Recep Tayyip Erdogan can thank the Turkish lira for his rise to power. A financial crisis that delegitimized mainstream politicians propelled his campaign. The lira’s 30 percent drop versus the dollar in a single day became emblematic of establishment mismanagement.
Erdogan is a populist. In 2005, he struck six zeroes off the Turkish currency. Instead of one U.S. dollar buying 1,330.000 Turkish lira, suddenly it bought 1.33. Coca Colas no longer cost one million lira; they cost less than one. Whatever the psychological boost, it did little to tackle underlying problems. Initially, Erdogan could pretend otherwise. After all, what is the difference between a Coke costing 0.90 lira and costing one lira? Nearly two decades later, however, the new Turkish lira approaches 33 to the dollar. Put another way, Erdogan’s revamped currency has lost more than 95 percent of its value relative to the dollar. Because he has maintained an iron grip over economic policy for two decades, he cannot blame opposition. Earlier efforts to blame Jewish financiers, the so-called “interest rate lobby,” also fell flat among all but his die-hard supporters.
Dictators often embrace irredentism to distract from poor economic stewardship. Argentina was once a rich country but inflation in the 1970s and early 1980s eroded Argentines’ spending power. Cost-of-living in the country was second only to Japan. It was against this backdrop that, in 1982, Argentine military dictator Leopoldo Galtieri revived a dormant claim to the Falkland Islands, ruled by the British for almost 150 years, to justify their invasion. He calculated—wrongly—that the United Kingdom, riven with union unrest and domestic discord, had no political will to defend a few thousand sheep farmers on fringe of empire. He was wrong. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was not one to go wobbly.
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s 1980 invasion of Iran was as historic a miscalculation. He envisioned a blitzkrieg; he got World War I. The war drained Iraq’s treasury and destroyed a generation of human capital. Two years after armistice, Saddam presided over an economy in ruins. Rather than accept responsibility, Saddam revived revanchist claims to Kuwait, its historic “19th province” and sought to annex the oil-rich emirate to seize its multi-billion dollar reserves. It was a get-quick-rich scheme that failed miserably. The resulting war and sanctions plunged Iraq into poverty from which Iraqis have yet to recover fully. Iraq should be Dubai; today it is barely Kosovo.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, too, falls into the same category. The Russian ruble has lost nearly two-thirds of its value versus the US dollar over the past ten years. Every land grab Putin makes—be it against Georgia or Ukraine—comes not only at a high price in blood and treasure, but also requires continued subsidies that strain the Kremlin’s treasury even further. Without the Russian dole, for example, neither nominally independent Luhansk nor Donetsk could survive. Putin’s response is to accelerate the cycle of war to rally Russians around their flag.
Back to Turkey: The window-dressing of central bank personnel changes and reform has failed, and the Turkish currency continues its slow, steady slide to nothingness. With time, Turkey might become Zimbabwe on the Med. It is against this backdrop that he embraces irredentism not as a rhetorical tool, but as a military one. Simply put, Erdogan needs war.
As the Hamas-Israel war distracted the world, Turkish warplanes and drones bombarded northern Syria to eradicate the region’s industrial infrastructure of Kurdish regions and consolidate Turkish military control over occupied districts. Erdogan has also augmented his occupation of northern Cyprus and he continues to challenge Greek sovereignty over Aegean islands.
Now he signals plans to occupy Gara Mountain ostensibly to enable a transit corridor from the Persian Gulf through Iraq to Turkey and Europe but also to counter the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). For anyone to validate such reasoning is to greenlight war, not only in Iraqi Kurdistan but also in Armenia where Turks make similar demands for a corridor.
Rather than a cakewalk, however, Gara will likely be Erdogan’s Waterloo, Khorramshahr, or Donestk. The PKK has nowhere else to go. Purges have transformed the Turkish Army into a shell of its former self, and President Joe Biden’s gift of F-16s will not come in time (or, perhaps, at all should Biden lose reelection). Much like Galtieri, Saddam, and Putin, Erdogan now directs his country into the abyss rather than admit his own financial incompetence.
