From the Potomac to the Euphrates

This article first appeared here on ForeignPolicy.com on July 5, 2018 A few summers ago, a Turkish military officer stopped me to chat after a lecture I gave at a conference in Washington. During our conversation, he observed that Western analysts tend to exaggerate the importance of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, insisting that “He is just a man, but we [the armed forces] have been around for a long time and will still be here when he is gone.” The suggestion was that the military can wait out Erdogan — this was before the failed July 2016 coup — and when the Turkish leader does finally leave office, Turkey will revert to something resembling a pre-Justice and Development Party (AKP) status quo. This idea — that if Erdogan were to lose an election, retire, or die, Turkish politics would automatically change — is not limited to the officer I met. Any number of Turkish academics, journalists, and policymakers have expressed their belief that Turkey would return to a system that was democratic enough to inspire hope that one day Turkey could join the club of democracies. Their conviction has more to do with hope and faith than analytic judgment. Erdogan and his party have irrevocably altered Turkey; there is no going back. Turkey’s political trajectory is an exemplary case of a country permanently rolling back democratizing reforms, but it’s not the only one. Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party in Poland are undermining the rule of law, democratic values, and human rights in the service of what they define as authenticity and security. These are developments that predate the migrant crisis that is buffeting Europe, though the large number of people from Africa and the Middle East seeking refuge in the European Union has made Orban’s and Kaczynski’s message more politically potent, and thus the undoing of democratic institutions and liberal values politically acceptable, for large numbers of Hungarians and Poles. Observers often describe the way these leaders — including Erdogan — have forged illiberal democracies, or in Turkey’s case, an elected autocracy, as demonstrations of power politics. But these pejoratives are meaningless outside the imprecisions of newspaper editorials. Orban, Kaczynski, and Erdogan have articulated a vision of the future of their societies that appeals to and makes sense for large numbers of people. The Hungarian and Polish leadership have done so basically in opposition to the liberal principles upon which the EU was built. In the Turkish case, the AKP’s program can best be summed up as piety, prosperity, and power. Voters in all three countries have justly rewarded these leaders. Yet for all their apparent success, the Turkish, Hungarian, and Polish leaders have opposition. Over the last 15 years, about half of Turkey’s electorate has consistently opposed the AKP and Erdogan. In 2016, Orban staged a referendum aimed at preventing migrants from entering Hungary. The proposed measure received 98 percent support of the people who voted, but in a political blow, it fell well short of the 50 percent voter turnout needed to become binding. In Poland, the Law and Justice party’s turn away from the West produced the Committee for the Defense of Democracy that has been able to bring large numbers of people into the streets at various times to protest Kaczynski’s worldview. But what’s important is how, in response to opposition, leaders in Turkey, Hungary, and Poland have established new institutions, manipulated existing ones, and hollowed out others to confront political challenges or to close off their possibility. Formal institutions come in the form of laws, rules, regulations, and decrees; their origins are found in political contestation and often reflect the interests of the winners in those conflicts. Informal institutions are uncodified, but that doesn’t mean they are less powerful than formal institutions. Sometimes these norms, which are based on the way things have long been done, are more powerful than written rules. The old boys’ network that has sustained elite, white, male privilege in the United States has often trumped legislative and administrative measures created to level the playing field for women and minorities. One of the best examples of institutional manipulation is the way in which Turkey’s AKP used its majority in the Grand National Assembly to whitewash a 2014 parliamentary investigation into corruption charges against four government ministers that threatened to ensnare Erdogan and his family. The process rendered the idea of parliamentary oversight essentially meaningless and gave the Turkish leader an opportunity to argue — credibly for his constituents — that the original allegations were an attempted coup. Since the corruption allegation, Erdogan has manipulated institutions to reverse the outcome of an election he did not like in 2015, tried his opponents in courts packed with his supporters, and debased Turkey’s electoral laws to ensure the passage of a referendum on constitutional amendments that would grant the presidency extraordinary powers. The AKP has used the legal system to jail journalists — most often on spurious terrorism-related charges — and force ownership changes in the media industry. These attacks on the press, along with the transformation of the state-owned broadcaster and state-run news service into an arm of the AKP, have crowded out independent newsgathering. In the recent elections, the state-owned Anadolu Agency called the presidential election for Erdogan well before the Supreme Electoral Council — made up of AKP appointees — could count the vast majority of ballot boxes. This prompted Erdogan to appear on television graciously accepting another presidential term, making it impossible for the election board to contradict Anadolu’s projection and thus rendering the board a mere prop in AKP’s electoral theater. The institutional manipulations and innovations during the AKP era that have been employed to serve Erdogan’s goals will endure after he is gone. This is because institutions tend to be sticky — they remain long after the moment when they are needed, often leveraged by a new cohort of politicians to advance their agendas. This does not imply that institutional change is impossible. It is just that revisions take place in the context of existing institutions and previous innovations. For example, the origins of Egypt’s current repressive laws concerning the press and civil society organizations can be traced back through any number of revisions to the 1950s and 1960s. In this way, authoritarianism tends to build on itself. It may eventually give out, but short of a revolution that undermines a mutually reinforcing political and social order, institutions will have a lasting impact on society. Despite all the apparent change in Egypt since early 2011, the country’s politics still revolve around a system that Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers founded in the 1950s. The data social scientists have generated indicate that transitions to democracy often fail: Some countries lose their democracy, and those that do only get it back in rare and very specific circumstances. France became democratic again after the defeat of the Vichy government and Nazi Germany. Hungary and Poland were supposed to be shining examples of transitions to democracy. Those countries may yet live up to democratic ideals that as EU members they ostensibly share with other democracies, but because of what Orban and Kaczynski have done, the path to that goal will be long and hard. As for Turkey, no doubt the military will outlast Erdogan, but it is unclear if it will outlast Erdoganism.

This article first appeared here on ForeignPolicy.com July 23, 2018. Earlier this month, Syrian regime forces hoisted their flag above the southern town of Daraa and celebrated. Although there is more bloodletting to come, the symbolism was hard to miss. The uprising that began in that town on March 6, 2011, has finally been crushed, and the civil war that has engulfed the country and destabilized parts of the Middle East as well as Europe will be over sooner rather than later. Bashar al-Assad, the man who was supposed to fall in “a matter of time,” has prevailed with the help of Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah over his own people. Washington is too busy over the furor of the day to reflect on the fact that there are approximately 500,000 fewer Syrians today than there were when a group of boys spray-painted “The people demand the fall of the regime” on buildings in Daraa more than seven years ago. But now that the Syria conflict has been decided, it’s worth thinking about the purpose and place of the United States in the new Middle East. The first order of business is to dispose of the shibboleths that have long been at the core of U.S. foreign policy in the region and have contributed to its confusion and paralysis in Syria and beyond. There probably isn’t anyone inside the Beltway who hasn’t been told at some point in their career about the dangers of reasoning by analogy. But that doesn’t mean such lessons have been regularly heeded. The Syrian uprising came at a fantastical time in the Middle East when freedom, it seemed, was breaking out everywhere. The demonstration of people power that began in Daraa—coming so soon after the fall of longtime leaders in Tunisia and Egypt—was moving. It also clouded the judgment of diplomats, policymakers, analysts, and journalists, rendering them unable to discern the differences between the region’s Assads and Ben Alis or between the structure of the Syrian regime and that of the Egyptian one. And because the policy community did not expect the Syrian leader to last very long, it was caught flat-footed when Assad pursued his most obvious and crudely effective strategy: a militarization of the uprising. In time, Syria’s competing militias, jihadis, and regional powers, compounded by Russia’s intervention, made it hard to identify U.S. interests in the conflict. So, Washington condemned the bloodshed, sent aid to refugees, halfheartedly trained “vetted” rebels, and bombed the Islamic State, but it otherwise stayed out of Syria’s civil conflict. Lest anyone believe that this was a policy particular to U.S. President Barack Obama and his aim to get out of, not into Middle Eastern conflicts, his successor’s policy is not substantially different, with the exception that President Donald Trump is explicit about leaving Syria to Moscow after destroying the Islamic State. While the bodies continued to pile up, all Washington could muster was expressions of concern over another problem from hell. Syria is, of course, different from Rwanda, Darfur, and Srebrenica—to suggest otherwise would be reasoning by analogy—but it is another case of killing on an industrial scale that paralyzed Washington. It seems that even those well versed in history cannot avoid repeating it. Many of the analysts and policymakers who preferred that the United States stay out or minimize its role in Syria came to that position honestly. They looked at the 2003 invasion of Iraq and decried how it destabilized the region, empowered Iran, damaged relations with Washington’s allies, and fueled extremist violence, undermining the U.S. position in the region. It seems lost on the same group that U.S. inaction in Syria did the same: contributed to regional instability, empowered Iran, spoiled relations with regional friends, and boosted transnational terrorist groups. The decision to stay away may have nonetheless been good politics, but it came at a noticeable cost to Washington’s position in the Middle East. The waning of U.S. power and influence that Syria has both laid bare and hastened is a development that the policy community has given little thought to, because it was not supposed to happen. By every traditional measure of power, the United States, after all, has no peer. But power is only useful in its application, and Washington has proved either unable or unwilling to shape events in the Middle East as it had in the past—which is to say, it has abdicated its own influence. That may be a positive development. No one wants a repeat of Iraq. In Washington’s place, Moscow has stepped in to offer itself as a better, more competent partner to Middle Eastern countries. There haven’t been many takers yet beyond the Syrians, but there nevertheless seems to be a lot of interest, and the conflict in Syria is the principal reason why. Contrast the way in which Russian President Vladimir Putin came to the rescue of an ally in crisis—Assad—with the way U.S. allies in the region perceive Obama to have helped push Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak from office after 30 years, much of it spent carrying Washington’s water around in the region. The Egyptians, Saudis, Emiratis, Israelis, and others may not like Assad very much, but Russia’s initial forceful response to prevent the Syrian dictator from falling and then Moscow’s efforts to will Assad to apparent victory have made an impression on them. Syria is now the centerpiece and pivot of Russia’s strategy to reassert itself as a global power, and its renewed influence in the Middle East stretches from Damascus eastward through the Kurdistan Regional Government to Iran and from the Syrian capital south to Egypt before arcing west to Libya. Israel, Turkey, and the Gulf States still look to Washington for leadership but have also begun seeking help securing their interests at the Kremlin. The Israeli prime minister has become a fixture at Putin’s side; the Turkish president and his Russian counterpart are, along with Iran’s leaders, partners in Syria; King Salman made the first ever visit by a Saudi monarch to Moscow in October 2017; and the Emiratis believe the Russians should be “at the table” for discussions of regional importance. The era when the United States determined the rules of the game in the Middle East and maintained a regional order that made it relatively easier and less expensive to exercise U.S. power lasted 25 years. It is now over. Finally, the situation in Syria reveals the profound ambivalence of Americans toward the Middle East and the declining importance of what U.S. officials have long considered Washington’s interests there: oil, Israel, and U.S. dominance of the area to ensure the other two. Americans wonder why U.S. military bases dot the Persian Gulf if the United States is poised to become the world’s largest producer of oil. After two inconclusive wars in 17 years, no one can offer Americans a compelling reason why the Assad regime is their problem. Israel remains popular, but over 70 years it has proved that it can handle itself. Obama and Trump ran on platforms of retrenchment, and they won. The immobility over Syria is a function of the policy community’s impulse to just do something and the politics that make that impossible. Perhaps now that the Assad-Putin-Khamenei side of the Syrian conflict has won, there will be an opportunity for Americans to debate what is important in the Middle East and why. It will not be easy, however. Congress is polarized and paralyzed. The Trump administration approach to the region is determined by the president’s gut. He has continued Obama-era policies of fighting extremist groups, but then he broke with his predecessors and moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Trump breached the Iran nuclear deal, though he has done very little since about Iran other than talk tough. He wants to leave Syria “very soon,” even as his national security advisor vows to stay as long as Iran remains. Despite and because of this incoherence, now is the time to have a debate about the Middle East. There is a compelling argument to be made that American interests demand an active U.S. role in the region; there is an equally compelling argument that U.S. goals can be secured without the wars, social engineering projects, peace processes, and sit-downs in Geneva. In between is what U.S. policy in the Middle East looks like now: ambivalence and inertia. Under these circumstances, Syria, Russia, and Iran will continue to win.

It should not be a surprise except to the most hopeful that Recep Tayyip Erdogan is once again president of Turkey and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) will enjoy an effective parliamentary majority with its partner, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). Erdogan supporters are rejoicing while his opposition, which many Turks believe was revitalized even in defeat, licks its wounds. It is an outcome that sounds familiar and was likely never in doubt. President Erdogan has worked hard over seven long years to get to this point; he can now put what Turks refer to as the “executive presidency” into action. As a result, he will enjoy significant new powers with little oversight, allowing Erdogan to pursue the transformation of Turkey into a powerful, prosperous, and pious society unencumbered. The extraordinary aspect of Turkey’s elections was obviously not the outcome, but rather the way it was conducted. The entire process was somewhere on the spectrum between free and unfree and fair and unfair, bewildering participants and observers alike. The confusion helped Erdogan win with a veneer of democratic legitimacy. It seems to be the perfect template for future elections in Turkey and other countries with populist and authoritarian leaders. When the polling stations closed and the ballots were counted, Erdogan won 52.5 percent of the vote, soundly defeating his closest competitor, Muharrem Ince of the Republican Peoples’ Party (CHP) who garnered 30.7 percent of the vote after a spirited campaign. In the parliamentary elections, the AKP lost 7 percent of its vote total from the controversial November 2015 election. Even though it can claim 42.5 percent electoral support, it lost its parliamentary majority. However, its partner, the MHP, won 11 percent of the vote, meaning that as long as the two parties stick together they will effectively control the parliament. The CHP won 22.6 percent of the vote while a new party called Iyi (Good) Party attracted 9.95 percent of Turkish voters. The Kurdish-based People’s Democratic Party (HDP) won the requisite minimum 11.7 percent to earn mandates in the Grand National Assembly. For Erdogan and the AKP there is no reason to question these results. Erdogan has a strong record of accomplishments and has remained popular; Ince drew huge crowds leading up to Sunday’s vote without interference from the government; the HDP, whose leader is in jail with most of the rest of the party’s senior officials, made it into parliament; and the AKP actually lost its parliamentary majority. This is all entirely accurate, but the opposition has many legitimate concerns about the government’s conduct prior to and during the elections. For example, like the 2017 constitutional referendum that paved the way for the executive presidency, Erdogan and the AKP dominated the media. According to Reuters, in May Erdogan enjoyed almost ten times as much airtime as Ince on TRT—Turkey’s state broadcaster. The Iyi Party’s presidential candidate, Meral Aksener, got a measly twelve minutes of airtime. These huge disparities are compounded by the fact that after fifteen long years of AKP rule most of Turkey’s privately held media outlets mindlessly recycle Erdogan talking point out of either ideological conviction or fear. Then there is the question of the MHP’s results. This is a party that split in 2017, that had become a wholly owned subsidiary of the AKP, that never held a campaign rally, and in only one poll did it come close to the 10 percent threshold to enter parliament, but it nevertheless garnered 11 percent of the vote. How did this happen? One line of analysis suggests that Iyi, which Aksener carved out of the MHP, drew votes away from CHP, not her former party. It is a plausible scenario, but the result is so at variance with almost every poll that it deserves scrutiny, especially since the implications of an AKP-MHP majority in parliament for Turkish politics are so important. Under the new system, if the president is a member of the party that controls the Grand National Assembly, his or her powers are largely unchecked. The alliance gives Erdogan and AKP that effective majority. Their supporters argue that the difference between the MHP’s results and its poll numbers is the result of unprofessional pollsters rather than manipulation. In fairness, Turkey’s polling agencies do not have a sterling record.     After the polling stations closed, the state run news service, Anadolu Agency, behaved less like a news organization than an arm of the AKP. Anadolu’s early projections of an Erdogan win with support in the mid-50 percent range seemed intended only to sow confusion at a moment when there was a cascade of exit polls that are notoriously inaccurate. Ince intimated as much when he declared that Anadolu was projecting results based on a relatively small number of returns from smaller cities and towns that were known AKP strongholds. The Supreme Election Council (YSK) is supposed to have the first and final word on results, yet Erdogan declared victory before it was finished counting ballots from what the opposition believed were vote rich districts in Ankara and Istanbul. It turns out that Anadolu’s projections and the CHP’s own vote tracker eventually converged, but the aggressive and early call of the presidential election raises serious questions whether it was employed to establish a fait accompli. Finally, there is the composition of the YSK, which is supposed to be an independent body, but its officials are all AKP appointees. It is the government’s prerogative to appoint to this agency whomever Turkey’s leaders would like. Yet given the way in which the AKP has politicized, manipulated, and hollowed out Turkey’s institutions, it seems unlikely that the YSK would defy Erdogan. Midway through the the 2017 constitutional referendum, its officials ruled that ballots without the required official seals would nevertheless be counted as valid, a decision that opponents believe lifted supporters of the executive presidency to victory. This is why Ince’s supporters were so fearful that once Anadolu declared Erdogan the victor, the YSK would just rubber stamp the result. Then again, there is no evidence that Erdogan’s victory is fraudulent. Sunday’s Turkish election is a perfect example of post-truth politics. There are two competing narratives that partisans on both sides believe in fiercely. They respond ferociously to any effort to question their particular truth even if there are good reasons to do so. The unfortunate result is more anger, greater polarization, further instability, and a deepening of authoritarianism. This is Turkey’s present, but it is the wave of the future.