Erdogan’s Micro-Imperialism Could Prove Disastrous for Turkey and its Neighbors

The Turkish government could present its decision to send soldiers to Libya as another sign of strong, principled leadership to protect Turkey’s interests.

But even the least capable international observer could have seen that becoming allies with a rapidly unravelling, moribund political entity in Tripoli facing the rival General Khalifa Haftar, supported by Russia, France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, was bound to be a disaster.

Turkey’s various political gambits to gain a ceasefire (to buy time and prop up the failing Tripoli administration) have failed miserably while Haftar’s allies politely have stood by, muttering pleasantries and muted calls for peace. Haftar did not sign anything as he would have been insane to agree to a ceasefire when he and his backers were in a dominant military position. Haftar continued to besiege Tripoli so as to place himself in an even better position to negotiate the next time he is called to the table.

In other words, Turkey’s Libya adventure was doomed from the beginning, and it is not headed in a particularly promising direction at the moment.

For the sake of brevity, I will not go into the other futile foreign policy efforts of the Erdogan administration here, as these two suffice to demonstrate two facts:

Erdogan has become a clear danger to regional stability, and his burning of bridges with the West, along with the increasingly unbalanced nature of his overseas adventures, could spark a series of wars that could devastate the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East.

By trying to bite off more than it can chew, Turkey has committed itself to a course of action that cannot be supported by its economic or military capabilities. When these adventures fail, Turkey’s national interest will not have been well-served, but deeply undermined, and generations of Turkish citizens will have to pay for the grave mistakes of this administration.

The situation in the eastern Mediterranean today is a textbook example of a zero-sum game, in which various state actors are maneuvering around the prospect of hydrocarbon resources. The only part that does not make sense in this picture is the assumption that states are rational actors that work toward their self-interests. As in the case of Erdogan’s Turkey, a state actor can take steps that undermine its self-interests, and are not based on a rational view of what is in Turkey’s best interests, but on what is in the best interests of Erdogan.

Erdogan’s Turkey has emerged as a threat to stability at an extremely volatile region of the world. The ending of the Cold War did not negate the possibility of global or regional conflicts of unimaginable destructiveness. Irresponsible international actors like Erdogan do not have the capability to shift major power balances in the world, or even the capability to achieve micro-imperialist objectives as their domestic audiences believe, but they do have the ability to open a Pandora’s Box and trigger ever more destructive wars that could engulf the world.