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.
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.
Philosopher Thomas Hobbes held that a sovereign must enjoy unconstrained power in an anarchic world. Turkish ultranationalists—with whom Erdogan has been allied with for the past decade—have historically subscribed to a Hobbesian view of human existence as a war of all against all. The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the near extinction of Turkish statehood after World War I incited Turkish nationalists to glorify brute force as the sole means for national survival, and they have held civil liberties in contempt. Author Nihal Atsiz, an intellectual loadstar of Turkish ultranationalists, asserted, “Turks don’t need excessive liberty for a dignified life.” Survival and dignity depended on ethnic purity and raw power.
Nationalism is ascendant in Turkey today, particularly among the youth. However, it’s not clear if nationalist Turks will countenance continued authoritarian rule. According to a recent survey, the nationalism of the Turkish youth doesn’t seem to have as strongly anti-democratic, far-right overtones, which is unlike most other countries. This suggests that authoritarian rule has inoculated at least a younger generation of nationalists against authoritarianism. Be that as it may, Turkey’s predominantly nationalist-conservative electorate will now be looking for strong, if not necessarily authoritarian, leadership that serves national power interests. That puts Turkey’s anti-nationalist liberal opposition and its presidential candidate at a disadvantage.
Ekrem Imamoglu, the presidential candidate of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and who has been jailed since March 2025 on corruption charges, has been anxious to court European representatives, and a dinner with the British ambassador in 2022 prompted major criticism. Imamoglu has now made himself even more vulnerable to claims that he is inattentive to Turkey’s national security concerns and is prepared to offer concessions to the Western alliance.
In a bid to mobilize Western support, Imamoglu has pledged to make Turkey a trustworthy NATO ally, joining an anti-Turkey opinion in the West that has called Turkey’s loyalty to the Western alliance into question. Imamoglu has reproached the Turkish government for delaying Sweden and Finland’s NATO accession, ascribed equal blame on the Turkish and Greek sides for the continued division of Cyprus, and called for the accommodation of Western allies—that is, mainly Greece—in the eastern Mediterranean.
However, Turkey had legitimate reasons to delay the Nordic countries’ NATO accession. Sweden had long provided a sanctuary for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which was designated as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union. Imamoglu’s rhetoric also downplays the fact that a U.N. plan for the reunification of Cyprus was accepted by Turkey and Turkish Cypriots but rejected by the Greek Cypriots in a 2004 referendum. Imamoglu has not elaborated on the concessions that he would make to accommodate Greece and Greek Cypriots, but Turkish voters have been duly warned.
Imamoglu wagers that “a more democratic Turkey will be a more influential, trusted, and stabilizing force in a fractured world.” But however true that rhetoric is, it will be ignored today. To Turkish voters and Western politicians, it feels dated; an idealistic argument that belongs to the earlier age of globalization, when the spread of democratic values was expected to usher in global harmony. At a time of geopolitical rivalries, democratic Turkish politicians have lost even the pretense of support from the West. Ozgur Ozel, the leader of the CHP, has expressed his frustration with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on several occasions, saying Starmer is ignoring the democratic backsliding in Turkey and is prioritizing his relationship with Erdogan. Ozel said that Starmer, a fellow social democrat, has “abandoned” him.
More damningly, the CHP risks being abandoned by newly won voters. The social democratic opposition party carried the local elections in 2024, making inroads into Erdogan’s conservative base. It became Turkey’s leading party for the first time since 1977—the last time it won a general election—and it still maintains a lead, albeit narrowly, in the polls.
Ozel may eventually replace Imamoglu as the CHP’s presidential candidate, since Imamoglu is unlikely to be freed from prison in time to run in the 2028 election. Ozel is keenly aware that winning over conservative voters is the key to electoral success. In a recent conversation for Foreign Policy, he explained that his strategy is to sway conservatives with policies that address poverty and inequality without brandishing a leftist banner that puts right-wing voters off. That’s a sensible strategy in a country where inequalities in wealth and income have increased dramatically but only a minority of the population identifies as leftist. However, economic woes notwithstanding, conservatives will be prompted to return to Erdogan if the CHP fails to reassure them by matching the president as the custodian of national power.
The past may offer clues for the future. The CHP succeeded in the 1970s because its charismatic leader, Bulent Ecevit, like Erdogan, enjoyed a unique rapport with the popular classes. Ecevit called for social justice and economic redistribution, but he wouldn’t have overcome the culturally and religiously rooted resistance of the conservative poor to the left if he hadn’t also been a standard-bearer of Turkish nationalism. In 1974, Ecevit defied the United States and ordered the invasion of Cyprus in response to an attempt by Greece to annex the island. The United States punished Turkey by imposing an arms embargo in 1975, but Ecevit, who had become a popular hero, was rewarded at the ballot box in 1977, when the CHP scored its biggest electoral victory ever.
In Trump’s world, which is governed by strength and force, nationalism—not liberalism—will resonate with voters. The CHP’s struggle against autocracy will be impaired if it fails to reassure voters that it will fight for the country’s interests. To stay relevant, the Turkish opposition will be compelled to abandon its faith in the democratic West and embrace Erdogan’s rhetoric of Turkish strength.
