Dr. Miklos K. Radvanyi
For President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkish history does not begin in 1923. In countless speeches, he has repeatedly rejected treating the establishment of Ataturk’s Western-Style Republic as a historical Ground Zero. In a 2023 speech, he argued essentially that although the Republic was founded in 1923, Turkey’s roots were much older, going back two and even three millenia. His efforts to establish an uninterrupted historical succession continuity starting with the Seljuks, followed by the Ottoman Empire, and ending with the Republic of Turkiye, provide a window into his illusionary Turkish-Islamic imperial civilization. His Muslim Brotherhood-based historical ideology, summarized in his populist phrase “from the gates of Vienna to the Red Sea,” renders that connection strangely more explicit. Even more alarmingly, while classical Kemalism viewed the collapse of the six hundred years old Ottoman Empire as something from which the new Republic had to escape, Erdogan unequivocally rejected any implication that the current Republic requires any repudiation of everything Ottoman. That distinction is politically fundamental. In Erdogan’s narrative, the Republic of Turkiye is not the antithesis of the Ottoman Empire. On the contrary, it is its historical successor.
Naturally, all this does not prove that Erdogan literally intends to restore the Ottoman Empire’s borders. At least not now! Yet, it demonstrates that his geographical imagination that underlies his nationalism extends far beyond the borders established in Lausanne, Switzerland, on July 24, 1923. However, more importantly, from this overly ambitious historical memory, Erdogan has moved into the realm of foreign policy. Already, in his October 2019 speech he asserted that Turkey cannot remain indifferent to Syria, Libya, Iraq, Iran, the Balkans, Crimea, Central Asia, Afghanistan, the so-called Palestine, with which Turkey shares historical and civilizational connections. Crucially, Erdogan explicitly – and not implicitly – connected this worldview-based activism with Turkey’s historical inheritance, arguing that the legacy of Turkey’s “ancient civilization and rich history” gives the country not merely prestige but also responsibility.
What makes Erdogan’s partially made-up history even more dangerous is that it is not purely ethnic Turkish nationalism. It is a synthesis of over-the-top Turkish nationalism and Sunni-Islamist civilizational identity. In this context, Ottoman power is portrayed not merely as Turkish imperial expansionism but as the expansion of a “civilization” committed to order, faith and justice. Moreover, in his rhetoric, Erdogan frequently invokes Allah, martyrs, conquest, ancestors, and civilization in the same speeches, in which he discusses modern national power. His 2019 (in)famous parliamentary address, for example, explicitly linked the Battle of Manzikert on August 26, 1071, in which the Seljuk Sultan Alp Arslan decisively defeated a Byzantine army led by Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes, the Ottomans 600 years of reign starting with the conquest of Constantinople, the War of Independence, and contemporary Turkish military operations into a single historical continuum.
Erdogan presents the idealized Seljuk as well as Ottoman empires and their histories overwhelmingly through their achievements. Military victories, territorial expansion, administrative order, architecture, religious prestige, political endurance, and the supposed justice exercised by Ottoman rulers abound in his rhetoric. Yet, this narrative is highly selective. It intentionally tends to minimize or completely deny the much darker dimensions of Ottoman tyranny: irrational palace coups, horrific dynastic executions, fratricide, bloody rebellions, outrageous corruption, exploitative taxation, barbaric religious inequality, brutal repression of subject peoples, ruthless religion-based slavery, genocides committed against non-Turkish peoples, unimaginable massacres, forced population movements, and the agonizingly cruel political and military decline of the empire’s final three-and-a-half centuries. In this manner, Erdogan’s national mythology of “glorious history” turns into a self-serving avalanche of historical distortions. The Ottoman defeat in the naval battle of Lepanto on October 7, 1571, the failed second siege of Vienna from July 14 to September 12, 1683, the incessant national revolts among Balkan Christians, the long territorial retreat from Europe, the catastrophic wars of the 19th century, Ottoman fiscal bankruptcy, the Armenian genocide of 1915, and the ultimate collapse of the Empire after World War I.
Where Erdogan’s mendacious historical narrative could become fatal for Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and ultimately NATO is when it creates contemporary entitlements for interventionism. His fatalism is nothing but another blatant distortion when restoring the Ottoman past becomes romanticizing the Ottoman past. This restoration narrative becomes intolerable geostrategically when it appears in the most recent Makkah Joint Defense Agreement, signed on August 7, 2026, by Erdogan, Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, and Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan. In addition to the Iran deterrence angle, there is an unmistakable United States, Israel, NATO dimension to this Agreement. The verbatim enactment of the wording of Article 5 of the NATO Charter makes this Agreement even more disturbing. Could it be that an armed conflict between India and Pakistan would force the NATO member states to intervene directly or indirectly on behalf of Turkey? Could another war or terrorist act against Israel trigger NATO mobilization? Would this Agreement serve Erdogan’s fulfillment of “regional autonomy from Western tutelage?” Would Egypt or other Muslim states join this Agreement in the near future?
Although the Makkah Agreement is not yet a “Muslim NATO,” it would be the greatest American strategic mistake to minimize or dismiss its present and future geopolitical potential. Especially, if it becomes institutionalized, this Agreement could lead to the formation of a new global Caliphate with world-shattering consequences. Consequently, it must be stopped in its embryonic state before it becomes a full-fledged political and military catastrophe.