Michael Rubin
Middle East Forum, Sept. 9, 2024
“Just as dictatorships set Ethiopia and Sudan down the path to division, so too does Erdoğan make Turkey’s collapse inevitable.”
For decades, beginning in the 19th century, Europeans referred to the Ottoman Empire as “the sick man of Europe.” First sultans and then so-called reformers acting in their names sought autocratic power. The Porte covered for a crumbling economy with grandiose projects and compensated for lack of popularity with disastrous foreign adventures. In its final decades, Turkish authorities played ethnic and sectarian communities off each other in order to consolidate power and ethnically cleanse Anatolia. Ultimately, the question diplomats asked during and after World War I was not if the Ottoman Empire would fall but when.
Turks like to embrace the glories of the Ottoman Empire at its peak, but shirk responsibility for its twilight years by arguing that Turkey was merely a successor state that emerged from a fractured empire, no different from Greece, Hungary, or Syria. It is a useful formula to claim historical legitimacy but eschew responsibility for the Greek, Armenian and Assyrian genocides.
Erdoğan’s aides may cover for him, but there is no hiding that, as with President Joe Biden in the United States, age has won over ambition.
Today, history is repeating albeit on a smaller scale. Turkey may not be the sick man of Europe, but its dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is. Erdoğan is literally sick, whether it is an epileptic fit in a locked armored car, a bout of colon cancer, or an apparent on-air heart attack. At 70 years old, Erdoğan is still relatively young, but his vigor lags; he has repeatedly fallen asleep during televised speeches and state meetings. Erdoğan’s aides may cover for him and his troll armies declare his bodily waste smells like roses but there is no hiding that, as with President Joe Biden in the United States, age has won over ambition. There is a reason why Erdoğan increasingly promotes his son and son-in-law as each auditions to succeed him.
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