Erdoğan, in Trouble at Home, Fishing for Trouble in the Aegean
by Burak Bekdil • March 5, 2022 at 5:00 am
At home, Turks are economically paralyzed: the official annual inflation rate is running at 48% (although independent researchers measure it at 114%); there are basic commodity shortages; gasoline, natural gas and electricity costs have doubled within a year; the national currency has lost half of its value against major Western currencies, and per capita GDP has been in freefall for the past seven years. The minimum wage, at barely $375 a month, is, after Albania, the second lowest in continental Europe. This gloomy picture has emerged just 16 months before Turkey's Islamist autocrat, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, will go for an all-or-nothing election in June 2023.
Like any other third-world autocrat, Erdoğan blames the economic collapse on "foreign powers plotting against Turkey's graceful rise."
[Turkey's top defense procurement official, Ismail] Demir's office is running hundreds of armament programs. But observers have noticed a recent tendency to give prominence to naval programs targeting exclusively Greece, as Turkey does not have other littoral rivals.
Turkish military and defense procurement officials are working day and night to run scores of other, smaller naval programs, despite the country's severe economic constraints. This expansion reflects a political process of prioritizing guns over butter -- all as theater for Turkish voters before they go to the ballot box.
To this day, the Turks are proud that their Ottoman ancestors had made the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas "a Turkish lake." To this day, they lament that the Aegean is now widely a Greek lake and the Mediterranean is anything but a Turkish lake.
A century after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of the modern Turkish Republic, Turkey's irredentist Islamists are flexing their muscles not exactly to make the Aegean a Turkish lake again, but to distract the Turkish masses who many well be economically disgruntled into embracing the illusion that a neo-Ottoman Armada is back on the blue waters.
