Erdoğan Declares Turkey a 'Playmaker' at Security Conference

Erdoğan's week looked outward, and that was the point. At a new National Security Conference in Ankara he declared that Turkey had stopped following other countries' scripts and become a regional "playmaker," a country that writes its own. The line was aimed as much at home as abroad, because the busier and more indispensable Turkey looks to the world, the less leverage anyone has to question what Erdoğan does inside it.

Abroad, the influence is genuine. Turkey planted itself in the middle of the US-Iran endgame, with foreign minister Hakan Fidan offering to help finalise a peace text and to clear mines from the Strait of Hormuz once a deal is struck — exactly the service a Washington desperate to reopen the strait most needs. He spent political capital on Gaza too, comparing Netanyahu to Hitler and drawing "antisemitic dictator" in return, while Turkey keeps its trade embargo on Israel. For much of the region's public, that makes Erdoğan the loudest voice against Israel; for Washington, it makes Turkey, not Israel, the partner it can actually use on Iran.

The domestic purpose is the part Erdoğan does not advertise. Over the past year his government has hollowed out the opposition: Ekrem İmamoğlu, the Istanbul mayor who was his strongest challenger, has been jailed with prosecutors seeking a sentence measured in thousands of years; more than 500 officials of the main opposition CHP have been detained; and an Ankara court's move against the party's leadership saw riot police storm its headquarters. Henri Barkey of the Council on Foreign Relations describes what has emerged not as ordinary backsliding but as "a system of personal rule," organised around one man's survival. US lawmakers from both parties warned this month that Turkey is nearing a point of no return on democracy.

That is the backdrop to the prize Erdoğan has been waiting for: the NATO summit Ankara hosts on July 7-8. He plans to ring the city with more than 40,000 security personnel — a number that says as much to his own opposition as to any external threat. A summit of the alliance's leaders confers exactly the legitimacy that makes the crackdown harder for Western capitals to call out; the optics of the club are worth more to him than any communiqué.

And yet the same assertiveness that makes Turkey useful also makes it a problem inside the Western camp. In the same week Erdoğan offered to broker peace for Washington and prepared to host NATO, his fighter jets harassed an aircraft carrying the French, Dutch and Greek defence ministers to an EU meeting in Cyprus, jamming its communications. That is the tension to watch through July: Erdoğan is selling the West an indispensable Turkey while showing, in the air over the Mediterranean and in the courts in Ankara, that the indispensability is exercised on his terms, against allies and opponents alike.