Cold Turkey

The country’s once-warm relations with the West have chilled. Where does Erdogan go from here?

- Matthew Philips

There’s a famous saying in politics: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” It’s hard to think of a leader who’s put that to better use than Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In a way, his entire political career was born out of crisis. After a stint as mayor of Istanbul in the 1990s, Erdogan was briefly jailed and his Islamist political party was banned. He then helped form a new party that was swept into power after a devastating financial crash hit Turkey in 2001. He’s now a twice-elected president who’s steadily amassed power, in part by knowing how to leverage a bad situation. He did, after all, describe a failed coup against him in 2016 as a “gift from God,” because it allowed him to crush his political opponents and endow himself with even more authority to bring about his vision for a “new Turkey.”

Erdogan knows as well as anyone the political cost of an economy going up in smoke. So why is he goading Donald Trump into tariffs and sanctions when Turkey’s economy is in so much trouble?

That’s a question U.S. officials and global investors are asking after watching the Turkish president respond to U.S. pressure by ratcheting up the tension even more. To Trump officials, it seemed like a simple enough strategy: Turn up the heat until Erdogan releases Andrew Brunson, an American pastor imprisoned in Turkey for the past two years. They didn’t expect him to risk bankrupting his own country or consider leaving NATO in favor of a closer alliance with Russia, China, and Iran. But that’s the way things are headed, or at least that’s what Erdogan wants the world to believe.