Hebraica

The Illusion of Control

• Episode 10

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Turkey is rising, Israel is worried, and President Trump is betting that his friend Recep Tayyip Erdoğan can help bring order to a chaotic region. But America has made this kind of bet before.

From the Afghan jihad to the War on Terror, the United States has repeatedly empowered forces whose beliefs and ambitions it failed to take seriously, thinking their power could be harnessed for American purposes. 

In this episode, Robert explores Turkey’s resurgence, Israel’s growing concern, and one of the oldest temptations of great powers: the belief that because history is dangerous, it must therefore be controlled.


Introduction

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A couple weeks ago, over the July 4th weekend, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went on Fox News twice in forty-eight hours. And uh while he had plenty of nice things to say about the United States on its 250th birthday, his real message was about Turkey, a powerful Muslim country not far from Israel, with which our president, President Trump, is getting much closer. A country that Netanyahu and most Israelis see as a rising threat. Trump has very good reasons for courting the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but his apparent willingness to make US policy in the region an extension of Turkish policy and to tolerate increasingly aggressive statements and actions from Turkey against America's allies does seem to be misplaced. Trump sees Turkey as BB once did, as a useful partner, a country that can help us bring order to this lawless region, country that can help the US maintain some semblance of control. But Trump is playing with fire. Trump sees power. And unfortunately, for the most part, he dismisses belief.

Table of contents; housekeeping note; basic argument

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America empowers local partners whose values diverge from its own, only to realize later what a mistake that actually was. We've seen this movie before. But even now, after decades of missteps in the Near East, that lesson still eludes us. This is Hebraica. I'm Robert Nicholson. If you're enjoying these conversations, please consider subscribing, uh, rating the show, sharing it with a friend, and uh joining our Hebraica newsletter on Substack. That's Hebraica.substack.com. Your support helps build a community around the world shaped by Jerusalem. So in today's episode, I want to do a couple of things. First, I want to explain a bit more about this tricky trilateral between the US, Israel, and Turkey because it's not going away. Second, I want to give a little historical context that should make us cautious about throwing in our lot with Erdogan. And third, I want to summarize with a few lessons and conclusions. Let's start with these trilateral tensions. And there's no better way to start than by pointing out that Turkish President Erdogan has, by all accounts, had a very good year. To his north, Turkey's historical nemesis, Russia, has been substantially bogged down and weakened thanks to Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine. To Turkey's east, Iran and its regional network have been severely degraded by a combined U.S.-Israel war, even as Turkey and its partner Azerbaijan agreed to a U.S. brokered peace process with Armenia that would see Turkic power extended across Russia's old haunts in the Caucasus to the south. Bashar al-Assad is gone, and Syria has been transformed into a Sunni Muslim state, de facto at least, under the leadership of Ahmed Oshara, the former jihadist and Turkish friendly agent. Abdullah Ojilan, the imprisoned leader of the PKK, a Kurdish militia which has been battling Turkey for Kurdish independence for decades, made a deal with Erdogan to end hostilities. We'll see where that goes. Further south, the Sunni Gulf powers have been dramatically set back since the start of the US-Israel war on Iran. To the southwest, Turkey's footprint in Africa has been growing tremendously in Sudan, in Libya, and in Egypt through a renewed alliance with President Sisi. To the West, Europe has also become substantially weaker, especially as President Trump works aggressively to decouple European and American interests ever since his second inaugural. And this has had the added benefit for Turkey in Europe's growing interest and appetite for Turkey's burgeoning arms market. And even further west, the U.S. under Trump has happily run its Mid East policy through Ankara under Ambassador Tom Barak, one of Trump's closest friends, who seems to be doing his best to make American policy and Turkish policy one and the same thing. A very good year. Year and a half, like I said. Turkey is still dealing with inflation and some other economic problems, but by and large, it is hard to deny that its star is rising. And from Israel's perspective, all of this is very bad. Maybe the most interesting thing about this development is that for many years, Israel and Turkey were two of the region's closest allies, two secular democracies with powerful modern armies that stood shoulder to shoulder against Muslim extremism around the region. But things started to change when Erdogan came to power more than

The view from Ankara: ambition

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20 years ago. The changes happened slowly at first, but they happened steadily. The big difference between Erdogan and his predecessors is that Erdogan was and is an open supporter of political Islam. Although for years many commentators in Israel and in the West dismissed Erdogan's beliefs as irrelevant or maybe just a convenient tool for rallying the peasant masses. But ever since Erdogan came to power, the Israel-Turkey relationship has been spotty at best. There has been ongoing military contacts, but erratic cycles of rupture and reconciliation. The first big rupture came in 2010 when Israeli commandos boarded the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish ship that was attempting to break an Israeli blockade of Gaza. And that incident left ten Turkish activists dead, and Ankara recalled its ambassador. Israel apologized in 2013. The two countries reconciled in 2016, but the overall downward trend continued. Erdogan continued to champion Hamas and to denounce Israel on a pretty regular basis. And in 2018, Turkey again expelled the Israeli ambassador amid clashes in Gaza, and ostensibly, at least, because of Trump's decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. There was another reconciliation in 2022. Ambassadors were restored, and the Israeli president even visited Ankara. And then came October 7th when Erdogan decided to defend Hamas as a liberation movement, compare Netanyahu to Hitler, recall Turkey's ambassador to Israel, restrict and eventually halt trade with Israel, and eventually emerge as one of the Jewish state's most vocal critics. In recent months, this year, in the aftermath of this latest round of fighting in Iran, the Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan declared that Israel is an unbearable burden on humanity and a quote problem for the world. The Turkish interior minister, Mustafa Chiefchi, also sparked backlash after expressing his personal hope to govern and liberate Jerusalem. Needless to say, when Israelis look north amid everything else they see surrounding them, they see this powerful Muslim state with an ambitious political vision that's eager to fill the void left by Iran and Russia, and maybe most alarmingly, seems increasingly close to President Trump. A couple of weeks ago, I talked about the importance of seeing global affairs through the lens of both power and belief. But in the case of Trump, it seems, at least from the outside, that these two things in his mind are actually fused, that his understanding of the world, his belief about what's fundamentally true, ultimately centers on power. I don't know the man's heart. I can only comment on what I see, but based on what I see, President Trump looks down on smaller countries, weaker countries, and even on strong countries that refuse to exert their power, or at least exert power in a way that acknowledges his own power. When he looks at a map of the world, he sees only those countries whose power is significant enough to warp the space around them. And Turkey is one of those countries. Now, Trump is certainly not the first president to court and at times conciliate Turkey. There's a long, a long history of this over the course of the last 75 years. And there's a reason U.S. presidents have done this. There's a reason U.S. presidents have refused to recognize, for example, the Armenian genocide until President Biden did it in 2021. Turkey is a powerful country. It sits on several critical geographic choke points. It's a member of NATO. It's historically been a counterbalance to Russia. And for the most part, it's been mostly secular and on our side in this long battle against religious extremism. But Trump's extreme deference to Erdogan belies his belief

The view from Jerusalem: concern

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that in a moment of global chaos, a stronger alliance with Turkey will help America preserve its equities in the region. He thinks that it will help us ensure that positive developments in Syria remain on track, that Iranian power vacuums are filled by Turkey rather than by a resurgent Iran, that Russia will not be able to reassert its position in the Caucasus, that Europe, which Trump largely detests, is also counterbalanced by a more muscular country whose European identity has always been suspect. And of course, that critical flows of energy and weapons are maintained for global markets. That Israel, Greece, Cyprus, and other American allies fear this renewed Turkish power seems irrelevant to President Trump. And when he arrived at the NATO summit, just a couple of days after BB's TV appearances, he was just as chummy with Erdogan as he's ever been. And worst of all, he did the thing that everyone feared he would do in announcing that he was seriously considering selling advanced F-35 fighter aircraft to Turkey, which only inflamed the consternation that's being felt around the region. None of this is really new. Powerful men scan the horizon for other powerful men who pose a threat to their power. And they look for alliances with others, with other powerful men who can help confront those threats and augment their own power in some way. And at no point in any of this do these powerful men pay any attention to the fears or desires of the less powerful. In America's case, the problem is that history has shown us time and again that the belief that we can harness another country's power and ambition for our own purposes is a double-edged sword. The great mistake of powerful nations, not just the US, but throughout history, is believing that because history is dangerous, it must therefore be controlled. Power is essential in this world, but control is an illusion. And oftentimes the quest for control, for control at all costs, aggravates or even uh metastasizes the threats that we face. And here I I want to talk about history and talk about America's current position in the world and how we got here as a way of illustrating that point that I just made. I should preface by saying that history is a funny thing. It's funny because it's almost impossible to draw direct lines of cause and effect for for any historical event, because there are infinite factors that that lie behind any event. You could say that the cause of me recording this podcast right now is because I saw something in the news and I wanted to talk about it. Or because my brain is telling my vocal cords to pass air through my mouth in the shape of words. Or because my mom met my dad, or because their parents met their parents, and so on. History is complicated. But having said that, I do believe that history is still coherent and able

The view from Washington: confidence

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to be interpreted, that we can discern general lines of causation, and that although we always run the risk of oversimplification, we must also do our best to discern patterns and try to make sense of human affairs. I want to talk about the temptation to use all power to remain in power and how that temptation led, at least in part, to a worsening of America's position in the world. I could start anywhere, but let's start in the latter days of the Cold War when the white hot core of U.S. foreign policy was to constrain and challenge and in some administrations even roll back the power and influence of the Soviet Union. A very good policy goal, in my opinion, one that mostly served us well. But even good policies, when pursued in unwise ways, can open a Pandora's box of maladies like some of the ones that afflict us today. One of the final acts of the Cold War was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. And that invasion set the stage for one of the most celebrated covert operations in American history. Working with our partners in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, we, the U.S., decided to challenge this expansion of Soviet power by flooding Afghanistan with weapons and cash and military training for Afghan locals who wanted to resist this Soviet juggernaut. Classic case of unconventional warfare. The only problem was that we pursued power with no awareness of belief. The vast majority of the Afghan resistance fighters were hardcore Sunni Muslims who raised the religious cry against the godless communists to rouse the populace to arms. New pipelines for foreign fighters were created. Funds were raised in mosques all over the world where Imams were preaching the necessity of jihad against the infidel. This American proxy war against the Soviets was massively successful, actually, and did indeed help break the back of the dying communist regime. But the victory came at a high cost. When the Soviets withdrew, we forgot about Afghanistan. But the pipelines and the networks of fighters, weapons, cash didn't just evaporate. And within a decade, this highly sophisticated Sunni Jihad military machine followed its own rhetoric to its logical conclusion and turned its sights on that other infidel superpower, the United States, which its leaders saw had not only co-opted Muslim countries, but uh backed Israel's occupation of Palestine. One Arab veteran of the Afghan war, Osama bin Laden, established a new organization called Al-Qaeda in the mid-90s and declared war on the Jews and Crusaders, launching a global jihad that culminated in the attacks of 9-11. And those attacks did what bin Laden intended them to do. They lured the U.S. deeper into the Islamic world, into a quagmire, further inflaming Muslim anger and spawning a whole new generation of fighters sworn to defend the honor of Allah and all Muslims. The Shiite Islamists in Iran were also radicalized, both on the merits of jihad, which they had already been fine-tuning, and in response to their own fears of Sunni extremism, especially after the U.S. invasion of Iraq turned into a sectarian war.

Statesmanship and the problem of history

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Regimes collapsed. Years passed, and the Arab Spring broke out. Refugees all the while are pouring out of the Near East into Europe, destabilizing European politics, and frustrating the refugees themselves, who are unable or unwilling to assimilate into European society, leading some of them to embrace radicalism, and beginning a rift between the US and Europe that would only grow in in the years to come. And the US, the US, for its part, frustrated by its inability to win in Iraq or Afghanistan. Ramped up its military activity, perfecting new technologies like unmanned drones and remote surveillance that would later morph into other threats against the homeland. On the home front, frustration turned to despair, especially among a whole class of returning veterans who had given their friends much of their own lives and in some cases parts of their own body to a cause that increasingly felt misguided at best. Some of them, baffled as to why America did any of this, began hatching conspiracy theories to try to find and isolate the hidden hand that was behind it all. New social and political movements appeared on both the political right and the political left. And a growing erraticism in American society translated into erraticism in U.S. foreign policy, which created growing concern and distrust among our partners abroad and emboldened our rivals and enemies who were eager to exploit all of this chaos. In an effort to contain all of these forces and bring some semblance of stability to the region, Democratic and Republican presidents tried to outsource regional hegemony to local partners, whether Jews, Persians, Turks, or Arabs. But each new deal seemed to only create more chaos. Meanwhile, Russia and China quietly were expanding their power all this time, hoping the U.S. would just keep working itself into a frenzy and using new technological tools to stoke the flames of discontent on the American home front. Now, what I just gave you was a wildly reductionist retelling of the last 40 years of American history. But there is a kernel of truth in there that I think should be taken seriously. What's my point in all of this? To say that America caused 9-11 or that America created ISIS? No. But I would certainly argue, and I don't think I'm alone in this, that aggressive U.S. support for a Sunni jihad in Afghanistan, a jihad that was, at least as far as jihad go, well-intentioned, but served to strengthen existing terrorist networks, was a major contributing factor in the rise of Islamist politics and terrorism that continues to haunt us. It was not intended, but it happened anyway. It turns out that it is very hard to control the forces that we unleash. My point is this the U.S. must, like every country, wield power. From a biblical perspective, this is the quintessential purpose of any state. But the U.S. must exercise its power cautiously, warily, being extremely careful as it chooses its partners. We repeatedly make the mistake of empowering people whose beliefs and ambitions we don't take seriously because we think that their power can be harnessed for our purposes. We did it in Afghanistan, we may be doing it again with Erdogan. We should have anticipated that funneling guns and money to religious fighters

An alternative retelling of five decades of American history

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might blow up in our face. We didn't. And even today, many of those involved in the Afghan jihad recount their adventures and celebrate them with almost no awareness of the unintended consequences of that policy. Most Republicans and Democrats today, if you ask them why is America in the state that it's in, why does the world look this way, will blame the conservatives or the libs or the nationalists or the globalists or Europe or the Jews. They can't see that we, like every other nation in history, bear a lot of the responsibility ourselves, all of us. Now, that isn't to say that U.S. policymakers should have just sat back and watched the Soviets take Afghanistan, or that the exercise of power or covert operations are ipso facto evil. They are not. Okay, let's let's bring this thing to a close. There seem to be three three lessons from the last 40 years that are worth learning. Number one, don't empower people or states who fundamentally oppose your way of life just because you think they can help you defeat today's enemy. Know your partner. Know what he wants, know where his ambitions start and end, and never assume that because he's helping you solve today's problem, he has stopped pursuing his own project. While it's difficult to ascertain in any given moment a state's intentions, there are discernible patterns that can be observed and studied to craft forecasts based on general dispositions and trajectory. We do this all the time. We just need to do it better. And we need to do it with an eye on both power and belief. Number two, the use of every available means to preserve power, all power to stay in power, is eventually self-defeating. Number three, total control is impossible. And the quest to achieve total control often produces greater insecurity. I'm not naive. America must sometimes work with unsavory partners. I'm not arguing that America should abandon Turkey completely or refuse to work with Erdogan or, God forbid, retreat from the world. Power must be exercised, but we should never mistake a convergence of interests for a convergence of purpose. Erdogan has his own vision of history, his own ambitions, his own beliefs about Turkey's place in the world. He's not an instrument of American policy. And the more power we help him accumulate, the more seriously we should ask what he intends to do with it. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing, leaving a review, and sharing the podcast with someone you know who might appreciate it. It is the best way to help Hebraica grow. You can also find the written companion to this project on Substack, where I'm publishing essays, commentary, and digest of relevant news from around the world. Until next time, my friends, thank you for joining me. Thank you for listening. God bless you.