The Neo-Ottoman Sultan: Erdogan and the new Turkish adventurism

The CFR's Steven Cook on the shocking arrest of Istanbul's mayor, Erdogan's strategy, and why Turkey can be a highly disruptive force

Apr 23, 2025

Turkey has not been getting much attention of late. But the arrest of Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu—widely seen as Turkey’s most popular opposition figure—has sent shockwaves through Turkish politics and sparked mass protests across the country. In this exclusive Octavian interview, we speak with Steven Cook, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, to understand the deeper meaning of the crackdown and what it signals for the future of Erdoğan’s regime. From the fragile state of Turkish democracy to Ankara’s stance on NATO, the Kurds, Syria and Israel, Cook clearly explains why Turkey has become one of the most important—and volatile—players in global affairs. As the world focuses elsewhere, it is critical that we understand just what Turkey is doing and how it is playing its chess game to the detriment of the West.

red flag on top of brown concrete building during daytime — Photo by Michael Jerrard on Unsplash

Octavian: Can you explain the circumstances and significance of the arrest of Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul?

Steven Cook: Ekrem İmamoğlu is a politician who is now famously the mayor of Istanbul and is a member of the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), which is the party of Ataturk. Although it's not quite a party these days. It's more of a front of different groups that oppose Erdoğan. İmamoğlu has proven himself over time to be a very, very good politician who has captured the attention of Turks who want to live in a more democratic society and who are rebelling against Erdoğan's divide and rule approach to governance which he began in 2007 and 2008.

He rode that and he was a rising star of the CHP when he ran for mayor of Istanbul in 2019. Now Istanbul is very, very important to the Justice and Development Party (AKP). First of all, Erdoğan, although he traces his roots to the Black Sea region of Turkey, grew up in a place called Kasımpaşa which is down the hill from Taksim Square and cosmopolitan Istanbul. Symbolically, it was more of a rough and tumble neighborhood of Istanbul.

He was then the mayor of Istanbul in the mid-1990s. And as prime minister, before he became president in 2014, he spent a tremendous amount of time in Istanbul, the imperial capital, as opposed to Ankara, the Republican capital, in keeping with the generalized view within the Justice and Development Party that the republic is sort of an accident of history and that Turkey's natural evolution probably was more in line with its imperial domains rather than the much changed and smaller republic based on a different set of ideas.

In any event, İmamoğlu won in 2019 against one of Erdoğan's former prime ministers. And they found reasons through some legal tortuosity to rerun those elections a number of months later. And İmamoğlu won by an even bigger margin even though Erdoğan tanked the first results because he didn't like them. The Istanbulis said, no way, we're not going to stand for this. Istanbulis abroad flew home to vote in this rerun of the elections and İmamoğlu won by an even bigger margin.

“İmamoğlu has captured the attention of Turks who want to live in a more democratic society.”

And from that point on, the Justice and Development Party have sought to hamstring him. They limited his budget. He was brought up on charges for insulting judges because he criticized the Electoral Commission that decided that the elections in 2019 could be rerun.

Then in his own reelection a number of years later, he also won quite handily. So he's very popular. He's probably the most popular politician in Turkey right now and a likely candidate in the next presidential election in 2028. Erdoğan has been gunning for him and saw an opportunity to have him detained and subsequently arrested on corruption charges, the irony of which is not lost on Turkey watchers all over the world, given the allegations, since there's pretty good reason to believe that Erdoğan himself and the people around him have engaged in some corrupt practices.

There was the idea that İmamoğlu was going to be arrested on both corruption charges as well as terrorism, but they only charged him formally with corruption. This produced huge demonstrations throughout Turkey in late March and early April. Those demonstrations have tapered off a bit but they are continuing. And the government is under a tremendous amount of pressure as a result.

Octavian: And they stripped him of his college degree, right?

Steven Cook: You need to have a college degree in order to run for President of the Republic.

Octavian: How do you see this playing out? Is Erdoğan firmly in command or do you see any risk to him kind of losing control?

Steve Cook: You know, when it came to the 2019 mayoral elections in Istanbul, I was convinced that Erdoğan's candidate was going to win. There's a tendency because Erdoğan’s been around so long and he's always been one or two steps ahead of his opponents that he's kind of this evil genius and he knows what buttons to press and levers to pull and that he almost has a perfect theory of politics. Of course, we know that it's not true because he is human.

But until he's been up against Ekrem İmamoğlu and the mayor of Ankara, a guy named Mansur Yavaş, he’s been up against people who have not been very good politicians, people who haven't made good political decisions, which has really helped him.

Here, I think Erdoğan calculated quite rightly that he wouldn't pay a price in Washington, that the Trump administration wouldn't really care that he arrested the most popular politician in Turkey. It also came after a number of weeks in which European politicians and leaders were talking about Turkey being more important than ever before, precisely because the Trump administration was changing the US position on Ukraine, raising very serious questions about U.S. relations with the EU and about the integrity of Article 5 of the NATO charter.

At the moment, European leaders are looking around and asking “which of us actually have a real army?” Other than the fringe. You have a bunch of really small countries. The Germans don't have much of an army. It's a big country, but not a big army for historical reasons. The Finns and the Swedes, new members of NATO, have real armies. But really the country with the biggest military structure in Europe is Turkey, although only really a small part of Turkey is actually in Europe.

But nevertheless it is a NATO member and it has the biggest military structures next to the United States. It's the second largest military in all of NATO. And so whereas one would have expected European leaders to be vociferous in their criticism of arresting İmamoğlu, they expressed concern but didn't criticize Erdoğan because they're thinking ahead of Europe without an American security umbrella. And that makes Turkey more important to them from their perspective.

“Where Erdoğan miscalculated very, very badly was that he thought he could get away with this among Turks.”

Octavian: Do you think Erdoğan could be replaced at the ballot box?

Steven Cook: I think that's really the only way that Erdoğan would be turned from office. Never say never, of course, but I think a successful uprising like in Egypt is less likely in Turkey than it's been in the past.

It seems very unlikely he would leave. And it seems unlikely the institutions of the state that control the guns, the military or the police, would show him the door like they did in Egypt. Turkey obviously has a robust history of coups d'etat. But these institutions have been captured by Erdoğan and the AKP. Anybody who's been appointed to any senior position in the Ministry of Police or the Armed Forces or the intelligence directorates are all people who owe their positions to Erdoğan. And so it seems unlikely that a coup will happen.

If there were a free and fair election, the chances are obviously greater of Erdoğan leaving, but there are obviously major questions about whether there would be a free and fair election. These days, I do believe, there has been electoral fraud. But in the last presidential elections where everybody was expecting Erdoğan to lose, there was some electoral chicanery, but analyses after the fact demonstrated that he actually won the election.

Octavian: With Erdoğan in the ascendant then, how do you think his neo-Ottoman foreign policy affects things?

Steven Cook: By the way, people fight about this term “neo-Ottoman.” It's kind of a stupid academic debate. But I think what when people say neo-Ottomanism, whether they have a really deep granular understanding or not, what people mean is that the Justice and Development Party has, almost from the very beginning, pursued a very active foreign policy that is oriented 360 degrees around Turkey, not just towards Europe, where for many years it seemed like that was the case, even though it really wasn't.

“What the Justice and Development Party under Erdoğan has sought is basically strategic autonomy.”

It has been active, not just in Europe and the Balkans, but the Eastern Mediterranean, in the Caucasus in Central Asia, in the Middle East. It has developed economic ties with Russia. So there really is a 360 degree foreign policy.

What the Justice and Development Party under Erdoğan has sought is basically strategic autonomy.

Octavian: There was a recent announcement from the PKK that it is disarming. What is going on with the Kurds and Erdoğan?

Steven Cook: Here's what's happened with the PKK. The PKK, for folks who don't know, is the Turkish acronym for the Kurdistan Workers Party. And the Kurdistan Workers Party is led by a guy named Abdullah Öcalan who took up arms against the Turkish state in 1984. And this war has ebbed and flowed over the course of the last 40 years.

Öcalan was apprehended by the Turks coming out of the Greek embassy in Kenya in 1999 and has been in an island prison ever since. And in recent months, there's been a significant amount of outreach between the Turkish government and Abdullah Öcalan.

In the last month or so he called upon the PKK, the group that he has led, to lay down its arms in its war against the Turkish state. And the PKK, which is holed up in the mountains in Iraq and has basically been engaged in this dirty little war against the Turkish armed forces, said it is willing to do that so long as the Turkish government upholds its end of the bargain.

While they’ve said that, as of yet there hasn't been a wholesale disarmament of the PKK and peace hasn't broken out.

Octavian: What is the Turkish end of the bargain?

Steven Cook: That the Kurds enjoy cultural rights and are not repressed. Which is something that Erdoğan, when he first came to power in 2003, seemed to support, a new relationship between the Turkish state and the Kurdish minority which is about 20% of the population. People don't realize, but Istanbul is the second largest Kurdish city in the world.

He sought what they call an opening, basically trying to relax the ethno-nationalist kind of determinant of being Turkish and emphasizing religion, that everybody could be happy Muslims in Anatolia rather than, “You're a Turk and you're a Kurd” and there'd be ethnic differences.

So the Turkish state’s end of the bargain from the perspective of the PKK is to respect the cultural rights and political rights of Kurds. The problem is they've never been. Erdoğan tried to do that, but the hard realities of Turkish nationalism and Turkish politics forced him to make a U-turn in which over the course of more than the last decade, he has been very hard line on Kurdish rights.

But this opening to the PKK is very, very important. Also, it’s very important in terms of Syria. Because there is a group in Syria that's called the YPG, the People's Protection Units. And the People's Protection Units were set up with the help of the PKK at the beginning of the Syrian uprising against Bashar al-Assad. The PKK said to the Kurds in Syria, you guys are going to need to defend yourselves. This is not going to go well.

Now, obviously there are direct links between the PKK and the YPG. But the Turkish government maintains that there are no differences between these two groups, whereas the US government says there are differences between the two groups. The YPG hasn't conducted any operations against the Turkish state.

But the Turkish government says because there's no difference between the YPG and the PKK, that they're exactly the same, there is a certain expectation that the YPG also lay down its arms In this agreement. Then all at once the threat that the Turks perceive of a Kurdish entity, an autonomous state or autonomous zone in Syria, goes away.

But the YPG said we're not a party to whatever agreement there is.

“At a level of abstraction, what do the Turkish, Iranian, and Russian governments all share? The idea that an American-led global order isn’t in their best interest.”

Octavian: The YPG basically defeated ISIS, right?

Steven Cook: You took the words right out of my mouth. They are the ones who partnered with the United States to fight ISIS on the ground after, by the way, the Turkish government said it was not interested in taking on the mission with Obama. They preferred to fight Kurdish nationalism. The United States then established this partnership with the YPG, which has been very, very successful.

And they're essentially the jailers of ISIS. People have heard of the al-Hol camp, where ISIS fighters and their families have been kept by the YPG, as well as other jails.

What will happen in terms of Kurdish politics and Turkey remains to be seen. It's not to suggest that there hasn't been progress, for Öcalan to say the things that he has said and for the PKK to say we're open to it. But we've been here before. In 2015, there were negotiations between the Turkish government and the PKK about ending the conflict and It actually led to iof incredible violence between the two and a lot of innocent people suffered in southeastern Turkey as a result.

Octavian: And what exactly is going on with Turkey in Syria, where the initial reports that the victory by HTS was a masterstroke for Erdoğan?

Steven Cook: For years, the Turkish government coordinated with Islamist extremists, for lack of a better term, in Syria. Erdoğan was a leading member of the “Assad must go” camp in international politics. He tried to get President Obama to commit American forces to bring down the Assad regime. The argument was that Assad was fueling extremism and there was this huge threat to Turkey from refugees. Obama never acceded to that.

When the uprising became a civil war, which then became a proxy war, the Turks ended up supporting different militias. And one of the groups that they supported was an Al-Qaeda offshoot called Jabhat al-Nusra. Jabhat al-Nusra was led by a guy named Ahmed al-Shara. Al-Shara then broke from Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State, because the Islamic State wanted to take over Jabhat al-Nusrah. So he established something called Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham or HTS.

And al-Shara and HTS are now the people who are in charge in Damascus. The media in the United States and elsewhere has made a big deal that Ahmad Ashar had this doctrinal break from extremism and ISIS and so on and so forth. I don't think that's really the case. I think he broke from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi because if ISIS had subsumed Jabhat al-Nusra into ISIS, Ahmed al-Shara wouldn't have the kind of power as a leading jihadi anymore.

So he established HTS and continued being a leading jihadi. And people in Idlib, the pocket of Syria that the government under Bashar al-Assad didn't control and which was controlled by HTS, tell terrible stories about what it was like to be in an HTS jail and that they really did seek to implement Islamic rule in Idlib. And so when talking heads and others say he's really changed, I don't think we have really enough evidence to say conclusively that Amman al-Shara is going to rule inclusively like Qatari or Turkish spinmeisters have told him to say.

But what's clear is that the Turks believed that by dint of Shara being the self-anointed president of Syria that they have gained a lot, that they're the winner in the battle for Syria and that they sit at a very influential place because this is their guy.

I don't know if they've won anything yet. You know, al-Shara needs them less than he did when there was an Assad regime. The Saudis, the Emiratis, and others have been very active in courting the new leadership in Damascus. Yes, the Turks are in a fairly good position. But I think others in the region, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, and Egypt are very wary of the accumulation of Islamist political power in Damascus and in their own way are all pushing back against it.

Just to pivot here, this is a pattern with Erdoğan and the AKP. They are Islamists. They're not Muslim Brothers. They come from a different tradition, But they have made common cause with Islamist groups across the Middle East, whether it's HTS, the Islamists in Tunisia of the Ennahda movement, Islamists in Egypt after Hosni Mubarak fell. The Turks were kind of everywhere and supportive of the Muslim Brotherhood. Erdoğan wanted to take the Muslim Brotherhood under its wing, even though the Muslim Brotherhood has a longer history than the Islamist tradition from which Erdoğan and the AKP comes.

And of course, Hamas, which is the Palestine branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Since at least 2006, the Turkish Islamists in the form of the Justice and Development Party have had a relationship with Hamas as its patrons, along with the Iranians, and have consistently since then been outspoken on behalf of Hamas and very, very critical of the Israelis when the Israelis have battled with Hamas. There was a famous moment at Davos in early 2009 in which Erdoğan was on a panel with Shimon Perez and they went at it. David Ignatius, the foreign policy columnist for the Washington Post, was sort of caught in the middle of the two of them.

In 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2021, there were clashes between Hamas and Israel. And at each moment, Turkey was quite supportive of Hamas and quite outspoken against Israel. It was quite influential in whipping up pro-Hamas, anti-Israel sentiment in Turkey and elsewhere.

And when you talk to AKP folks about this, they say we see in them ourselves. And I've said to them, you guys weren't blowing up buses or pizza places. You guys were always committed to a political process. They have not. And they say, no, they were elected in 2006. And Fatah, their rival, sought to overthrow them and the Israelis have been repressing them.

“From the perspective of the Israelis, Turkey is an enemy state in all but name.”

This is not totally untrue, but at the same time, if you read Hamas's charter from 1988 and then you read the announcement of Operation al-Aqsa Flood, which began on the morning of October 7, 2023, Hamas is engaged in an effort to “liberate” all of Palestine. From the river to the sea, from the north to the south, essentially engaging in genocidal attacks on Israel and Jews. And the Turkish government has been supportive of this.

Octavian: So what do you see playing out between Israel and Turkey?

Steven Cook: By the way, I should point out, just looping back to what we originally were talking about, Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul, called Hamas a terrorist organization, criticized Hamas, but also has expressed empathy for poor Palestinians caught in the crossfire in this terrible conflict in the Gaza Strip.

So he has taken a very different position from Erdoğan who has stood before crowds of tens of thousands of people whipping up anti-Israel, pro-Hamas sentiment.

Octavian: Do you put the Turks in the same category as the Iranians? Do you think that there will eventually be a conflict between Israel and Turkey?

Steven Cook: People have been very worried about it since they're now bumping up against each other in Syria. And the Israelis obviously don't like Ahmed al-Shara, who the Turks, despite years of denying it, now say is their guy. And Turkey is one of the few states around the world that has restricted trade with Israel. And it has whipped up anti-Israel sentiment that has been really a locus online. From the perspective of the Israelis, Turkey is an enemy state in all but name.

They don't want the Turks to basically burrow into Syria militarily and establish a military presence there. And so the Israelis have done a number of things. They have sought to weaken Ahmed al-Shara by taking territory and establishing relations with the Druze and inviting Druze adjacent to what was the UN buffer zone in Syria to work in Israel. They have taken shots at the regime in Damascus.

And they have destroyed military infrastructure that could be used by the Turks to establish a military presence there, most importantly the T4 airbase where the Turks had intended to set up shop.

Octavian: You mentioned earlier that the Europeans are looking to the Turks as a bulwark for NATO if the U.S. retreats. But why are they comfortable putting their faith in Turkey? Doesn’t it have very different interests?

“Whereas one would have expected European leaders to be vociferous in their criticism, they’re instead looking to Turkey—run by an autocrat—as their best hope because Trump rattled the foundations of NATO.”

Steven Cook: Well, Turkey is a NATO ally. It's a treaty ally of all of these countries They are not a member of the European Union, although Turkey has historically wanted to be in the European Union, albeit under a different regime. Erdoğan has evinced very, very little interest in it since 2005.

Within NATO, the big dogs militarily are the United States and Turkey. And then everybody else really. And so as the Trump administration has made it clear that It is outside the European and NATO consensus on Ukraine, Turkey's importance has risen as a sort of stopgap.

The Germans can't rearm overnight. The Brits also have to rearm. The British Army is a shadow of what it once was. Others have committed to spending more of their GDP on defense, but these kinds of things don't happen overnight. So Turkey is a stopgap. And that's why European leaders have been talking about Turkey being more important to them than ever before and why the criticism of the arrest of Ekrem İmamoğlu is mostly muted.

Yes, Turkey has been a somewhat difficult member of NATO. Everything in NATO has to be done by consensus. And there are things that Turkey doesn't want NATO to do. It doesn't want it to develop ties with the Republic of Cyprus, half of which Turkey occupies and has occupied since 1974. And there have been a number of incidents where NATO has wanted to cooperate and work with Israel and the Turks under Erdoğan have vetoed that.

The Turks have carved out basically an ambiguous approach to both Russia and Ukraine. Early on in the conflict, there was lots of discussion about Turkey and the supply of TB2 drones to Ukraine. There was a big article in the New Yorker all about it, which seemed like more of an ad for the company, which, by the way, is controlled by Erdoğan's son-in-law, than an actual deep journalistic dive into these drones.

Which, by the way, the Turks sold to the Ukrainians. It wasn't like they were stepping up out of some sort of obligation as a NATO member. They sold this equipment to Ukraine. Those TB2 drones have shown up in Africa and other theaters and have been particularly deadly and killed a lot of civilians. That hasn't really come out.

At the same time that they were selling drones to Ukraine, they refused to levy sanctions on the Russians. One of the places where you can find Russians is in Istanbul. Specifically because the Turks have felt that they did not need to and did not want to sanction Russia.

They were the ones who were instrumental in hammering out the Black Sea grain deal, which was very, very important. So it's been a quite ambiguous policy. They've never been 100% with NATO nor 100% against NATO policies.

And this goes back to what I said before, which is that the Turks have sought a strategic autonomy. They bristle at the idea that they're a strategic asset on NATO's southwestern flank. They don't see themselves as East or West, they see themselves as Turkey, inheritors of a great civilization and a great power in its own right. And they have prioritized from their perspective their own interests. At times, this has come at the expense of American or NATO interests.

Octavian: Who does Europe actually think they're going to protect them against then?

Steven Cook: That's a really good question. I don't know. Turks have never believed that in a conflict where Turkey was under threat, the Belgians and Spaniards were going to fight for them. I don't think that Poles and Lithuanians and Estonians should believe that Turkey is going to fight for them.

Octavian: Erdoğan's been an unbelievable survivor. Do you think he is now one of the more dangerous actors on the world stage for the West? Or is it something that can be managed?

Steven Cook: I think that they are quite disruptive because, at a level of abstraction, what do the Turkish government, the Iranian government and the Russian government all share in common? They share the idea that the exercise of American power or an American-led global order isn't necessarily in their best interest.

And so, Turkey has been willing to oppose the United States. It's been willing to undermine American efforts in places like Syria, Gaza, the Red Sea, a variety of other places. And then there have been places where it's been perfectly willing to play ball with the United States. A long time ago, I wrote a piece called “Neither Friend Nor Foe.”

And if you look at Turkey as neither friend nor foe, it becomes clear that you can work with them where your interests overlap and oppose them where you must. And then in places where the stakes aren't that high, get out of each other's way.

“If you look at Turkey as neither friend nor foe, it becomes clear you can work with them where your interests overlap.”

But the State Department and the senior political leadership in the United States across both parties regards Turkey as this strategic actor of utmost importance. They believe you can't rattle the cage or upset the apple cart. Use whatever stupid metaphor or cliche you want on this.

Octavian