However, a better assessment would have understood the Ankara summit as Nato returning to its roots. In recent months, the theme of Nato reverting to its original Cold War purpose — European deterrence and defense — has been advanced by the Trump administration. The idea was rolled out in February as “Nato 3.0” and is the brainchild of Undersecretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby, a restrainer who advocates for limiting military interventionism and who has therefore been maligned by the liberal Atlanticist set and reportedly spied on by Israel. As Colby describes it, Nato 3.0 is not an abandonment of Nato but rather “a return to and validation of its foundational purpose”. In other words, “make Nato great again” by ensuring Europeans pour billions into defense industrial production and technological innovation so they can take care of their own conventional (non-nuclear) defense. 

At this year’s summit, I witnessed the transition to Nato 3.0 in real time. The Trump administration surely regards Europe’s acceptance of its shift in policy and philosophy as a major foreign policy “win”. Multiple senior Nato officials spoke of the need to build “a stronger Europe in a stronger Nato”, and repeatedly recited figures testifying to leaps in European defense spending in accordance with Trumpian demands. One senior Nato official spoke of the “simultaneity problem” — the Trump administration’s concern about a scenario in which the US military would be forced to fight multiple major conflicts at once, which he described as the reason “why Europeans are stepping up and taking more responsibility for their own defense”. Whatever their distaste for Trump’s bullying rhetoric, it was clear that Nato officials and allies are now taking the Trump administration’s words very seriously.

More from this author

The Middle East’s new power brokers

By Lily Lynch

A few weeks ahead of the summit, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth echoed Colby at the Nato defense ministerial meeting in Brussels, tying Nato 3.0 to Washington’s demands that allies raise defense spending. “That’s what defense spending commitments are all about,” he said, “transforming Nato into a real military alliance that’s focused on hard power and real deterrence, a Nato 3.0 modeled on the Nato 1.0 that won the Cold War.” During the same meeting, Hegseth gave trans-Atlantic allies an ultimatum. Going forward, he said, American Nato dues would be contingent on allies meeting their own defense spending targets. “Where other allies do not spend with urgency, our dues contributions will go down,” he warned. He also told allies to expect a review of their progress in six months. If insufficient strides had been made by then, the US would spend less on Nato. This threat contributed to a sense of elevated fear in Ankara. It wasn’t an entirely irrational one either: the Trump administration is dramatically scaling back its involvement in other multilateral institutions. In January, the United States withdrew from 31 UN entities and is currently withholding around $4 billion in mandatory UN dues.

To understand “Nato 3.0”, it’s essential to understand the alliance’s evolution. Nato’s founding was rooted in Cold War ideological and military competition with the Soviet Union. As such, Nato 1.0 was a firmly Right-wing organization, one interested above all in strengthening American dominion over Europe and confronting the Soviet threat. But it also had several other functions, among them spreading the gospel of free markets and crushing internal Left-wing subversion. The North Atlantic Treaty signed in April 1949 established the military alliance and outlined Nato “values”; the pact promised “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law”. From the very beginning, not all members lived up to the pompous rhetoric. Founding member state Portugal was then ruled by dictator Antonio Salazar, whose one-party regime Estado Novo, or New State, employed a menacing secret police and outlawed all opposition parties; the dictatorship’s “new” name was an irony, as according to Tom Gallagher, the puritanical Salazar “manifested the true reactionary’s horror of change”. 

The United States was often the alliance’s biggest proponent of working with unsavory regimes, pushing for Franco’s Spain to become a member of Nato with overwhelming support in Congress and the Senate. The US saw Francoist Spain as an ideal ally owing to its “strategic location and furiously anti-communist sentiment”. When some European member states objected to admitting Franco’s regime into the alliance, the United States signed the Pact of Madrid with Spain in 1953, furnishing the dictatorship with aid and allowing the US to build military bases on Spanish soil. French colonial Algeria was also an original part of Nato, with Article 5 extending to the colonized country where systematic torture and concentration camps were used to subdue the population. Meanwhile some former Nazis from West Germany’s supposedly “clean Wehrmacht” — the alliance shamelessly propagated the myth that Wehrmacht officers fought honorably during the Second World War — were also integrated into the pact, with some rising to Nato’s senior leadership. In the face of the Soviet threat, there could be no enemies to the Right.

Nato 2.0 covered a period we might describe as the “long Nineties” and was characterized by End-of-History hubris and excess: rapacious eastward expansion, self-aggrandizing rhetoric about liberal values, and zealous out-of-area operations. Nato’s “out-of-area” actions — operations undertaken beyond the territorial limits of member states — undermined its claim to be a “purely defensive alliance”. As “humanitarian” operations, their results ranged from mixed to disastrous. While the 1999 Nato bombing of Yugoslavia forced Serbian security forces from Kosovo, it did not bring down President Slobodan Milošević; he wouldn’t fall until a contested election several months later. Indeed, Milošević’s own Minister of Information during the bombing, Aleksandar Vučić, has been leader of Serbia in some form for 14 years, and his regime employs Serbian nationalist rhetoric barely distinguishable from that of his former boss. In 2011, Nato intervened in Libya with even more catastrophic results: though sold to the public as a “humanitarian intervention” to protect civilians, the real goal was regime change, with the removal of leader Muammar al-Gaddafi judged a strategic imperative worth many Libyan lives. In the end, a report from Harvard’s Belfer Center determined that “Nato’s action magnified the conflict’s duration about sixfold and its death toll at least sevenfold”. Nato 2.0 also included the Great War on Terror, which meant the emergence of non-state actors as a new threat; costly cross-border operations and occupations ensued. If Nato 1.0’s main purpose was containing the Soviet Union in Europe, then Nato 2.0 represented the mother of all mission creep.

The summit in Ankara was the alliance’s response to Trumpian demands for a Nato 3.0: a scaled back, “Europe-led” pact that doesn’t rely on the United States as the guarantor of Europe’s conventional defense. As such, the summit kicked off with a grandiose Defense Industry Forum, where Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte repeatedly invoked the term “defense industrial revolution”. The event was an opportunity for Turkey to hawk its indigenous defense industry wares, but it was also an opportunity for Europe. As one official from a European defense ministry wryly put it to me, the forum allowed allies to make a big show of complying with Trumpian dictates to spend more on their defense.

Just to drive the point home, President Zelensky gave a speech at the event likening the current revolution in drone technology to the invention of missiles. He described Ukraine as a reluctant defense industrial powerhouse forged in war and asserted that it should therefore be admitted to Nato. In other characteristically immoderate statements, the Defense Industry Forum was widely touted as a success. A Nato official confirmed that “at least” $50 billion in new defense deals were announced at the forum; among them were $40 billion worth of investment in counter-drone capabilities and multi-country initiatives for the continued militarization of space. The pivot to Nato 3.0 would appear to be well underway.

Suggested reading

Can Britain's military be saved?

By Edward Luttwak

Turkey is perhaps the model Nato 3.0 ally, which makes its hosting of the first summit of this new chapter richly appropriate. Though Turkey has contributed to Nato 2.0 peacekeeping missions and interventions in places like Kosovo and Bosnia, Turkish President Recep Erdoğan, like Trump, has no time for liberal internationalist pieties. Like Trump, he would like to see Nato stripped bare to its raw essentials of defense and security, ditching democracy promotion and the dissemination of “Western values”. Turkey has the second largest army in Nato and a burgeoning defense industrial base: Turkish defense and aviation exports broke records last year, exceeding $10 billion. All of this has won admiration from Trump. Throughout the summit, Trump repeatedly praised Erdoğan, calling him “really a great man”, “a great leader”, and “a strong person”. Trump’s affinity with Erdoğan suggests that what is most valued in Nato 3.0 is a capacity for deterrence and defense; democratic deficiencies are of little concern in an ally that is seen to be pulling its weight.  

Despite the notable absence of liberal rhetoric in Ankara, elements of Nato 2.0 remain for now, including the tradition of the annual summit. During the Cold War, Nato held just 10 summits. Today, it holds a wildly expensive summit every year. Last year’s one in The Hague reportedly cost about €1 million per minute, with some media reporting that it was the most expensive meeting in the alliance’s history. Preparations for this year’s summit reportedly cost €235 million. In addition to being expensive, international relations scholar Patrick Porter believes that annual summits present risks. “The curse of regular summitry…wasn’t a feature of Cold War Nato,” he tells me. “There are these relentless opportunities for trouble and mischief and misunderstanding.” It’s a critique now shared by some other allies. While Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte told journalists in Ankara that the next summit will be in Albania, he would not confirm that it would happen next year.

Whatever the similarities between Nato 3.0 and Nato 1.0, there are also a few striking differences. Nato once justified itself with the Cold War platitudes of prosperity and liberty. This was propaganda to be sure, but it was still integral to winning an ideological battle that once divided the world. Now, the rhetoric of prosperity and freedom has been replaced with the cold, uninspiring promise of “security” — a nebulous, constantly expanding concept emblematic of an ideology that has lost the ability to excite or be believed, and must now rely on coercion, censorship and repression to get its way. While Nato holds a lavish summit each year and member states ramp up spending for a “defense industrial revolution”, people living in allied countries are being told they must endure brutal cuts to health care, education, and social welfare to pay for it all. Alliance boosters like to boast that Nato “protects one billion people”. If it does, it does so at a steep cost.

Their reasoning was that Turkey, which has the second largest standing army in Nato, was not to be trifled with. More to the point, they saw the attacks as a category error. Turkey was just not the enemy. Ankara’s official self-image is of a natural mediator, a regional heavyweight whose cultural understanding of its neighborhood is deeply rooted in a 600-year Ottoman past. It had loudly denounced the US-Israeli strikes while working its back channels to bring them to a halt. In other words, the missiles targeted Turkish self-esteem. For all its condemnation of US action, and despite saber-rattling at Israel, Turkey was being lumped into the imperial camp it had so loudly refused to join. It was a cruel blow that when talks between the Trump administration and the mullahs in Tehran finally took place, they happened in Islamabad and not Istanbul.

Even before the fog of this conflict lifts, Turkey, like countries elsewhere, is busy calculating who comes out on top. The cui bono matrix is not difficult to run. By most calculations, as Iran goes down, Turkey goes up. Of course, the current high price of oil is a spanner in Turkey’s disinflation policy, and risks undoing three years of sacrifice that dragged inflation down from a high of 75% per annum to (a still staggering) 32%. Yet as with the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, a weakened Iran increases Turkey’s strategic and commercial clout. In the long term, it reinforces Turkey’s effort to be an energy and transport hub, and allows it to compete with Dubai as the regional commercial center. That’s shadowed by opportunities further afield: just last week, Turkey’s foreign minister signed a “strategic partnership” on trade and security with Britain.

Suggested reading

Erdoğan's new world order

By Lily Lynch

As that last deal implies, all this is also good for the Turkish defense industries — not just drones but warships and even fighter jets. Israel views this with some alarm, and Benjamin Netanyahu has warned against an “emerging radical Sunni axis” in which Turkey is, presumably, the crucial pivot. In truth, the danger of a confrontation between a US ally and a fully paid-up member of Nato is slim. Ankara’s greater fear is that a badly wounded and unstable Iran will be a running sore even greater than the Syrian civil war — prompting a refugee crisis along a common 534-kilometer border, or else fueling Kurdish irredentism.

Thumbing back to before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Turkey may have been suspicious of the Shah’s ambitions to turn Iran into a dominant Middle Eastern power, but relations were largely cooperative. While there was no direct causal link, it is not fanciful to think that the rise of a Shiite theocratic regime in Tehran gave confidence to the Sunni religious Right in Turkey, which was gathering strength in those years. That Turkey was in danger of becoming “another Iran” was the newspaper cliché of the day. It is now ironic to think that a preferred solution for the pious government ruling in Ankara would be a stable but weakened secular regime in Iran. The worst option would be for Iran to emerge from the current conflict as master of the Strait of Hormuz, emboldened and unbowed.

Whatever the outcome, the people of Iran may well conclude that they are classic victims of “the curse of oil”, a rueful malediction preventing nations from converting natural resources into the well-being of their citizens. The Turkish people might conclude that they suffer from a different sort of hex: “strategic significance”. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been at the helm of his country for well over two decades, pioneering the art of transactional international relations while Donald Trump was chasing starlets and Viktor Orbán was still Brussels’ idea of a model democrat. His governments have managed to leverage geography and regional importance to insulate Turkey from external pressures and democratic accountability at home. The question now is whether the war will finally strip away that insulation, exposing Ankara to pressures it has long managed to arbitrage. The answer lies in understanding how profoundly Turkey has changed under Erdoğan’s rule — and whether that change can still work in his favor.

It might be a stretch to say that Turkey underwent a form of regime change in the 2002 elections that brought Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) to power. But it is fair to say that those elections obliterated a whole generation of politicians. No party in the previous parliament managed to gain a single seat. In a result reminiscent of Hungary under Orbán, and under a system that rewards the largest party, the AKP won two-thirds of MPs with barely a third of the popular vote. Erdoğan, a former mayor of Istanbul, was still a banned politician at the time, having served a brief prison sentence for “exploiting religion to political ends” by reciting a nationalist poem at a political rally — a blatant form of judicial casuistry which he was later to apply to his own political rivals.

Erdoğan’s political instincts and impassioned rhetoric peppered with references to Islam spoke to the concerns of first- and second-generation urban migrants. His party portrayed a greater acceptance of religion in public life as part of a wider struggle to make Turkey more democratic. Until recently, an aggressively secular Turkish military was a controlling presence in political life. Still, it is important to remember that what brought the AKP to power was not so much a tide of Islamic feeling as an economic crisis. A decade averaging 70% inflation was followed in 2001 by the collapse of the Turkish lira.

Today, it is again inflation, much more than Iranian Kheibar Shekan missiles, that most threatens the Erdoğan government. The parallel with Orbán is inexact — the GDP of Istanbul alone is roughly 1.5 times larger than all of Hungary. Yet like the jobless Hungarian premier, Erdoğan faces the predicament of a populist leader who now strains to be popular. And, like autocrats everywhere, Turkey’s leader has cultivated a patronage network and a praetorian guard of cronies who will do anything to keep their champion in power. The result is an increasingly disillusioned society that watches its country drop like a stone in international indices of democratic rights and press freedoms. A common reckoning is that 90% of Turkish media is under direct government control. But here’s the rub. The AKP still suffered its worst defeat since coming to power in the 2024 municipal elections, not just failing in the big cities but losing conservative heartland strongholds such as Bursa, Kütahya and Adıyaman.

Suggested reading

Why Turkey’s Kurds are tired of fighting

By Matt Broomfield

A year after Ekrem İmamoğlu — the popular Istanbul mayor widely seen as the most credible presidential challenger for the 2028 elections — won a second term by 10 percentage points in 2024, the government moved to arrest him on corruption charges. The tactic was familiar: Selahattin Demirtaş, the charismatic leader of the pro-Kurdish party, has spent years in prison despite the European Court of Human Rights repeatedly ruling his detention was politically motivated. The court issued a similar ruling for the philanthropist Osman Kavala, imprisoned since 2017. Kavala’s offense was to support civil society activism, his aggravated life sentence now a warning pour décourager les autres, or in this case other businesspeople tempted to support a dissident cause.

As the constitution stands, Erdoğan is not eligible for another presidential term, but few doubt he will overcome that obstacle. And though current polls show him unable to beat a CHP opponent, his current strategy is to use the courts to run that party into the ground. Mayor after CHP mayor is now being arrested, while the party leadership may be legally disbanded. Turkey, once a viable candidate for EU membership, has long ceased to be the poster child for how democracy can flourish in a Muslim-majority society.

The Antalya Diplomacy Forum, Turkey’s annual showcase conference held earlier this month, offered a revealing snapshot of where Erdoğan’s transactional model now stands. Dozens of heads of state attended. American and Iranian officials circled the same rooms without meeting. The mood was less about solving the Hormuz crisis than recalibrating for a world in which Washington is, to put it mildly, unpredictable. In such a world, Erdoğan’s strongman politics finds a ready audience. Tom Barrack, the US ambassador to Ankara, was explicit about the new dispensation at the public forum. “This part of the world,” he said, “respects only one thing: power. And if you don’t reflect power, if you reflect weakness, you are on your heels.” To hammer his point home, Barrack even lauded Erdoğan by name.

But as the price of food rises, as the middle classes try to send their children abroad, and as elected leaders go to jail, Turkish citizens may not be quite so sanguine about the cost to their civil liberties. Turkey pundits used to describe the country’s fault lines as lying between military and democratic politics, between secular and pious — but these binaries may have been more symbiotic than they appeared. Think of the Victorian optical toy, the thaumatrope: a bird painted on one side, a cage on the other. Spin the disc fast enough and the bird appears inside the cage. The question, as Turkey navigates the turbulence of its neighborhood’s most dangerous war in a generation, is whether the disc is finally slowing down — and whether, when it does, the bird will still be there.

Erdoğan strongly supported the Free Syrian Army in its endeavours to “protect and liberate Syria and Syrians from the tyranny of the Assad regime”. In 2012, when prime minister, he expressed his desire to embrace his rebelling Islamist brothers in Damascus in service of his “neo-Ottomanist” vision, and “inshallah, to pray in front of Saladin Mausoleum and do namaz in the Umayyad Mosque”. He was clearly acting in self-interest. An adviser to Erdoğan noted in 2018 how, thanks to Turkey’s involvement, “Turkish contractors will get a bigger share of the pie” in Syria. But the Left, for its part, built a pro-Assad case built on anti-immigrant, anti-Arab and “anti-imperialist” sentiment.

The Turkish Left’s love for Assad is rooted in their respect for Ba’athism, the Arab nationalist ideology that promoted national unity through the leadership of a socialist revolutionary state. It had identified Syria’s Ba’athism as a sister movement to Ataturk’s Kemalism, the founding ideology of the nation: with a similar holy trinity of nationalism, socialism and secularism. Like its Syrian counterparts, Turkish Leftist movements since the 20th century have adopted an anti-imperialist posture, violently defended modernisation, while considering “foreigners” dangerous agents of dark outside powers. Kemalists claimed that the only way to unify the country was by imposing militant secularism through a repressive state apparatus and by banning all Islamic lodges and public expressions of religion. Anyone talking about ethnic rights and political freedoms or daring dissent was branded an imperialist stooge.

Suggested reading

Syria has spooked MBS

By Malise Ruthven

For these strands of the Left, anti-regime activities in Syria were an imperialist ploy. After the rebels moved their command centre from Turkey to Damascus in 2012, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times claimed that the CIA and US special operations units were training Syrian rebels in Turkey and Jordan, months before Barack Obama had approved sending arms. These reports sufficed to convince the Turkish Left that the Syrian suffering was manufactured in Western capitals and disseminated by the Western press to convince the world to intervene in the civil war. Instead of sharing the pain of those who suffered unspeakable tortures at Sednaya Prison — the “Human Slaughterhouse” — they tried to invalidate and belittle their experience. Instead of showing empathy, they came up with various conspiracy theories about how Turkish secularism would take a hit if those tortured by the Syrian regime could achieve some justice in Damascus.

This mindset expressed itself in various ways. Take the Orhan Pamuk affair. In 2012, a year into the civil war, the French daily Libération published a letter addressed to Assad and signed by various international writers including Pamuk, Turkey’s Nobel Laureate in literature. They demanded Assad’s resignation, warning him that “other than resignation, there will be just one road that remains and that will be a death similar to what happened to Saddam or Gaddafi. Or life imprisonment in a cell at the Hague.”

This created a furore in Turkey. SOL, the publication of the Turkish Communist Party, depicted Pamuk wielding a shotgun on their front page. “You’re a fascist,” read the accompanying headline. Elsewhere, Ulusal Kanal, the television broadcaster of the Kemalist Patriotic Party, called the intellectuals’ letter “an open threat” and described Pamuk as “an intellectual loser… After the Young Turk revolution, his new target is Syria.” According to Ulusal Kanal, Pamuk “had collaborated with the imperialists and remained under the wings of the US”.

Increasingly, the secular Turkish opposition to Erdoğan and his Islamist allies took the form of anti-immigration and anti-Syrian sentiment. A decade into the Civil War, Turkey was hosting 3.6 million Syrian refugees: the highest number in the world. And by 2021, anti-Syrian riots rocked Turkey, with activist groups torching Syrian houses and shops in Ankara. Then, this summer, more than 470 people were arrested for attacking shops and smashing cars in Kayseri. Ugly, racist questions became increasingly unmuted: who were those Syrians filling up our streets anyway? Weren’t they paid-up voters of the Islamist government? Weren’t they inflicting violence on Turkish women on the streets? Weren’t they the sole cause of Turkey’s recent demise?

And immigration played a decisive role in the general elections last year. Erdoğan seemed to be on his way out in 2023: his one-party regime had rattled millions with its ceaseless nepotism, while his unorthodox economic policies, including lowering interest rates as an antidote to inflation led the Turkish lira to a free fall. Turkey was ready to turn the page from his ilk.

But Erdoğan had an advantage. As an Islamist, he could claim that his loyalties were clear and accuse the opposition of flip-flopping when it came to issues like the Syrian refugees. He told his voters that while the secularists were promising to understand the pious now, it was nothing more than a calculated electioneering strategy. The Left’s hatred against immigrants was proof that they were no humanists, but opportunists. The opposition parties suffered from the same selfishness; the alternative to Islamist rule was no better, so people should elect the autocrat they already knew.

Although Turkey’s leading opposition party promised change, purporting to have become a democratic party and extending a hand to Turkish Kurds and Armenians, the Leftist CHP reverted to its ugly anti-immigrant rhetoric days before the second round. The party allied with far-Right firebrand Ümit Özdağ, and covered thousands of billboards with a pledge to deport “15 million immigrants”. Had they been elected to office, the Turkish Left would have forcefully sent back all immigrants from Turkey to Syria by May 2024.

Erdoğan wanted the best of both worlds: incorporating the rhetoric of “anti-imperialist” Third Worldism, demonising “foreign intervention” and “internal enemies” in the pay of foreign powers, while sustaining Turkey’s involvement in Syria and its support for Syrian dissidents. But the fall of Assad is not all good news for Turkey’s president. It removes a rhetorical device from his lexicon — no longer can he rule out domestic secular opponents by comparing them to Assad and his allies such as Egypt’s Sisi. And the Left can regain popularity without drawing from Erdoğan’s playbook. Take Istanbul’s Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu. Having strayed from anti-immigrant rhetoric, İmamoğlu has shown how a social democrat politician doesn’t need far-Right ideas to retain popularity. He was reelected earlier this year, thwarting Erdoğan’s preferred candidate. He will likely run for president in 2028.

Suggested reading

Will Erdoğan crush the Syrian Kurds?

By Matt Broomfield

In the meantime, it looks as if Turkey’s Syrian immigrants will return. Last week, BBC’s Turkish service reported how “almost all Syrians say their country is safe to return now” and how Turkey’s Syrians, “women, men, young and old, say in unison: ‘It’s now time for us to go back.’” Their departure will mean a culturally poorer and ethnically more homogenous Turkey.

Will the self-fashioned Turkish “communists” and Kemalists, whose hateful chatter about imperialist designs and regressive Arabs is now passé, feel ashamed about the fall of the Assad regime? Will they feel guilty about the bodies of dissidents (reportedly deported from European countries and Turkey) found at Sednaya Prison? More likely, they’ll pour their resentments on other targets: the heinous liberal intelligentsia or any other group they believe they can easily scapegoat without consequences.

And so whenever foreign journalists and scholar friends ask me how Erdoğan remains this popular in Turkey despite his autocratic rule and the accompanying financial meltdown, I remind them of what Turkey’s public perceives as his alternative. For so long, the tragic fate of Turkey’s secular resistance was to act heartless in the face of tragedy just beyond Turkey’s borders. From now on, if they want to convince people that they act ethically and not out of self-interest, they must do better.

Watching at home, transfixed to the television is my stepmother. One of Greece’s leading lawyers, she is not a woman who has much free time, or who indulges in frivolities. She is captivated.

It’s a Turkish soap — a dizi. If there is one country that has little time for Turkey and its exports, it’s Greece. But these shows, for all their absurdity and melodrama — or perhaps because of it — are a big draw. And Greece is not alone.

From the Mediterranean to the eastern bloc to Central Asia, Turkish soap operas are huge. In a 2011 survey, 78% of respondents across the Arab world reported having watched one. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve turned on a hotel TV, anywhere in the world, only to be assaulted by a barrage of emoting Turks with big hair.

Dizis (the Turkish hate calling them “soaps”) are unique: epic plotlines with seven minutes of adverts per 20 minutes of screentime, characterised by natural settings, a slow narrative pace, portentous music, and scripts dashed off week after week.

Suggested reading

Turkey is the year's most important election

By Chris Morris

They are also big business. Between 2020 and 2022, global demand grew by 44%. Loved across Central and Eastern Europe, including Serbia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Romania, Poland and Hungary, they also have huge followings in Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, Japan and Vietnam. Turkey is now the world’s second largest exporter of TV, after the United States, with more than 650 million viewers in more than 140 countries.

And if you want impact, how’s this: in 2008, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia issued a Fatwa against channels that broadcast Noor, a dizi that centres on the lives of a husband and wife seeking to “reconcile the conflicting pressures of traditional and modern worlds”. As part of a wider attack on “depraved” TV moguls, he declared, instructively, that these sorts of programmes were a “deliberate attempt to impose an imported culture on Arab societies”.

Here is where these soaps get (for me, at any rate) interesting. They aren’t Citizen Kane, but they might well be Forrest Gump — that sweet rendering of the American Dream — which is vastly preferable if you’re interested in promulgating an idealised idea of your own society.

We forget the degree to which the global view of the United States has been and remains filtered through Hollywood — especially for the billions around the world who consume its product but will never visit the place. America may underpin the Bretton Woods order that it founded in the aftermath of the Second World War, but in much of the global popular imagination, it exists only in its movies, which project US culture to all corners of the world.

Suggested reading

Will Erdoğan survive Turkey's earthquake?

By Christopher de Bellaigue

Turkey does not have the pull of the American hegemon so it must draw on other things. First is ethnicity. In central Asia, countries such as Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan have large Turkic populations: “Turkey is looked at here like a big brother,” one local told me. Then there is history. “And don’t forget,” he continued, “it founded an empire. People are proud of that. In this region, there’s a lot of goodwill toward the Turks, who are seen as a people like us who did really well. Turkey maintains this influence through its soaps, many of which are based on historical themes.”

He’s not wrong. One of the country’s biggest exports is the dizi Muhteşem Yüzyıl (Magnificent Century), which focuses on the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent during the glory days of the Ottoman Empire. In 2012, Reuters reported that Magnificent Century was watched by 200 million people in 52 countries.

Then there is the question of the language. Across the former Soviet Union, where over the past century Russian became the lingua franca at the expense of the various indigenous languages, the various peoples there are fighting what might be described as a postcolonial linguistic fightback against Moscow’s cultural imperialism. The language wars are raging.

In Azerbaijan, for example, another former Soviet state, Turkish is now threatening Russian’s former dominance. “Azerbaijani is a Turkic language,” one TV exec explained to me, “and Azerbaijanis learn it through soap operas. Terrestrial TV is in Azerbaijani; satellite carries Russian and Turkish content, the latter of which is far more influential and popular because of its soaps.” The dizi has become, in many parts of the world, the vessel through which Turkish culture and language is transmitted to local populations. As a result, newborns across the Balkans are being named after the leading characters in 1001 Nights — a dizi set in modern-day Istanbul.

More from this author

Erdogan's Turkey won't save Ukraine

By David Patrikarakos

Perhaps their popularity shouldn’t come as such a surprise. Like all soaps, they deal with universal social issues, such as love across class divides, children born out of marriage and gender inequality. But their strength for their vast Muslim audiences is that they remain avowedly Islamic, albeit in a very Turkish way.

Despite President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s increasing Islamisation of society, Turkey remains pretty liberal compared to many other Arab and Middle Eastern countries. Storylines in Western shows often involve alcohol and sex, both of which are frowned upon in the Middle East. While Dizis tackle the subjects that everyone wants to watch — romantic relationships, jealousy, separations, betrayal and revenge — they do so without the sex, drugs and booze. Family-friendly viewing across the continents. Magic.

If the definition of soft power is the ability to co-opt rather than coerce, and is about shaping the preferences of others through appeal and attraction, then the dizis fit this model almost perfectly. As the American academic and diplomat Joseph Nye said about soft power: “The best propaganda is not propaganda.” He’s right. Who needs Goebbels when you’ve got Aşk-ı Memnu (Forbidden Love), a 79-part serial based on a classic romantic novel starring the immaculately coiffured heartthrob, Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ?

The Turks of course know this. Egemen Bağış, the former Minister of European Affairs, has declared that dizis are the “perfect tool for us to reflect Turkey’s image and Turkish lifestyle… Turkish series have become one of the most effective means of our soft power”. And it’s not just politicians who get it. İbrahim Şahin, Director General of Radio-Television of Turkey (TRT), articulated the central point: the model is not financial. “Maybe Turkey does not generate a high income from the series. But there is no price to transfer our culture and our social structures in the form of soft power abroad through the series.” Quite a statement from a media executive.

More from this author

The Wagner Files

By David Patrikarakos

It’s an understanding that goes all the way to the top. The importance of dizis is not lost on a politician as smart as Erdoğan, who is seeking re-election this weekend. Some commentators have even argued that they are key to Erdoğan’s efforts to rally his supporters, a “soft-power tool to make his policies more desirable, instead of direct imposition and propaganda”.

This can, however, be a double-edged sword. In the run up to the elections, a scandal has arisen around the splendidly-named dizi “Cranberry Sherbet” in which the devout woman Nursema, after being married off to an abusive husband by her conservative family, got thrown out of a window by him after she resisted his attempts to rape her.

The storyline has highlighted the issue of domestic violence, which has become a contentious issue in Turkey; that it centres on the type of religious female who voted Erdoğan into power is problematic for the government so close to the elections.

Erdoğan, though, always tried to exploit the popularity of the dizis and in this sense, they articulate a final, perhaps counterintuitive truism about soft power: its effects are almost always more potent at home than abroad. Earlier this year, Erdoğan declared that much could be learnt from the historical drama The Last Emperor, set during the reign of the 34th Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamit. For a man who is increasingly resembling a modern-day Sultan, it might be useful to have an electorate that includes large swathes of voters hooked on tales of a glorious strongman from the past.

When British Remainers claim to “believe in Europe” — most of them literally don’t know what they’re talking about. As one travels eastward from the pointy western end of the continent, Europe just keeps widening out. It contains entire nations and peoples that most of us haven’t even heard of. How about Kalmykia — Europe’s only Buddhist state? Or the ginger-headed Udmurts? Or the Alans of South Ossetia? 

Faraway countries of which we know little? Evidently. But Europe beyond the borders of the EU is still out there — and it is currently reminding us of its existence.  

Most urgently, there is the crisis on the border between Poland and Belarus. The Belarusian government has discovered that migration from the Middle East and elsewhere can be used as a weapon against the EU. Migrants are being flown to Belarus, bused to the Polish border and then pushed across the frontier. The Polish authorities are pushing back, trapping thousands of people in the no-man’s-land between the two states. As temperatures drop, we’re coming closer to a full-blown humanitarian crisis — and perhaps to armed conflict. A regime capable of using people as weapons is also capable of giving weapons to people. 

Meanwhile, a thousand kilometres to the south another crisis is brewing. The Dayton Agreement that brought peace to Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995 is breaking down. This fragile state is divided into two main parts — Republika Srpska (predominantly populated by ethnic Serbs) and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in which ethnic Bosniaks and Croats are the biggest groups. 

It was never the most robust of arrangements, but now the Bosnian Serb leader, Milorad Dodik, is making moves towards independence for Republika Srpska. Most ominously, he wants to divvy up the Bosnian armed forces. What could possibly go wrong?

Unlike in the Nineties, this is happening right on the EU’s border. Bosnia is roughly triangular in shape and is surrounded on two of its three sides by Croatia, which is now an EU member. If the Bosnian state collapses, then that could bring the EU into conflict with Serbia and Russia — both of which support the Bosnian Serbs. And if that wasn’t enough, Turkey could be dragged in too — as the patron of the predominantly Muslim Bosniaks. 

Turkey is itself a potential source of instability for Europe. President Erdogan has long been a thorn in the EU’s side, but at least he was willing to do a deal on curbing the flow of illegal migrants from the Middle East (in return for money). However, he’s reported to be in poor health — and his party’s grip on power is slipping. Polls show that the opposition is in with a chance of winning the next general election. Whether they’ll be allowed to win is anyone’s guess. But one way or another, disruption is coming — and that could mean an end to the immigration deal. 

Could the European Union cope with multiple crises on its borders? No, because it just doesn’t have the capacity. You only have to look at Ursula von der Leyen’s statement on the Belarus border crisis. She condemns the actions of the Belarusian authorities — describing them as a “hybrid attack”; but she only offers unspecified “support” to the Polish, Lithuanian and Latvian governments. Significantly, there’s no mention of the only EU agency capable of acting in this matter — which is Frontex — the European Border and Coast Guard Agency. Even though Frontex is headquartered in Warsaw, the Polish government has declined the agency’s help. Clearly, the Poles have little confidence in the EU’s approach to border control.

In Bosnia, it’s the US keeping a lid on the situation. The EU has been of scant use — it couldn’t even stop the circulation of a diplomatic note that proposed a three-way partition of Bosnia (between Serbia, Croatia and a rump state for the Bosniaks). The Americans have rejected this dangerous idea, but what happens if they lose patience with policing Europe and tell the Europeans to sort themselves out? 

As for Turkey, any agreement with the EU depends on the ongoing cooperation of the Turks — or, when that’s not enough, turning a blind-eye to the alleged strong-arm tactics of the Greek and Bulgarian authorities.

What all of these crises reveal is the essential powerlessness of the European Union. We’ve been told ad nauseam that the EU is the producer of peace in Europe. The truth, however, is that the EU is the product of it. 

A political entity that lacks an army, a police force or the legitimacy conferred by national sovereignty, cannot survive without an international order created by others. If this order is compromised — even to a limited extent — then things start falling apart. Just look at the refugee crisis of 2014 and 2015, which contributed to Brexit, the election of a populist government in Italy and the tightening grip of the Hungarian leader, Viktor Orbán.

What would a deeper, longer crisis do to the EU? A number of possibilities present themselves, none of them good. The least worst option is that America, through NATO, rides to the rescue; in which case the western pecking order is settled for years to come. Alternatively, Brussels does a deal with Moscow — and essentially pays Danegeld to the Russians from hereon out. 

Or maybe the EU could start manning-up — either by creating an actual European Army or expanding Frontex into a de facto military. However, that creates a problem of democratic accountability. Von der Leyen as Commander-in-Chief? I hardly think so. A more likely scenario is more of what we’re seeing already — which is the EU relying on its eastern member states to hold the line. That means allowing them (indeed, paying them) to do things their way — which won’t be pretty. As Aris Roussinos argues, expect to see more barbed wire, more walls, more tear gas and worse.

We should certainly expect Belarus — with Russia in the background — to keep up the pressure. If the line breaks, then illegal migrants will pour into Europe fuelling a renewed populist backlash. Don’t forget there’s a Presidential election in France next year and that candidates of the far Right are in second and third place. 

Of course, the line may hold. But what would be the price of that? I’m reminded of the fate of the Roman Empire. Long before the western half of the empire fell and Rome was sacked, the institutions that had defined the state were reduced to hollow shells. That’s because all the real power had leaked away to the legions on the troubled frontier. 

The decisions that actually mattered weren’t made in the Senate or anywhere else in Rome, but in the forts and watch towers along the Danube and the Rhine. In the Crisis of the Third Century, marked by multiple invasions and rebellions, the Roman establishment was usurped by a series of “barracks emperors” — leaders of men who owed their position to soldiery not aristocracy. 

Obviously, the EU is not the Roman Empire — but it is an empire of sorts. And like all empires it has to choose a frontier and defend it. 

The stability of the EU currently depends on the sort of politician who can agree a budget proposal in a committee meeting or strike a backroom deal over dinner in a Brussels restaurant. It’s a dull, bureaucratic and sometimes corrupt culture of government. If, however, the EU comes to depend on the sort of person who can repel a column of cold and hungry migrants, then we’ll look back on the present era with fondness.

After years of back and forth negotiations, the Greek Ministry of Defence finally settled on France over the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and the United States as the provider of the Hellenic Navy’s new frigates. It’s a vital upgrade given the deterioration of both the Mediterranean’s security environment and of Greek naval capacity following more than a decade of austerity. The FDI frigates chosen pack a powerful punch, tilting the scales back in Greece’s favour in its increasingly heated contest of primacy in the Aegean with Erdogan’s Turkey.

To accompany the new frigates, there is a strong likelihood of Greece also buying a number of Gowind-class corvettes from France as part of its rapid naval build-up. Coupled with Greece’s recent purchase of 24 Rafale fighter jets, France has emerged as the country’s most significant supplier of arms, at a time when the likelihood of open conflict with Turkey is greater than it has been in decades.

Yet as with Aukus, the true significance of the deal lies less in the hardware purchased, than in the alliance-building underpinning it. The “Strategic Partnership for Cooperation in Defence and Security” agreement unveiled in Paris contains a mutual defence assistance clause in the event that either country is attacked anywhere on its territory, using “all the means at their disposal, including, if needed, armed violence,” to fend off the aggressor.

In doing so, Macron stated, “we commit ourselves to protect [Greece] in the event of intrusion, attack or aggression. This is my idea of friendship and of the European independence and European territorial unity that we value,” and thus a direct French promise to defend Greece from an attack by its purported Nato ally Turkey. When the two countries came to the brink of war last year, it was France, alone among all EU and Nato countries, that supported Greece, both diplomatically and through its deployment of French warships and fighter jets to the eastern Mediterranean. Under Macron, France has become, simply, Greece’s strategic patron, an informal relationship the new agreement has now formalised.

As Macron stated at the signing ceremony, “Europeans must get over their naivety. When we’re under pressure from powers that are sometimes becoming harsher, to react and show that we too have the power and capacity to defend ourselves doesn’t mean giving in to escalation, it merely means ensuring we’re respected… we must, as Europeans, play our part in our own protection.”

For his part, Greece’s premier Kyriakos Mitsotakis observed that with this “very strong alliance, which essentially goes beyond each other’s obligations within the European Union and NATO”, France and Greece are “taking the first step towards a European strategic autonomy”. This is, in other words, the first tentative realisation of that bugbear of the perennially supine German security establishment, as well as of central and eastern European EU powers fearful of losing the American defence umbrella.

Yet significantly, Macron took great pains to change the frame of the tiresome strategic autonomy debate, emphasising that it is not a question of rejecting American military hegemony, but rather of responding to America’s strategic shift to the Pacific, which will mean a diminished involvement in European affairs. As he observed, “for just over 10 years now, the United States of America has been focusing a lot on itself and has strategic interests that are being redirected towards China and the Pacific”, and “it would also be naïve of us – or rather, we’d be making a terrible mistake – if we didn’t seek to learn lessons from it and act accordingly. And so it’s with the same pragmatism, the same clear-sightedness about our independence, that we must, as Europeans, play our part in our own protection.”

Instead of spurning the US defence umbrella, Macron stresses that strategic autonomy is not a replacement for Nato, but the enhancement of its European pole through self-sufficiency. By framing Europe’s strategic autonomy as a form of burden-sharing, allowing the United States to concentrate its attention and forces on the part of the world most important to its survival as global hegemon, Macron has, in effect, called Germany’s bluff. After all, the insistence with which Germany stresses the existential importance of the NATO alliance is matched only by its commitment to shirking any serious attempt at fielding a militarily capable force of their own within it, a long-standing complaint of American administrations.

But the time for German free-riding has passed. With the Americans girding up for an air and naval contest in the Pacific, and their appetite for military interventions in the Islamic world blunted by two decades of failure, Macron has seized the chance for Europe to take the dominant role in providing the continent’s security against its troubled near abroad.

More from this author

How liberals made the British Empire

By Aris Roussinos

What is perhaps most noteworthy is that the agreement seems to have taken place with Biden’s blessing. While Northern European analysts tend not to bother themselves overmuch with tracking developments in Greece, it is significant that Mitsotakis had preceded the ceremony with a series of warm assurances to the United States that the country remains a “strong and reliable ally” within the Nato framework, and that “since 1952, Nato has been at the heart of Greece’s security and defence architecture.”

At the Athens meeting of Nato defence chiefs which immediately preceded the announcement, the Greek Chief of General Staff Konstantinos Floros pledged that Greece will honour all its commitments and obligations, and remain “a pillar of stability in the eastern Mediterranean with respect for international law, good neighbourly relations and cooperation”.

The unspoken contrast is of course with Nato’s problem child, Turkey, a constant source of security crises and aggressive interventions across the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, and already sanctioned by the United States for its purchase of Russian S-400 anti-aircraft missiles. Trump’s warm personal relationship with Erdogan — the origins of which are a matter of speculation — has been replaced by an atmosphere of chilly froideur on the American side, with no realistic prospect of improvement.

Indeed, just as the French and Greeks were inking their agreement, Turkey’s erratic strongman Erdogan was meeting Putin in Sochi, suggesting that he would buy even more S-400s, and pledging further defence cooperation with Russia in space, and in the joint development of warships, jet engines and submarines.

As the US defence relationship with Turkey becomes ever more strained, Greece, supported by the strong efforts of the American ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, has sought to supplant Turkey as America’s chosen partner in the region. Starting with the joint air and naval base in Crete’s Souda Bay — a strategically important deepwater harbour Churchill wanted Britain to possess as an “amphibian citadel” in World War Two — Greece has given the US basing rights across Thessaly in central Greece and usage of the port of Alexandroupoli in Thrace, an important logistics asset for any future operation in the Balkans — or indeed, as Turkish analysts relentlessly sound the alarm, in Turkey.

More from this author

The walls are going up across Europe

By Aris Roussinos

While Erdogan’s national security advisor Mesut Hakkı Caşın is doing the rounds of Turkish cable news networks threatening to invade Greece to throw the Americans out of Thrace and attack American troops in Syria, the Greeks are quietly soaking up American military largesse in the form of helicopters, upgraded fighter jets, joint training and equipment for Greek special forces and airborne units. Furthermore, the United States is offering strong background encouragement for Greece’s growing web of military and diplomatic alliances with the Middle Eastern powers Egypt, the UAE, Israel and Saudi Arabia, all American partners, and all united by their shared antipathy to Erdogan.

Given the strategic centrality to Greece of its deepening defence relationship with the US, it is simply impossible to imagine that Mitsotakis did not ask and receive the Biden administration’s blessing for the pact with France, which indicates America’s newfound acceptance of a European drift towards strategic autonomy. Indeed, the State Department’s only comment on the pact to Greek media was to note that “the US and Greece enjoy a robust defense relationship rooted in our shared values”, and to stress that “we strongly support Greece’s role in creating stability in the region and look forward to continuing to work closely with Greece to advance our shared goals for peace and prosperity in the region including through our robust relationship with the Hellenic Navy”.

Over the course of a few days, then, European strategic autonomy under Macron’s leadership has gone from being a source of existential anguish and circular debate among German thinktankers and derision among British analysts, to a matter of fact in the Eastern Mediterranean. By framing it as a means to strengthen Nato and to grant the United States cover to refocus itself on the Pacific, Macron has won Biden’s tacit blessing, outflanking his European critics.

Ahead of US Secretary of State Blinken’s trip to Paris this week, the State Department has already emphasised that it “will be looking at transatlantic security, and European security, and ways that we can support France’s efforts to strengthen European security and defense capacity,” as long as it is “in conformity with NATO,” stressing that “it is very much in our interest and Europe’s interest for those capacities to be strengthened. And having a more effective, capable European alliance is very much in our interest as well.”

The Biden administration has, therefore, essentially outsourced the role of containing Erdogan in the Eastern Mediterranean and generally upholding Europe’s security in the wider region to France. It is, from an American perspective, the European equivalent of AUKUS, and not its antithesis, formalising a small core of capable countries willing to uphold security in regions important to their strategic vision, and sidelining the rest.

Suggested reading

Why the French are revolting

By Ed West

Indeed, we can interpret the Franco-Greek pact as a form of sub-Nato alliance, just like the new defence cooperation agreement between Sweden, Denmark and Norway, which may become the model for the organisation’s near future. To reassure Poland and the Baltic states, no doubt in future a similar agreement will provide them with an equivalent alliance to lessen their fears of Russian encroachment. Indeed, this may become a useful future role for Britain, if and when the Army, weakened by decades of underinvestment and mismanaged defence procurement, is capable of fielding a significant armoured force again.

The fact is, as the French analyst Benjamin Haddad noted recently, “the quicker we acknowledge something structural is changing in transatlantic relations, the better we can transform them in a way that serves the interests and security of both sides”. Europe isn’t pushing the Americans out; instead the Americans are disengaging of their own volition, keenly aware, as Haddad notes with an eye on Germany, that “pro-American sentiment can also conveniently be used to avoid increasing defence spending”.

The current Nato framework hobbles Europe’s military capacity rather than advancing it, and Haddad is correct in claiming that “European autonomy is not competing with the alliance”, but instead “could save the transatlantic relationship.” For now, both Macron and Biden win from the new arrangement; the formal assertions of continued fealty to Washington remain true, even as they set the scene for Nato’s obsolescence. Only the coming decades will tell whether or not history will assess the pact, as Macron claims, as “a contribution to Europe’s independence, to the strengthening of Europe’s sovereignty” in what is already becoming a post-Nato world.

Abuse was at its worse when I opened Germany’s first liberal mosque, the Ibn Rushd-Goethe Mosque, in 2017. I wanted people to be able to worship in a place that advocates an interpretation of Islam which reflects the values of the Western society in which I live. I was Germany’s first female head and preacher of a mosque — it was a historic moment for the state and for me personally. The Ibn Rushd-Goethe is a holy place where women and men can pray and preach together, where the veiling of the whole face (Niqab) is forbidden and where the Koran is interpreted through a contemporary lens.

The reaction we got was strong.

A fatwa was issued by the Egyptian Fatwa Council. Turkey’s main religious authority, Diyanet (directly run by the presidency), denounced the mosque as “depraving and ruining religion”. It was an attempt to deprive Germany’s Muslim population, including four million people of Turkish origin, of the right to freely exercise their religion and freedom of expression.

During our opening ceremony, a Turkish news station attempted to stage footage of the Quran being dishonoured. Turkey’s secret services visited the mosque repeatedly; I was attacked directly from Ankara and our supporters challenged. Diyanet denounced us as terrorists and supporters of Fethullah Gülen, a preacher who is a sworn enemy of President Erdogan. This message suited the narrative being pushed by Erdogan’s party, AKP, directly to the Turkish community in Germany: that we are a politically motivated, inherently unIslamic movement.

Suggested reading

The age-old tension between Islam and France

By Tom Holland

But that couldn’t be further from the truth. I am simply trying to enable ordinary Muslims to follow their faith. Many are joining me; my mosque attracts several hundred visitors a month. I have given speeches to, and led talks for, liberal Muslims and defenders of freedom of speech across the world. Every day, I am inundated with requests for guidance from fellow travellers looking for the courage and support to follow their faith. And I am exploring sites in London and Vienna for more liberal mosques, to meet demand. We are on the cusp of something truly exciting.

And today, more than ever, we need to look at the future of Islam. In Vienna, in Nice, in Paris and also, with less public attention, in Dresden, the vivid horrors of Islamist terrorism are back. Yet again, we hear the familiar questioning and soul searching: could these attacks have been avoided?

Well my answer is simple: no. And we can expect more of the same for so long as the violent ideology that underpins this terror — political Islam or Islamism — remains. It is an ideology that I have campaigned against my whole life, to the detriment of my own personal security and liberties. And that in itself highlights the challenge.

Islamism is the political ideology that guides Isis, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. Its aim is to achieve an Islamic state through political action or violent struggle. It is an ideology that segregates people based on sex, divides communities along religious lines and fuels hatred and suspicion of open discussion and debate on contemporary values.

That’s why what we are doing in my mosque — and beyond — is so important. Our movement has been consistently praised and used as a powerful counter-voice to Islamists across the country. Our growth is a testament to the bravery of ordinary Muslims wishing to follow their faith, and to the protection and support given to us by Germany. When Ankara threatened us — as it has threatened President Macron and France — the German Government proactively and very publicly intervened.

Suggested reading

Why is the Anglo media portraying France as the villain?

By Liam Duffy

State support and intervention is so critical. President Macron has bravely attempted to lead a debate about the future of Islam and its integration into the West, highlighting the dangers of allowing Islamists to create a state within a state. This has been followed by intervention from the French state services who inspected 51 Islamist NGOs, recommending several be dissolved. In Vienna, the Austrian government raided several associations and societies suspected of belonging to and supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. During the raids, the police reportedly found assets worth more than €25 million, stored in 130 bank accounts.

Only last week, Charles Michel, President of the EU Council, spoke of establishing a European institute to train imams in Europe to “fight the ideology of hatred”. A European delegation consisting of Macron, Merkel, Ursula Von der Leyen and Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz have now consulted on new, tougher EU regulations in Paris. And, last week, Chancellor Kurz confirmed he will create a new offence for “political Islam”, so the Austrian state can “take action against those who are not terrorists themselves, but who create the breeding ground”. These are radical steps and shows a clear trajectory to combating Islamism. Which is why I have to ask: where is the UK?

Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood spent years attempting to insert themselves into UK politics and media. Instead of elevating liberal voices in Islam, we see regression. The UK has also overseen significant growth in the funding of religious and educational institutions by charities and entities from Qatar and Turkey. In December last year, President Erdogan opened an eco-mosque in Cambridge, addressed a rally of supporters of his Justice & Development Party in London, and met with two prominent Islamists in the UK with links to Hamas. These are the very same states who want to shut me down.

Suggested reading

Will Britain stand up for liberal Muslims?

By Peter Franklin

Younger Muslims in Germany and the UK — home to some 3 million muslims — are desperate to join the fight against Islamism but fearful of the consequences. I have been inundated with private messages of support since announcing my intention to found a liberal mosque in Britain, but these same people fear being targeted and persecuted for their beliefs if that support were made public.

That is surprising in a country like England, where these moderate religious voices need to be encouraged and supported. Unfortunately, unlike me, they cannot rely on 24/7 police protection — and the attacks across Europe will discourage many from speaking up. But the immediate steps being taken in France and Austria can give us courage. I want them to be met in equal force by progressive, liberal Muslim voices who are championed and supported by the state apparatus.

I struggled for years in Germany to get where I am now. I want to help recreate that success in the UK and allow liberal Muslim communities to flourish. That means giving British Muslims the education, religious materials and roadmap that successfully established and preserved the Ibn Rushd-Goethe Mosque in Berlin. It means offering hope and courage to British Muslims in private — ensuring access to our global support community — while defending their right to religious freedom in public. And most important, it means challenging the very voices who want to restrict religious freedom.