When this city was the capital of the Byzantine Empire, so when it was Constantinople, it was built as a church.
But when the Ottomans conquered Constantinople, they turned it into a mosque.
When the secular republic was founded, the founding fathers wanted to make it a museum,
so that everyone can enjoy it.
But then, a few years ago, the Islamist government in Turkey converted it back to a mosque this time.
So, it’s called the Old Lady of Istanbul, and it’s having a bit of an identity crisis.
For centuries, Turkey has straddled the East and West.
In 2023, on the 100th anniversary of its founding, the country held
perhaps its most significant election to date.
After nearly two decades in power, Turkey's ultranationalist and Islamist President,
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, defied expectations to secure a third term in office for the next five years.
In the early years of Erdogan’s presidency, Turkey was hailed as a model country.
The “Turkish Model” was supposed to be a combination of democracy, moderate Islam,
free market capitalism and good relations with the West,
a blueprint for other Muslim-majority countries.
Right after the end of the Cold War, you had this sort of euphoria
that we were all going to be functioning market economies,
and we were all going to be liberal democracies.
It was a very different world.
This wonderful showpiece. Americans liked that very much.
Now, they discover it backfires.
As of 2023, Turkey is rated “not free” by American nonprofit Freedom House,
as political rights and civil liberties deteriorated in the country.
And for many years, Turkey has been one of the top jailers of journalists,
a label it shares with China and Iran.
Since 2018, Turkish Lira lost more than half of its value against the U.S. dollar.
Ankara’s warming ties with Russia have caused unease among some of its military allies.
So, how did it get here?
Modern Turkey’s borders were defined after the Ottoman Empire was defeated
by the Allied Forces at the end of World War I.
The empire was subsequently divided among the victors.
But a young military officer, Mustafa Kemal, led a successful uprising across the country.
Turkey officially became a republic on October 29th, 1923.
Kemal and the intelligentsia of that period, so called the Young Turks in the general term,
they were very secular, scientifically oriented people.
I remember my grandfather; they were very anti-religious.
They believed in science, and that is typical turn-of-the-century modernity.
While in Istanbul, I visited Faruk Birtek, a sociologist and an emeritus professor
at Bogazici University.
The republic is really, a clone of the third Republic of France.
That's what they admired.
And that's what they wanted to create here.
The ultimate goal was for Turkey to become a Western country
in terms of foreign policy orientation, but also in terms of its domestic setup,
in terms of its lifestyle, everything.
In 1947, the U.S. provided $400 million of military and economic aid to Turkey and Greece
to contain the spread of communism.
This marked the start of the cold war, which led to the formation
of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Both Greece and Turkey would then join NATO in 1952,
formally cementing their place with the free world and the Western fold.
Today, the Turkish Armed Forces is the second largest army in the military alliance,
ranking above founding members like the U.K. or France.
But in recent years, Turkey has warmed up to Russia.
While Western nations strived to isolate the Russian economy with record sanctions,
Turkey doubled its trade to $68 billion in 2022.
But it’s energy which has really bound the two countries together.
Like many European countries before the war, Turkey is largely dependent on Russian natural gas,
even though it has sought to decrease this with imports from Iran and Azerbaijan.
In 2020, Turkey and Russia formally launched TurkStream, the second major gas pipeline
carrying natural gas to Europe through Turkey, bypassing Ukraine.
And in March 2023, a month before the general elections in Turkey,
the two countries launched a nuclear power plant, built by Russia’s state-owned energy company Rosatom.
But Turkey’s expansion towards Eurasia is not limited to Russia.
In 2022, Erdogan attended a Central Asian security bloc hosted by China
and expressed his desire for full membership.
This foreign policy tilt away from the West has been labelled as strategic autonomy
in Turkish governing circles.
I visited SETA in Istanbul, a think tank with very strong ties to the Erdogan government.
Strategic autonomy means having a different policy line
in case where Turkey's middle and long-term interests are not compatible with the United States or NATO.
So, engaging with different actors in a more balanced way.
Since the 2010s, Turkey has expanded its military footprint across the Middle East and North Africa.
Turkish Armed Forces have a presence in Syria, Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan, among others.
America's gradual withdrawal from the region brought a new security structure and new risks.
Once Saudi Arabia, Egypt and UAE wanted to topple the regime in Qatar, Turkey's military presence played a significant role.
In Libya again, the Tripoli government was trying to be toppled by Khalifa Haftar.
And Turkey's military move was significant.
As the United States is less interested in playing the regional politics,
I think Turkey again becomes an important actor. A stabilizing actor.
We have a situation where the United States still is the most dominant actor in the international stage,
but it has now serious and credible challengers, most notably, of course, China.
Russia is one of them.
India is one of them.
This creates a system in which these midsize players, or rising players, are having more of a space
to conduct partially independent foreign policies, than the United States.
Turkey’s relations with the U.S. have soured particularly ever since the Obama administration
decided to arm Kurdish rebel forces in Syria to fight the Islamic State in 2014.
Kurds are the largest ethnic minority in Turkey, and there is a sizable population of Kurds
in neighboring Syria aiming to establish an independent state within or near Turkey’s borders.
Since the 1980s, Ankara has battled insurgents from militant groups
such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and the YPG,
making it one of the deadliest conflicts in the Middle East.
They have been supported, still being supported by the U.S., France, to a certain extent,
other European actors.
Anti-Western sentiment has increased significantly during the Erdogan era.
But anxiety about Western plots to undermine Turkey’s unity is nothing new.
In 1925, the young republic faced its first big challenge from the Kurds demanding autonomy.
At the time, Ankara blamed the U.K. for instigating the revolt and alleged that the British wanted
to install a friendly independent Kurdish state around Mosul, Iraq, which would give them
access to the oil fields in the region.
A century later, similar worries continue to dominate Turkish foreign policy.
Ankara also blames the U.S. for harboring Fettullah Gulen, an ultra-religious Muslim cleric
residing in the U.S.
The Turkish government believes Gulen was the mastermind behind a failed coup
against Erdogan in 2016.
The traditional opinion in Turkey is that Western powers wanted, expected, Erdogan
to be toppled by military coup, which didn't happen.
A year after the coup, Erdogan signed a deal to buy S-400 missiles from Russia,
straining relations with the U.S. even further.
Putin was the leader which demonstrated stronger solidarity with Erdogan,
which was a turning point.
The United States or EU never demonstrated a similar kind of solidarity.
In 2020, a survey on the Turkish public’s perception of Turkish foreign policy revealed
that 70 per cent believed that the U.S. poses a threat to Turkey.
This was followed by Israel.
Fellow NATO member Greece, which invaded Turkey in 1919, came in fifth.
Around 50 per cent also considered Russia, the U.K. and France to be threats too.
It's a kind of a historical trauma that goes all the way back to the Treaty of Sevres,
which partitioned the Ottoman Empire among the European powers.
That's why I think we have, what some scholars call today, the so-called Sevres syndrome.
The fear that the country will be partitioned, and that this will be in the hands of, again,
Western imperial powers.
Behind me is TCG Anadolu, Turkey’s largest naval ship.
It carries helicopters and drones and it’s a potent symbol
of Turkey’s increasingly muscular foreign policy.
Just a few weeks before the 2023 elections, the warship was anchored in Istanbul for the public to see.
In a bid to mobilize supporters, President Erdogan showcased the full might
of Turkey’s booming defence industry.
We manufacture everything ourselves now, thanks to God.
It’s our pride, it’s everything.
I salute Recep Tayyip Erdogan with my respect and love.
It made sense during the Greek war, of course.
You had to mobilize people to fight the invasion.
But we don't have a war anymore.
In 2021, Turkey’s defence sector reached a turnover of over $10 billion,
while arms exports hit $4.4 billion in 2022.
Prized military drones, manufactured by a company belonging to Erdogan’s son-in-law,
are both a domestic and foreign policy tool.
Turkey tried to diversify its economic ties, cultural ties.
So it's a multifaceted foreign policy,
it's not just military, but at the same time, Turkish entrepreneurs tried to go to
these African countries, Balkan countries, Middle Eastern countries.
Do you think Turkey’s Western allies were intimidated by this?
Yes, especially France, for instance, in Africa, they have been intimidated.
They consider Turkey’s new role in these areas as a challenge or competition.
The need for the government to attain regime security, and to use foreign policy as an instrument,
as a tool to keep that regime security.
Of course, if you have that in mind as an ultimate goal, it becomes a much more short-term policy game,
where you do sudden twists and turns, where you do change alliances
from one day to the next.
So, this goes a little bit further than just an independent foreign policy from the West.