2025 speech marking the 102nd anniversary of the founding of the Turkish Republic – a vision of Turkish international leadership that Erdoğan explicitly seeks to extend to the OTS. In 2023 Erdoğan declared at the OTS Summit, “We will work shoulder to shoulder to make the coming period the era of the Turks by extending our vision of the ‘Turkish Century’ to the Organization of Turkic States.”
However, Turkey’s demographic decline amidst the robust demographic growth in the Central Asia republics, particularly in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the coming ‘Turkish’ century could witness a rise of Central Asian Turkic influence at the expense of Turkish leadership. The matter could even become a major issue in domestic Turkish identity politics with a large-scale influx of migrant labor from Central Asia.
The expansion of the ruling AKP’s religio-cultural and political sensibilities to Central Asia as part of greater integration among OTS members is not a foregone conclusion. Demographics alone would suggest that Turkey could experience a blowback, an influx of different sets of sensibilities from ‘Turkestan’.
The growing connectivity across the Turkic nations of Eurasia from Istanbul to Almaty does foreordain a contest over the meanings of Turkishness and Turkic-ness whose outcome will carry significant political and geopolitical consequences moving forward.
AUTHOR'S BIO: Prof. Michaël Tanchum teaches international relations of the Middle East and North Africa at the University of Navarra, Spain and is an associate fellow in the Economics and Energy at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C. He is also a Senior Associate Fellow at the Austrian Institute for European and Security Studies (AIES) and an affiliated scholar of the Centre for Strategic Policy Implementation at Bașkent University in Ankara Turkey, (Başkent-SAM) @michaeltanchum
Earlier Articles
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Joint Center PublicationsOp-ed Halil Karaveli "The Rise and Rise of the Turkish Right", The New York Times, April 8, 2019 Analysis Halil Karaveli "The Myth of Erdogan's Power", Foreign Policy, August 29, 2018 Analysis Svante E. Cornell, A Road to Understanding in Syria? The U.S. and Turkey, The American Interest, June 2018 Op-ed Halil Karaveli "Erdogan Wins Reelection", Foreign Affairs, June 25, 2018 Article Halil Karaveli "Will the Kurdish Question Secure Erdogan's Re-election?", Turkey Analyst, June 18, 2018 Research Article Svante E. Cornell "Erbakan, Kisakürek, and the Mainstreaming of Extremism in Turkey", Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, June 2018 Analysis Svante E. Cornell "The U.S. and Turkey: Past the Point of No Return?", The American Interest, February 1, 2018 Op-ed Svante E. Cornell "Erdogan's Turkey: the Role of a Little Known Islamic Poet", Breaking Defense, January 2, 2018 Research Article Halil Karaveli "Turkey's Authoritarian Legacy", Cairo Review of Global Affairs, January 2, 2018
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