Some of those Kurdish fighters have been in the mountains ever since, waging a seemingly endless campaign against Turkey. When they finally descended this week, to ceremonially destroy their weapons as part of a closely-watched disarmament process, they brought a symbolic end to the Cold War era of armed campaigns for national liberation. In his first video appearance for over 25 years, jailed Kurdish figurehead Abdullah Öcalan announced: “The PKK movement and its national liberation strategy… has had its day… I believe not in arms, but in the power of politics.”

With their traditional Kurdish clothes and battered Kalashnikovs, the guerrilla fighters certainly seem a world away from the hair gel, wrap-around sunglasses and slick suits of the media scrum, spooks and politicos awaiting them at the foot of the mountain. Öcalan made his historic video appearance sporting a Lacoste polo shirt, prompting ordinary Kurds to rush out and buy up the brand.

The present day is strange, but also familiar. Some headlines from 1984 could have been written just a few weeks ago — try “Nuclear Tensions Peak as TV Star Turned US President Jokes About Dropping The Bomb”. And amid our century’s New Cold War, the Kurds are grappling with contemporary versions of some age-old questions. When wars never really end but endlessly evolve into proxy and frozen conflicts, what does it actually mean to declare victory or defeat? And amid spiraling regional confrontations, what are the potential consequences of forging a pact with the devil, and allying with your own long-term oppressors?

As I fly into Iraqi Kurdistan to witness the closely-guarded ceremony first-hand, these questions immediately present themselves. The originally Turkish-based PKK has followed a very different path to the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). While the former has relied on black-market weaponry to fight the Turkish Armed Forces in pursuit of a decentralized, autonomous federation based on direct democracy and women’s autonomy, the KRI has taken a more conventional approach. Following Saddam Hussein’s genocide of the Iraqi Kurds and their loyal backing of the USA’s 2003 invasion, the Iraqi Kurds have achieved quasi-statehood, underwritten by oil wealth and Western support. Some of the Iraqi Kurdish special forces guarding the ceremony, which takes place here on “neutral” soil, sport US flags on their multicam helmets.

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To its Kurdish critics, the KRI has thus been transformed into a bargain-basement Dubai. The rule of law and living standards might be better here than elsewhere in Iraq, but a small coterie around Kurdish tribal leaders has grown rich in gated compounds, while the majority languish amid poverty and political ennui. “There is not a state here, but only ‘authorities’… Our democratic revolution could not be translated into true legitimacy,” says Haval Abubakir, the regional governor who is also a prominent domestic critic of the KRI.

Despite these shortcomings, the KRI is a world away from the remote tunnel networks where thousands of PKK fighters still shelter from Turkish airstrikes. With its mushrooming high-rises and untouchable political dynasties built on the reputations of one-time freedom fighters, the KRI offers an image of a path untraveled for Turkey’s own Kurdish population, many of whom are relieved at the end of hostilities even as they worry about downing arms without clear guarantees from the Turkish side.

The mood at the disarmament ceremony is accordingly pensive. Our phones and cameras taken away, we wind up the mountainside to the symbolic site — a cave which first sheltered a clandestine Kurdish printing press during a 1923 uprising against occupying British forces. In conversations among attendees, phrases like “bittersweet” and a “bitter pill to swallow” recur. Pride of place is given to representatives of Turkey’s Peace Mothers. Clad in white headscarves, these formidable women have all lost children in conflict with the Turkish army. In their 60s and 70s, they brave heavy prison sentences as they protest Turkey’s continued repression of the Kurdish cause. “It’s enough war, enough pain, enough blood,” one says. “We just want peace, then all will be well.” Despite these brave words, her face is grim. Other members of her delegation break down in tears during the ceremony.

The PKK fighters themselves are characteristically defiant, even as they acknowledge the difficulty of the step they are making. As is customary, the delegation is 50% women, and led by the PKK’s top female commander, Besê Hozat. “As you know, things did not come about with ease, at no cost, and without waging struggle,” she says in a prepared statement, her voice ringing from the precipitous mountain walls. “Quite the contrary — all gains came at heavy cost, through struggling tooth and claw.”

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The event is a battle of narratives and jostling camera crews, with each side seeking to claim a victory. While Turkish TV broadcast images of twisted, blackened weapons and President Erdoğan boasts of a “terror-free Turkey”, on the Kurdish side the hope is that the PKK’s disarmament will pave the way for both domestic reforms in Turkey and a better future for all the region’s Kurds. Though security forces try to prevent it, audience members defy orders to rise, applaud and chant the Kurdish slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom”. Rather than handing their weapons over to Turkish authorities, the Kurds make a point of assembling the guns into a pyre and burning them. “We voluntarily destroy our weapons… as a step of goodwill and determination,” Hozat says.

What now? The path toward peace is difficult, but not unimaginable. The Irish, South African and Basque liberation movements, which have all supported the Kurdish cause, demonstrate the simultaneous possibility and limitations of the peace process. (In one meaningless but pleasing coincidence, an exiled Basque leader reportedly sparked controversy by wearing his own Lacoste-branded shirt during Eighties peace talks with Spain, sparking paranoid accusations of collusion with France.)

Basque political representative Igor Zulaika, who also attends the disarmament ceremony, sees his own party’s sense of “vertigo”, as they took necessarily “blind steps” along their own path from armed struggle to parliamentary participation, reflected in the Kurdish experience. “It was a historical moment, a moment of great hope. Of course, hesitation is part of every such moment, and that’s understandable.”

The ceremony is also attended by representatives of various peace-building NGOs, who share concerns the disarmament process is running in “reverse”, since Kurdish weapons are being downed before any concrete alternative has been established, and without any third party to oversee the PKK’s potential entry to Turkish political life. “The fact we had a strategy, the fact we were united and had the support of our people, meant the process went forward,” Zulaika recalls.

That said, the Kurds already have a political party in Turkey, which has survived a dozen successive bans and the continued detention of thousands of Kurdish mayors, MPs and other activists. Meanwhile, Kurdish representatives speak of handing responsibility from the PKK and its variously-initialled affiliates to a whole “alphabet” of civil-society and political bodies pursuing Öcalan’s federal vision. The systematic release of Kurdish political prisoners would demonstrate Turkey is minded to move the peace process forward: but until now, Erdoğan has responded only by setting up a new parliamentary commission to oversee the disarmament process. Prior Turkish-Kurdish peace processes have collapsed following domestic and geostrategic shifts, while Turkish airstrikes are currently continuing despite the supposed ceasefire.

Whatever happens next, the ceremony is a point of no return for the decades-old conflict — and thus also a key turning-point for the Middle East at large. While analysts tend to read Erdoğan’s detente with the Kurds as motivated by his unlikely pursuit of Kurdish support in Turkey’s Parliament, its outcome will affect not only Turkey but also several of the Middle East’s key current battlefields.

In neighbouring Syrian Kurdistan, PKK affiliates have braved warfare against ISIS and Turkey to establish an embattled, unrecognized polity uniting millions on the basis of their federal vision. A functional transition to peace should help these embattled, Western-allied Kurds in their own, ongoing negotiations as they seek to preserve autonomy while reconciling with the Turkish-allied Islamist forces that recently took control of Damascus.

Here in Iraqi Kurdistan, Turkey has established over 100 military bases in a de facto occupation, suspended flights to the regional airport, and conducted thousands of consequence-free airstrikes, often killing civilians and journalists. Iraqi Kurdish journalist Rebin Bekir survived an airstrike which killed two of his colleagues. “We aren’t members of any armed organization, but journalists, just like you,” he says, displaying his scars.

As well as potentially ending these violations and bringing stability to northern Iraq and Syria, a ceasefire could pave the way for broader geopolitical reset. Turkey, Iran, Iraq and the ruling Iraqi Kurdish party have long set aside other differences to coordinate against the PKK in various constellations. But in Ankara, that calculus may finally be shifting. To many Kurds, it’s significant that the peace deal is fronted not by Erdoğan but by the unlikely figure of hard-Right ultra-nationalist Devlet Bahçeli. Bahçeli is popularly perceived as a representative of Turkey’s so-called deep state, the military-intelligence complex ultimately concerned not with propping up Erdoğan but preserving Turkey’s regional status — in opposition to both Iran and Israel.

On the one hand, Ankara probably hopes that Öcalan’s principled, long-term opposition to Israel will neuter any potential Israeli sponsorship of Kurdish national ambitions. Notably, Turkey recently allowed documents to leak in which the jailed Kurdish leader warned against allowing Israel to “turn [Kurdistan] into another Gaza” by extending their influence through Kurdish regions in Syria and Iran.

On the other, Ankara is equally wary of what it views as a pragmatic marriage of convenience between Iran and the PKK, and simultaneously hopes to neuter the threat of the Kurds profiting from any future confrontation between Turkey and Iran. At the outside, given Ankara’s desire to curry favor in Washington by playing up its anti-Iranian credentials, Turkish and Kurdish interests could even directly align against the pariah state. If the PKK does down weapons altogether, many could end up in the hands of its Iranian affiliate PJAK, the most serious armed force on the ground capable of posing a threat to Tehran.

Whether the peace deal stands or falls, the Kurds’ strategic location means they’re poised to exert outsized pressure on what increasingly resembles a three-way confrontation between Turkey, Israel and Iran — with Iraq and Syria as key battlegrounds. “If the Kurds are allowed to be a part of stability, not a factor causing more pressure, it’s better for all concerned,” says Abubakir, the governor of Sulaymaniyah Province. Yet two days before we speak, explosive drones likely fired by Iranian-backed militias were shot down over his city. These realities bring to mind the sombre lines written three centuries ago by the great Kurdish poet Ehmedê Xanî: “Like a great wall the Kurds stand between the Turks and the Persians…/Both sides make the Kurdish clans/Targets of their poison-tipped arrows.”

Kurdish representatives optimistically present the disarmament ceremony as a turning-point, from their long 20th century of struggle and betrayal toward Öcalan’s vision of a peaceful 21st century movement pursuing bottom-up, grassroots change. As a symbolic gesture, the guerrilla fighters place their Kalashnikovs, one-by-one, onto a pyre, alongside a rocket launcher and light machine gun. They add wood and petrol, and set it alight.

The bonfire of weaponry is constructed to resemble the Kurds’ traditional New Year fire, which symbolizes rebirth and renewal. But however optimistic the symbolism, the fact remains the guns are burned. As the guerrilla fighters return to their mountains, hands which have clutched weapons for decades now hang loosely at their sides.

Since then İmamoğlu’s party, the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, has held huge protest rallies across the country and staged a primary in which more than 15 million people anointed him as their candidate for the presidency. The opposition has also led a boycott of industrial conglomerates, media companies, and retail groups associated with the government, which has been patchily observed. On 2 April, many shops in Istanbul and elsewhere were shuttered in support of some 3,000 detained protesters. Such measures are clearly intended to spook investors and prompt a currency crisis of the kind that the Central Bank has already spent $25 billion in reserves to prevent. The interior minister deplored the opposition’s “assassination attempt on our national economy”.

The small number of independent Turkish journalists still able to work inside the country concur that the CHP, a fissiparous outfit with a talent for walking into political traps, has handled the crisis surprisingly well. Noting that İmamoğlu’s detention even brought protesters into the streets of Erdoğan’s hometown of Rize, on the Black Sea, one such commentator, Murat Yetkin, declared, “the wind is changing”.

Since Erdoğan embraced authoritarianism in the early 2010s, he and his AK Party, or AKP, have captured the judges, cowed the universities, and lobotomized the mainstream media. Rather than report on the biggest of the recent protests, by hundreds of thousands of Istanbullus (2.2 million according to the CHP), on 29 March, Turkey’s main news channel debated filo pastry recipes for the forthcoming Bayram holiday.

Erdoğan has a habit of revealing the outcome of judicial investigations before they conclude. Referring to a probe into what he called the “bribery, corruption and terrorism” of CHP municipalities, he predicted that “as it advances and deepens [it] will reveal how far the arms of the criminal organization have embraced the municipalities like an octopus”. Depicting the protests as a Jacobin frenzy, and neglecting to mention the police’s use of tear gas, water cannons, and rubber bullets, he warned that such “street terror is nothing but an attempt to veil thefts” of which his opponents stand accused.

That the current agitation is both deep and wide testifies to Erdoğan’s declining credibility even among his constituency of Islamists, nationalists, and small businesses, which is corroborated by ever-slimmer electoral pickings. It also points to the emergence, finally, of a credible alternative to his suffocating misrule.

For years the CHP had struggled with the legacy of Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic, who conceived of the party as an engine of Turkish nationalism, economic dirigisme, and prescriptive secularism. Erdoğan’s recent CHP opponents were either too nationalist to attract the Kurds, who make up around 18% of the population, or — as in the case of Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, loser of the 2023 election — were disadvantaged by their membership of the Alevis, a big minority sect to which some Sunnis are axiomatically (and indefensibly) averse.

İmamoğlu, by contrast, is an observant Sunni with a background in the private sector — which Erdoğan supporters find reassuring. He possesses personal magnetism, a reputation for competence, and an instinct for the popular cause (milk for poor children; cleaning up the Golden Horn, for years a foul and dangerous suspension, now a place where dolphins cavort). To the Alevi and socially liberal base he inherited from Kılıçdaroğlu, he has added many Kurdish supporters. In a speech he delivered in the Kurdish region a few days before his incarceration (a 50-minute barnstormer with barely a glance at his notes), he referred to the Kurds as “the foundation stone, the central pillar of this country”. The emergence of the Kurds as a political force marks a big departure from the old nationalist insistence on a wholly Turkish nation. When I lived in Turkey as a journalist in the Nineties, CHP officials would deny the existence of the Kurds altogether, calling them “our brothers in the southeast” or, yet more egregiously, “mountain Turks”.

Of all the qualities that İmamoğlu needs as he begins a confinement that will either destroy him or make him invincible, the most salient is that he, alone among Erdoğan’s adversaries of the past quarter of a century, is a proven winner. In 2019 İmamoğlu was elected mayor of Istanbul, which had been a fiefdom of the AKP and its predecessor party ever since Erdoğan himself became mayor in 1994. The Supreme Election Council promptly annulled İmamoğlu’s victory and ordered a re-run only for indignant Istanbullus to return him with a bigger majority. In last year’s mayoral elections, he trounced his AKP opponent. As the saying goes — and as Erdoğan can confirm, having himself made the leap from mayor of Turkey’s biggest city to prime minister — “whoever wins Istanbul wins Turkey”.

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When I interviewed a smiling Erdoğan in the spring of 1997 on the terrace of an Ottoman pleasure house, the then Istanbul mayor had a reputation for personal magnetism, competence, and an instinct for the popular cause (planting trees on Istanbul verges, piping water to the poor). In this sense, he and İmamoğlu have much in common — they even both hail from the Black Sea region. We were brought early strawberries which we ate while admiring the view over the Bosphorus. The word “democracy” came up often as we talked, even though the previous year Erdoğan had caused outrage by describing democracy as a tram: “it goes as far as we want it to go, and then we step off.”

Last month Turkish democracy ran out of track. Erdoğan’s decision to arrest his rival is a bet against his own experience. It was a jail sentence handed down by Turkey’s (then militantly secular) judiciary that propelled Erdoğan to national power in the first place. His crime in December 1997 was to recite a martial poem which the courts interpreted as an incitement to religious insurrection. The vindictiveness of the judgement turned him into a martyr while his mastery of the democratic discourse established him as a symbol of what Turkey’s Nato allies, searching frantically for unobjectionable Muslim regimes, referred to as “moderate” Islam. The US consul in Istanbul visited the mayoralty to commiserate; the case, she said, would “weaken confidence in Turkish democracy”. Erdoğan served four months in prison and in 2002 became prime minister, a post he subsequently abolished, creating the executive presidency he currently occupies.

The president does not intend to step down when his second term ends, in 2028, as the constitution decrees. Which brings us to another character integral to determining the outcome of the current crisis: Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which has waged an on-off war against the Turkish state since 1984. Erdoğan needs the help of Öcalan’s followers in parliament to enact constitutional changes that would allow him to run for a third term. The PKK is keen: its units have been hammered from the skies by Bayraktar drones manufactured by Erdoğan’s eponymous son-in-law, and its alliance with Syria’s Kurds has been imperilled by Turkey’s influence over the new government in Damascus, which it helped install. So it was a big moment when, on 27 February, after months of secret negotiations, Öcalan ordered the PKK to disarm and disband. Two days later the group’s commanders in northern Iraq announced a ceasefire.

A good deal for the Kurds would involve parole for Öcalan and a new Turkish constitution enshrining Kurdish cultural and political autonomy. But Amberin Zaman, perhaps the best-informed analyst of Kurdish affairs (and herself a courageous reporter who was driven out of Turkey by Erdoğan’s threats), believes that the president’s promises to Öcalan (made through intermediaries) amount to little more than an amelioration of his prison conditions and freedom for a prominent Kurdish politician. Nor have the Kurdish nationalists stayed silent during the current protests, with one of their parliamentary leaders denouncing İmamoğlu’s arrest as “a black stain” and “a blow against democracy and justice”.

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Further blows will be landed. It is possible that Erdoğan will appoint an apparatchik to assume the government of Istanbul as he has done for municipalities whose Kurdish nationalist mayors have been removed or jailed. The loyal media will release details of alleged misdemeanours by the CHP, whose leaders are warning that the authorities will fabricate evidence using AI.

In a reign lasting almost a quarter of a century, Erdoğan has many precedents to draw on as he assaults the CHP. Back in 2016, a coup attempt by parts of the armed forces that had been infiltrated by devotees of Fethullah Gülen, an exiled cleric, was met with a huge purge not only of the army but also the bureaucracy, the universities and the media. Hundreds of thousands of people — not all of them Gülenists, by any means — were jailed, sacked, or forced into exile. To go by the accusations that the government has been leveling against the CHP, the party would be wise to brace for a similar total war.

Forget moderate Islam. Forget Turkish democracy. Erdoğan long ago flattened the secular judges and generals in his path and what he represents now is transactional geopolitics and power in perpetuity. Like the Ottoman sultans he admires — a favorite is Sultan Selim I, who almost tripled the empire’s size and committed what would nowadays be called a genocide against the Alevis — his vision is panoptic. He keeps his army, Nato’s second largest, busy fighting Kurds on both sides of the Syrian border. He opens the sluices and migrants flow into the EU; when the EU pays him enough he shuts them again. He pipes Russian natural gas into Europe for Vladimir Putin, while to Volodymyr Zelensky he sells Bayraktar drones that are used to kill Putin’s soldiers. Donald Trump likes him so much he let Turkey off with a 10% tariff and congratulated Erdoğan on doing “what no one’s been able to do in 2,000 years; you’ve taken over Syria”. The Russians call him “the plug for every barrel”.

This time around, don’t expect the US consul to come to the mayoralty to deplore the spectacle of a Democrat behind bars. Don’t expect Sir Keir Starmer to leap to the defense of a fellow Leftist who on the eve of his arrest was stripped of his university degree, rendering him ineligible to become president. Instead, think of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, who crowed, “There’s just a lot of good, positive news coming out of Turkey right now.” For this isn’t the late Nineties. In its cells, its streets, this pro-democracy movement stands alone.

Turkey won praise for quickly assembling container cities to accommodate the Syrian refugees who streamed across the border in the early years of the civil war. And you can be sure that Erdoğan, a near-absolute ruler even before the state of emergency he proclaimed on Tuesday, will exert himself to get the homeless housed as soon as possible. Politically, the hazards lie in the past. Every collapsed building is a reminder of the corruption associated with a construction industry whose leading players are known more for their government connections than their adherence to safety norms. Alluding to hypothecated taxes that the government introduced after earlier earthquakes, and which are designed, among other things, to make buildings earthquake-resistant, Kılıçdaroğlu asked: “So where is that money? Gone! They fed it to the gangs!”

The tragedy will cast a long and bitter shadow over the presidential election that is due on May 14. For the government, disaster management is an election campaign by another name. And Erdoğan loves elections. Since 2002, he and his Justice and Development Party, or AKP, have won six Turkish general elections, one presidential election and three referendums. That he doesn’t fight clean or fair can make one forget that he’s probably the world’s most successful electoral politician, and certainly among the most instinctive, a populist who’s rarely happier than when whipping up a crowd of flag-waving supporters, ridiculing his opponents or addressing in terms of proprietorial familiarity those pious Turkish nationalists who make up the biggest section of the country’s electorate.

Erdoğan’s worst shock at the polls came in 2019, when the AKP lost control of two key mayoralties: Istanbul, to a new star of the secular-leaning Republican People’s Party, Ekrem İmamoğlu, and Ankara. Erdoğan responded to defeat in Istanbul, which he considers his fief, by insisting on a rerun, which İmamoğlu won by a bigger margin. But last December a pliant judge sentenced the mayor to two and a half years in prison for calling election officials “idiots”, and banned him from politics — thus blocking his path to a run against Erdoğan in May.

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Opinion polls suggest that not only İmamoğlu, who remains in office pending appeal, but also other opposition politicians, could beat Erdoğan — which makes sense when you consider that inflation is at 64% and the economic miracle Turkey enjoyed until 2015 has given way to pain, much of it self-inflicted. (The reason why Turkish inflation is the second highest in the G20 is that Erdoğan has an ideological aversion to raising interest rates; his Central Bank — “his” being the operative word — has cut the benchmark rate by 10 percentage points since September 2021, just as other central banks raised theirs.) But when, shortly before the earthquake, I asked a politically astute Turkish friend — someone I have known since the late Nineties, when I was a resident reporter covering, among other things, the rise of a promising young Istanbul mayor called Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — whether the president really can be beaten, she replied with an unhesitating “no”.

After two decades in which he has survived coup attempts by secularists and rival Islamists and bombing campaigns by Islamic State and Kurdish militants, Erdoğan’s staying power can appear uncanny and preordained. Bekir Ağırdır, a columnist, wrote recently that news that the six opposition parties that have formed an alliance against the AKP are already “sharing out jobs and power” betrays a delusional complacency that only “strengthens the conviction that [the election] can’t be won”. Another commentator noted that the media in Russia, Turkey’s most important ally, is predicting a shoe-in for Putin’s chum across the water, “the indispensable Erdoğan”.

Since 2016, when Putin, in contrast with the West, backed Erdoğan unconditionally as he suppressed a coup attempt by rival Islamists, the Turkish president has met his Russian counterpart more than any other leader. Uneasy bedfellows the two countries may be, with interests that don’t always coincide in Syria, the Caucasus and, most recently, Ukraine, but the relationship isn’t really about Turkey and Russia; it’s about two strong men who share a desire to boss the neighbourhood but have sharper differences with the West than they do with each other.

One might marvel that even now, after Erdoğan has captured the judiciary, locked up tens of thousands of opponents, throttled the internet and herded the approved media into pens of abject obedience, all the while relieving his own party of anything resembling a mind of its own, Turkey has an opposition at all. But the country contains big minorities — Kurds, liberals and a heterodox sect called the Alevis — who hate his Sunni Turkish majoritarianism and that, in the Kurds’ case, have taken up arms against it. If these constituencies pull together, and there is sufficient attrition from the government side, an electoral shock may still be possible. In the three national elections and one referendum that have been staged in Turkey over the past six years, the number of votes received by the opposition has oscillated between 22.5 and 24 million, while Erdoğan and his allies have received between 24 and 27 million.

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The opposition is disunited. Kılıçdaroğlu of the Republican People’s Party is a dogged but uninspiring Alevi. Its other main component is a Right-leaning party containing Turkish nationalists. But the Turkish nationalists refuse to admit the country’s main Kurdish party, the Peoples’ Democratic Party, regarding Kurdish nationalist politicians as the polite face of armed separatism. And yet Kurdish votes will be crucial if power is to change hands on 14 May. Four months shy of the election — and with the Peoples’ Democratic Party facing a possible ban for its links to Kurdish militants — it isn’t clear which candidate or candidates from the opposition alliance will stand and who might be acceptable to the Kurds.

Erdoğan devoted his first 10 years in power to trying to improve human rights, liberalise the economy and make peace with the Kurds, all under the approving eye of the US and the EU, with which Turkey opened accession talks in 2005. He also expelled Turkey’s meddlesome generals from politics and embarked on a creeping Islamisation of the state. He presented a smiling alternative to the authoritarian secular state when I met him, in his capacity as mayor of Istanbul, in the spring of 1997, offering me delicious early strawberries on the terrace of an Ottoman folly he had restored and assuring me of the purity of his democratic convictions. Six years later, after a spell in jail for quoting from a controversial poem, he came to power nationally with the support not only of a large chunk of the electorate but also of the West, which regarded Erdoğan’s brand of pious but apparently pluralistic conservatism, and the spectacle of a Muslim Nato member knocking on the door of the EU, as the world’s best chance of avoiding a clash of civilisations.

Then came the 2010s — the decade of the Syrian civil war, the collapse of the Kurdish peace process and rising tensions with the EU, which, it was now clear, had no intention of letting Turkey in — and his programme degenerated into an unstable collage of transactions, vendettas and exhibitions of military potency. Democracy and human rights were discarded even if Erdoğan still needs the shot in the arm of periodic elections, contests which, short of stuffing ballot boxes, he has used every means available to win. There is no longer anything in the way of overarching design save a mission to keep his job and resist the circling enemies that are determined to drag Turkey down from her rightful position of global influence.

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Two decades of power does odd things. The same Erdoğan who once vowed to topple the “godless” Bashar al-Assad, and whose army occupies swathes of northern Syria, now wants normalisation with his southern neighbour. The philanthropist who let in 3.6 million Syrian refugees in the name of Islamic solidarity has done a volte face and vows to send them home. Erdoğan the doctrinaire Muslim welcomes millions of hard-drinking European tourists; the EU he takes such pleasure from deriding happens to be the country’s biggest trading partner and source of foreign investment. Putin’s pal also supplies drones to Zelensky. And every incoherence in policy is justified by invoking the goal of a strong, respected Turkey, capable of rebutting her many foes. You can be sure that, when the time comes to assess his government’s performance in dealing with the fall-out from the earthquake, Erdoğan won’t dwell on the Western countries that have rushed to Turkey’s aid.

Before the earthquake, in an address to the nation from his palace in Ankara, the President warned that the country’s enemies would never accept a Turkey “whose infrastructure is healthy, whose political will is its own, whose military and technological capabilities are rising”. Fortunately, he went on, “we have proved to the world in the struggle we have waged… that we can protect our independence and our future without regard to the impositions, desires and strictures of anyone else”. After a brisk overview of various recent ground-breakings, ribbon-cuttings and medal-pinnings he had attended, and not forgetting his latest chat with Mr Putin, he gave an enthusiastic account of the opening of a new high-speed metro line linking Istanbul and the airport, after which, pausing for effect, he said, “they don’t even have this in Paris”. This elicited dutiful titters among the cabinet ministers in the hall. Pressing home his advantage, the president concluded, “the Paris metro has a leaky roof”.

Having dealt with one European has-been, his tone hardened when he spoke of the public burning of a Quran by a well-known Islamophobe in Stockholm, on 21 January, as an “ugly act” which, since it took place outside the Turkish embassy and under the protection of the Swedish police, was “not only a religious issue, but also a national one”. Expanding his theme to include the current spat with Sweden and Finland over their accession to Nato, which he has promised to veto if they do not extradite scores of Kurdish “terrorists”, Erdoğan announced that “those who encourage or close their eyes” to the Quran’s desecration should “expect not the slightest indulgence from us on the subject of their application to join Nato… if you love the terrorists and Islamophobes so much (his voice rising to a familiar crescendo) why not entrust the security of your nation to them!” Calming down a bit, Erdogan went on to give details of his economic genius. The ministers crossed and uncrossed their legs. It wasn’t the performance of a man who expects to be moving out of his home, which cost $600 million, is four times the size of Buckingham Palace, and is alleged to have gold loo seats, later this summer.

Ukrainians write songs about their beloved Turkish drones. Ankara is feted in Kyiv. Now, not content with helping to kill Russians, Turkey’s President Recep Erdoğan is now trying to negotiate with them. Erdoğan spoke to Putin over the phone on Sunday and stressed the palpable need for a ceasefire on humanitarian grounds, saying Turkey was happy to help. He also — and this is important — made clear that Turkey will not jeopardise its relations with Russia or Ukraine. His ability to speak to both sides was, he said, an asset. They both agreed to hold more talks in Istanbul.

Turkey has offered to mediate between the two sides ever since the Russian army barrelled into Ukraine, following Putin’s hour-long televised meeting in which it became quite clear he was in the grip of despotism’s true curse: an utter detachment from the reality that would, under normal circumstances, restrain him. Thousands have now died in a war that is now over a month old and that Putin told everyone would last three days. Then again, he also told everyone — including Ukraine’s Jewish President — that he was going to “denazify Ukraine”, which his troops chose to do last week by shooting up the Holocaust Memorial in Drobitsky Yar on the outskirts of Kharkiv.

So Putin now finds himself in a tricky spot. His soldiers are getting shredded by Ukrainians buoyed by Western weaponry and the motivation that comes with defending their homeland . My concern has always been that Moscow has never cared about the lives of its soldiers — it’s not like their families can complain or the government is accountable to its citizens. Besides, there are plenty more where they came from and, despite some reports, plenty more Russian hardware to wheel into play.

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By David Patrikarakos

But for now, Russia flounders. There is much talk of “off-ramps”, a phrase used in geopolitical circles to mean giving someone a way out of a disastrous situation (usually of their own making). The problem is: how do you do it? Putin cannot talk to the United States or to Britain or even the EU — all of whom are doling out weapons and cash to Ukraine and sanctions on Russia — without looking pathetically weak.

Any Western state is a problem for him, which is a problem for us because we’re not going to trust China to do it. And no country in the non-Western world has the relationships or political clout to do it, apart from maybe India, which is more concerned with keeping things sweet with Moscow and is therefore clearly unacceptable to the Ukrainians. Such is the desperation for mediators that last month saw the yarmulke-wearing Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett jetting off to Moscow to try to make some progress (“see how Putin big-dicked him by making him fly on Shabbat,” observed an Israeli friend to me). It didn’t seem especially serious.

Turkey, though, is different. “Turkey is kind of unique here,” Ziya Meral, a Senior Associate Fellow at RUSI tells me. “It borders Ukraine and Russia in the Black Sea and has made sure to have good relations with both. It has consistently condemned Russian aggression in Ukraine — especially the seizure of Crimea. It is supplying the Ukrainians with drones. But at the same time it has strong relations with Russia, especially around energy, defence and tourism.”

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He continues: “For the Russians, there are obvious advantages. First of all, it allows them to sit down and say they are negotiating. They can claim they are trying to find a solution — but not with the West. That is vital to them: to show they are engaging for peace but on their own terms. They are not bowing to anyone.”

It does seem the Kremlin is exploring this possible off-ramp seriously. The Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, who is personally close to Putin, was on the ground in Turkey over the weekend, acting as an unofficial plenipotentiary for Moscow and will report back to his President personally. To be fair, he is by all accounts now living there anyway after being forced to scuttle out of both London and Israel. It’s not the type of forced exile that millions of Ukrainians are suffering right now, but it’s something.

For Turkey, the war in Ukraine presents both danger and opportunity. Erdoğan wants his country to form part of an energy route across the European continent — something that has become much more likely following the EU energy sanctions on Russia, as well as the fact that no one now wants to rely on Moscow for gas anymore anyway. Erdoğan has also always insisted that Turkey is an important global player that needs to be involved in the world’s major events. And the one now playing out in Ukraine folds all his neuroses into it. For him, Turkey must never be too reliant on Russia and China but he is also perennially mistrustful of Nato. A middle course is the only way. Do this right and that might be possible.

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But as skilful a negotiator he may be and as open to resolution as Putin may be — and I have reservations over the veracity of both of those claims — there is a limit to what can be achieved. Putin is only talking so much because the Ukrainians fought so well. If they hadn’t, he wouldn’t be negotiating. He’d be gloating.

And so it won’t be Turkey, or Erdoğan, that brings about peace in Ukraine. In the coming weeks, it might play a supporting role, but that’s it. As Meral concludes: “It’s not the men in suits but the ones on the battlefield that will ultimately decide what happens — as they always do.”

But it’s coming true with Biden.

And historians will never stop wondering what could have induced the 46th president of the United States to commit such a grievous error.

Is it the naïveté of a politician lacking any sense of history or tragedy, the one who took the Taliban at their word when they assured us of their peaceful intentions in Doha in February 2020?

Is it the cynicism of a president already looking ahead to his re-election and pandering to those in swing-states who are said to be fed up with “endless wars”?

Is it an effect of a swing of the pendulum between the four major poles of American diplomacy laid out by Walter Russell Mead: Wilsonianism and its democratic messianism; Jeffersonianism and its hard and fast isolationism; Jacksonianism and its reflex to give tit for tat, but only when US interests appear directly targeted; and Hamiltonianism and the formulation, so dear to France’s Montesquieu, that America’s only truly vital interests were those of peaceful commerce?

Or is this a new pole altogether? One pioneered by Barack Obama in August 2013, when he declined to enforce the red line that he had said would be irretrievably crossed if the Syrian leader resorted to the use of chemical weapons against his own citizens? The one at work when, without warning or any shred of moral or strategic interest, Donald Trump abandoned his country’s Kurdish allies, first in Iraq when he allowed the pro-Iranian militias to invade Kirkuk, then in Syria when he allowed Erdogan’s murderous proxies to enter Rojava? The one brought to its culmination in the present Afghan rout, this abject display of open desertion being broadcast live to the world and punctuated, as I write, by scenes of panic and chaos at Kabul airport that could easily be mistaken for those in Saigon in 1975?

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Is it, in other words, the consolidation of a trend that I first sensed almost twenty years ago, when writing American Vertigo and later developed in The Empire and the Five Kings? Gone the great power, which has jettisoned its dreams of exceptionalism, its ambition to be a shining city upon a hill! Broken, the gracious Virgilian thread that made the invention of America a new Aeneid whose mission was no longer to rebuild Troy in Rome or Rome on a grand scale in Europe, but to reinvent Europe with improvements! Onward toward a new pre-Columbian order in which the old empire, in retreat, no longer counts and makes way for the latter-day reincarnations of the Ottoman Empire, Greater Persia, Great Russia, Imperial China, and, as here, the new Ummah made possible by a radical misreading of the Koran!

It is too early to know for certain.

And each of these explanations is at least partially true.

But the time has come for a review of accounts.

And that review shows that what the most pessimistic of us feared must be booked not just as a loss but as an abomination in three parts:

1. The wolves are through the gate

They are hunting down the supporters of republican government and institutions, as well as my journalist friends from Tolo News.

They are sending women back to their fabric prisons after many thousands of them had tasted dignity and become accustomed to gender equality and the freedom to show their faces.

Sharia is the law of the land.

Lists of suspects, banned and “wanted” people are being posted at the entrances to neighbourhoods, sounding an ominous clarion call.

Islamic tribunals will soon be operating at full speed, with their absurd crimes and atrocious punishments.

And the scenes of stoning that have been filmed over the past few months in remote villages will be reenacted live in Herat, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif and Kabul, sites of high civilisation where the descendants of horsemen and poets had begun to embrace the democratic dream.

A people are in agony.

The triumph of a strain of barbarism that, twenty years ago, the great democracies and their Afghan allies easily defeated and whose legions of rabble on motorbikes are no more formidable today than they were back then.

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And of naïveté, when the American administration, speaking through national security adviser Jake Sullivan, adds credulity to dishonour by accepting the Taliban’s word that it is ready to “protect” civilians seeking to be evacuated from the country while offering dubious evidence of good intentions.

Worse than a crime, this is a mistake.

And, worse than a mistake, it is a stain.

A stain on the term of Joe Biden, whose first dramatic error this is.

But also, in a greater sense, this stain dishonours the modern conscience. It will take a long time for that conscience to forget this failure, this shame.

2. And what of the United States?

Already devalued by the sacrifice of the Kurds on the altar of appeasement, first toward Iran (the Kurdish Peshmerga in Iraq) and then toward Turkey (the Kurds in Syria), the word of the United States is suddenly worth nothing.

Imagine you are a Ukrainian in Donbass battling, in the trenches of Luhansk or Donetsk, pro-Russian separatists and mercenaries in the pay of the Kremlin.

An Armenian in Nagorno-Karabakh who has learned that the resentment of those pining for a return of the Ottoman Empire and denying the genocide of their ancestors knows no bounds or limitations.

Or a Taiwanese, South Korean or even a Japanese sensing the nearby presence of the iron jaw of Chinese totalitarianism just waiting to bite.

To say nothing of the Balts, the Poles, the Czechs — of Europeans, in other words — who had been living, like the generation of the founders of Europe, in the belief that venerable old treaties protected them and ensured their security.

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What do they all think of this self-inflicted Saigon? This geopolitical suicide? How can they avoid ruminating on the betrayal and massacre of Carthage’s Punic allies, as recounted by Gustave Flaubert in his novel Salammbô, when confronted with this spectacle, this disarray in a diplomatic system that has made the inexplicable choice, just weeks before the anniversary of September 11, of returning Afghanistan to the terrorists on a silver platter and allowing them to build a nest for the vipers of the new Al-Qaeda and their ilk? When confronted, yes, with the direct, deliberate and slow-motion abandonment of a people who, like the Kurds, were our rampart against radical Islam and protected the world from terrorism? Under the circumstances, how is it possible not to conclude that if Putin, Erdogan or Xi got it in his head to fill part of the void created by the American retreat there would be no one to oppose him?

Dizzying.

An Afghan Anschluss.

Munich on all fronts.

And even if one must be wary of comparing the incomparable, this is truly terrible.

3. But then, there is Panjshir

There remains, living in his homeland of Panjshir, one young man, Ahmad Massoud, son of the legendary Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, who, in his day, embodied the struggle against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and who was assassinated two days before September 11.

A few days ago, just a few hours after the fall of Kabul, the young Ahmad Massoud was able to elude the hired killers sent to track him down.

Knowing that if they captured him, he might suffer the same fate as his illustrious father, he did exactly what his father had done, a little less than twenty-five years ago, after the first fall of Kabul, when he managed to get hold of one of the last old helicopters that the Taliban had not yet taken over and took refuge in his bastion in Panjshir, above the Shomali Plain, to organise the Afghan resistance.

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He wrote to me from his native village on Monday (16 August), several hours after rejoining his commanders.

“We find ourselves,” he wrote, “in the situation of Europe in 1940.”

The debacle is complete, he continued.

The spirit of collaboration is all around us.

Subjugation is closing in with sound and fury.

As Kabul groans, as the villages of the north and south are put in chains, vengeance is unfurling over our wounded land.

But despite reversal and even catastrophe, all is not lost, he told me.

With my Mujahideen, I intend to resume the struggle.

I call on all free women and men in the world, friends of Afghanistan old and young, to join us in spirit.

I call on all free fighters from all over the country, whatever their origin or ethnicity, to come to our valleys.

Already, he continued, groups of brave citizens are moving to the front with their creed, their bravery, and their antique rifles and grenade launchers.

I welcome them!

They will be — we will be — the living faces of the Resistance, and, soon enough, of the counteroffensive.

Free Afghanistan has lost Kabul, but it has not lost the war.

Massoud’s words were the words of the Spanish republicans in 1936.

Of Czech president Beneš in 1939 and of Alija Izetbegović, in 1992, at the height of the siege of Sarajevo, when he gave me a dramatic message to pass on to French president François Mitterrand.

Almost word for word, they are the words of General de Gaulle’s radio address to his defeated countrymen in June 1940, broadcast from London, in which he urged them not to submit but to continue to fight.

Except that the Afghans were betrayed, the young Massoud pointed out. Betrayed but not defeated. And they were not defeated because their leadership, their generals, did not even take them into battle.

* * *

I know this young man, just as I knew his father.

I have done numerous video interviews in the mountains of Panjshir, where, for a year, Massoud has been quietly preparing for the worst and stockpiling arms, equipment and supplies, as his father had done.

I trust him.

I believe him when he says he inherited from his father the taste for freedom and the instinct of fighting to defend it.

I believe him when he insists that he has no choice and that the fight is now ineluctably his, body and soul.

I believe that when he issues a call for all free Afghans who love their country and reject servitude, whether living in Afghanistan or abroad, to join him, he is not only sincere but credible.

At my initiative, France’s President Macron received him at the Elysée Palace on April 5, 2021.

I was present at that meeting, where the best of France appeared to have a rendezvous with an heir to the noblest anti-totalitarian and anti-fascist struggles of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

And I am convinced that, in the new Great Game that lies ahead, it is this young man whom France, Britain and the rest of Europe will have to support.

In this area of the world, he is the embodiment of the future and of hope.

The country’s Westernised middle classes, centred on Kabul, and ethnic and religious minorities like the Shia Hazara, who played a central role in the 2015 migrant crisis, are unlikely to try their chances under Taliban rule, as long as the door to Europe remains open. Already, Afghans make up 42% of the refugees and migrants living in squalid conditions on Greece’s eastern island camps, perhaps an even larger proportion than they did in 2015 when the large presence of Afghan Hazaras was dramatically underreported in the West, distracted by the Syria crisis, despite Afghans constituting a major portion of the migratory flow, including 2/3rds of Sweden’s 2015 arrivals.

But in any case, the Europe of 2021 is not the Europe of 2015, and Europe’s leaders have no appetite for a return of the political turmoil that followed Merkel’s experiment with open borders. Distracted by Brexit and imported American culture wars, Britain’s remaining pro-EU contingent have neglected to follow the developing consensus on the continent, where the hard line on migration for which Viktor Orbán was lambasted by liberal commentators back in 2015 has now entered the political mainstream. 

When asked whether Germany had a duty to open the country’s doors to Afghan migration, even Merkel herself recently responded that “we cannot solve all of these problems by taking everyone in”. Instead she encouraged, rather unrealistically, a dialogue with the Taliban so “that people can live as peacefully as possible in the country”. In neighbouring Austria, Chancellor Kurz’s centre-right/Green coalition has responded to the surge in arrivals on its eastern borders with the deployment of the army and angry protests that European migration policy has “failed”, with the country’s Interior Minister Karl Nehammer complaining that “we have one of the biggest Afghan communities in the whole of Europe,” and that “it cannot be the case that Austria and Germany are solving the Afghanistan problem for the EU.”

The Austrian government has decisively swung towards the Central European approach of hardened borders and expedited returns to countries of origin, with Kurz stressing that he would not halt deportations to Afghanistan, as Sweden and Finland already have, a reflection of a public mood darkened by recent high-profile crimes carried out by Afghan asylum seekers. Like centre-left Denmark, which is accelerating both its return of refugees to Syria and the search, apparently along with the UK, of third-party countries in Africa willing to host refugees and migrants on its behalf, the new mood in Austria is not the result of the populist Right coming to power, but instead of centrist parties adopting solutions that were in 2015 considered the sole preserve of the radical Right.

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As in Spain, where the next government is likely to be a coalition between the centre-right PP and the radical right Vox, in Italy a coalition government between the centre-Right and the far-Right looms in the wings. Indeed, Salvini’s Lega is now so outflanked on its Right by the rising power of Georgia Meloni’s post-fascist Brothers of Italy party, the most popular political party in the country, that it can be considered centre-Right itself, so far has the country’s Overton Window shifted. In France, where Macron has angrily rejected an imported American racial culture war in favour of the country’s homegrown culture war over Islam and the possibility of civil war, the soi-disant liberal saviour from the perceived populist menace has moved so far to the Right that the roughly even chances of a Le Pen victory in the forthcoming presidential election seem almost irrelevant in defining the country’s political trajectory. 

Perhaps it is Greece that highlights best not just the shifting mood in Europe’s external border states, but the shifting mood in Brussels itself. When Erdogan opened Turkey’s land borders with Greece in spring last year, bussing migrants to the border fences in a confrontation that came uncomfortably close to war, Greece’s militarised response unexpectedly won applause rather than censure from the EU hierarchy, as well as the swift dispatch of both Frontex border guards and funds to build an impassable border wall, now being beefed up with EU surveillance zeppelins and drones. Rather than a rerun of the 2015 migrant crisis, when Europe functioned as a ready source of monetary tribute to an embattled Erdogan, last year’s Evros crisis functioned as a dry run for the coming Afghan wave.

After all, when Belarus’s autocrat Lukashenko began funnelling migrants to the Lithuanian border a few weeks ago, Frontex immediately responded with the deployment of border guards, and support for Lithuania’s planned new 550-km border wall — with Estonia even donating 100km of barbed wire to its struggling ally. Once again, the exact same fortification project Orbán was condemned for in 2015 was hurriedly paid for by the EU in 2020, and presented as a heartening symbol of EU solidarity by 2021. From the Baltic to the Aegean, walls are going up across the eastern marches of the European continent, which will soon define the bloc against the huddling masses straining to get in. Even in Turkey, where the secular opposition CHP party has accelerated its demands to return the country’s three million Syrian refugees within two years and made alarmed noises about the increasing flow of Afghan migrants across the Iranian border, the ruling AKP party is constructing concrete border walls to stem the flow from Afghanistan, just as it has constructed a concrete wall all along its borders with Syria, and deploys lethal force against Syrians trying to sneak through.

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Turkey has become, indeed, the archetype of Europe’s new border guard states, the model for what will no doubt become a ring of authoritarian states bordering the continent’s southern and eastern fringes, whose rulers will be lavishly bribed to keep migrants and refugees from landing on European shores, a relationship somewhere between clients and blackmailers. Like Erdogan, who quickly learned to deploy migrants as a weapon against Europe whenever he was under pressure, Lukashenko has learned the value of Europe’s desire to keep migrants away while not actively being seen to dirty its own hands with the rough business of border management. 

The Moroccan government was equally quick to learn this lesson, recently waving through thousands of migrants to Spain’s North African foothold of Ceuta after the Spanish government granted asylum to a Western Saharan leader, and receiving a handsome bribe to take them back again. Meanwhile, Europe’s only interest in Libya is which faction can most effectively police migrants, just as its only interest in Tunisia’s ongoing coup will be the maintenance of this summer’s border policing deal. Despite the difficulties raised by American financial sanctions, the EU even appears to be eyeing up Iran as one of the potential host nations for the coming Afghan exodus, a dynamic which, if it takes effect, will surely dramatically affect all other aspects of its difficult diplomatic dance with the country. 

So while handing responsibility for keeping migrants out of Europe to regional states may be domestically easier for EU leaders, particularly those from Northwestern and Nordic countries with Green-tinged parties ideologically committed to pro-migration policies, it also offers neighbouring nations handy weapons to deploy against the bloc for their own geopolitical purposes. The great difficulty for European politics is how to balance these opposing tendencies: it is difficult to think, given the steady rightward drift of European politics, that an Open Borders attitude will win out against the simpler solution of a hands-on European effort to prevent migrants entering the EU. 

The expansion of the EU’s Frontex border agency into a 10,000 strong armed rapid deployment force indicates the direction of travel. Indeed, we are already seeing early manifestations of this approach, both in the pushbacks of migrants in the Aegean by the Greek coastguard with Frontex support, and in the growing legal restrictions on the activity of Western European NGO boats blamed for accelerating the migrant flow. Both were placed with the quiet acquiescence of Brussels, despite the protests of Northern European Green parties.

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All this is, of course, a dry run for the almost certainly militarised and exclusionary border policing efforts that will grapple with the vast population movements from Africa and South Asia that will attend the coming decades of climate change. Already, Bangladeshis are the largest single national group making the dangerous crossing from North Africa, and it is not difficult to see a desertifying Sahel or collapsing Lebanon adding new sudden crises for European leaders torn between their desire to maintain allegiance to postwar liberal ideals on asylum and the increasing desire of their voting publics to reject them. The avowedly open, cosmopolitan Europe of the 1990s and 2000s is already dead, and even the lame duck Merkel and her ailing CDU party have abandoned the Wir schaffen das attitude of 2015 in the face of the coming wave. 

The British debate over the Nationality and Borders Bill, insular and self-regarding as all British political debate somehow manages to be, therefore ignores this rapidly shifting European context. In some ways, this must be a relief to a Conservative government that has shown itself incapable of satisfying its core voter base’s demands to stem the flow of irregular migration across the Channel: without any action by the UK itself, the EU will find itself drawn towards a Fortress Europe approach that will, eventually, choke the flow arriving on Kent’s shingle beaches. 

Just as France’s Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin demands a Frontex deployment with aerial surveillance assets along the Channel coast, Priti Patel’s border woes will be solved by European leaders without meaningful British input other than funding analogous to the tribute the EU hands in desperation to Erdogan. The walls are going up across Europe: we will not see them coming down again in our lifetimes.

For Cameron, it was an important symbolic victory, showing that Britain had a “special status inside the EU”. For his fellow EU premiers, it was a bewildering demand, especially when the man making it had assured them that he was desperate for the UK to remain inside the EU. It proved to be more revealing than either side realised, for its logic pointed to Brexit. Yet five months later, when the British electorate did collectively decide that the UK should exit the EU, the idea that the UK could do such thing was treated as an outcome that those involved in the negotiations could scarcely have envisaged.

When Cameron began his round of travels to European capitals in the middle of 2015 to try to win friends prior to the renegotiations, he wasn’t taken particularly seriously. Perhaps, paying too much attention to British political punditry, his fellow EU leaders had not expected the Conservatives to win a parliamentary majority at the general election that May. Perhaps they had not noticed that Cameron had included in the Conservative manifesto an assurance that any government he headed would not enter another coalition without first securing a commitment to a referendum on EU membership. Or perhaps, since they wouldn’t have contemplated doing such a thing themselves, they did not take Cameron to mean what he said — that if the British people voted for Brexit, Brexit is what would then happen.

Most EU governments, not least the German one, were also preoccupied with other matters and would remain so throughout Cameron’s ill-fated renegotiations. By the early summer, the risk for Angela Merkel was not whether British voters would choose to leave the EU but whether her Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble’s attempt to expel Greece from the Euro would succeed. Only weeks after it failed — in part because Merkel made some small concessions to the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras — the German Chancellor threw Europe into tumult by upending the EU’s common asylum rules to cope with the numbers of refugees and migrants travelling from Turkey into southern Europe. By the time, in February 2016, Cameron sought to finalise his agreement, Merkel’s focus had shifted to procuring a definitive agreement with Recep Tayyip Erdogan to return migrants without strong asylum claims back to Turkey in exchange for reactivating accession talks for Ankara.

The fallout of these events seems to have blindsided Cameron. There could have scarcely been a less propitious time for any British government to have been demanding concessions from other EU states than a moment when opt-outs from the Euro, the EU’s asylum policy and Schengen – the borderless travel area that covers most of the EU – protected the UK from the crises with which most other member states were grappling.

But Cameron did not help himself. If he had acted like someone who really believed that the Eurozone crisis had so destabilised the UK’s membership of the EU that exit had to be a serious option, he might have secured his fellow leaders’ attention. Instead, he plunged into negotiations in Brussels according to a timetable in part constructed to help George Osborne become the next Conservative leader with a Remain campaign organisation already assembled and ready to go in London.

With no currency in the EU’s present-tense difficulties with which to bargain and unable to instil fear about the future, he all too predictably ended up with very little beyond the promise that the UK did not have to pretend it believed in the EU’s stated purpose. When he returned home, he had to ask British voters to Remain, having just put on an overt demonstration of how little influence the UK could exercise in a Union whose founding text he had disowned.

But the possibility that Cameron’s lack of guile and their inattention to British problems would lead to the UK leaving the EU eluded many in the EU too. (Whether it did Merkel must remain an open question.) In part, this complacency rendered the referendum result a psychic blow. If some teleological historical force is supposed to be the ultimate agent of ever-closer Union in Europe, then, the EU is not supposed to shrink, however “cold” — a word Merkel once used to describe Cameron’s view of the Union ­— the vision of passing leaders of individual member states.

Brexit would also prove a colossal practical distraction: as Emmanuel Macron later complained, it created “thousands of hours of work for European leaders”. Believing that there was a reasonable likelihood that those Remainers at Westminster who wanted to prevent Brexit would eventually prevail was easier than working out how the EU could reconstruct a different kind of relationship with the UK as a simultaneous competitor and partner.

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That Brexit would bequeath Ireland a serious problem, allied to the obvious difficulties Northern Ireland would pose to any government actually procuring parliamentary assent for a withdrawal treaty, only reinforced this impulse. Now that Brexit has occurred, Northern Ireland has become instead the most fraught component of the EU’s relations with the UK. This is in part because Northern Ireland remains the UK’s primary Brexit weakness. As a matter of legal principle, the Northern Ireland Protocol weakens the UK Union, and its practical operation destabilises Northern Irish politics. So long as Joe Biden is President, it is a serious complication to the UK’s Atlantic relations, too.

But the Northern Ireland Protocol is also the EU’s burden. Brussels must now reconcile its expressed commitment to the Good Friday Agreement and its need to defend the borders of the Single Market,  in a situation where over the next decade or so there could be a border poll resulting in Northern Ireland becoming an inherent part of the EU’s legal order. Whether this is a prospect that EU governments can contemplate with any sanguineness remains to be seen.

Only the French government, after Macron came to power in May 2017, consequentially dissented from the effort to keep open the possibility of the UK staying in the EU, without which a different outcome in Northern Ireland might have materialised. Twice in 2019, Macron threatened to veto the extensions to the Article 50 deadline that first Theresa May and then Boris Johnson had to request. As Macron showed that October when he vetoed the start of accession talks for North Macedonia and Albania, the French President doesn’t believe that the EU is strengthened by sheer size. He thinks the Union needs to look like it is exercising power. For him, Brexit didn’t have to be stopped; rather, it had to be self-evident that it has deleterious consequences for Britain.

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From the start, Macron also conceived the UK’s impending departure from the EU as an opportunity to reform the Eurozone by making it a debt-bearing Union, and delineating a more hierarchical EU with a Franco-German core and a ring of outer members retaining national monetary sovereignty. His opening bid, articulated in his big “Initiative for Europe” speech at the Sorbonne in September 2017, met much more British-style resistance than he envisaged.

His subsequent success during the first months of the pandemic in persuading Merkel to accept some shared debt may well prove only a temporary victory; since NextGenerationEU is for the EU and not just the Eurozone, it has also only deepened the tangle between the EU’s legal order and the Eurozone. But the chances that last year’s agreement to issue EU sovereign debt would have been realised had the UK still been inside the EU are slim, as indeed they would have been if the 2019 British General Election had led to a second referendum.

Macron is the heir of a long line of Pan-Europeanists who have believed, for geopolitical reasons, that the UK can have no part in a European economic and political union. But, like Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi who founded the Paneuropean movement in the 1920s, Macron strongly believes that the UK needs to be absorbed into a well-defined European security system. For Macron, there has never been a reason why Brexit should disrupt the bilateral Franco-British military relationship entrenched in the 2010 Lancaster House Treaties. Nor does he think that the EU’s own security architecture should constrain how the UK participates in collective European security matters, hence his push in 2018 to establish a structure for military action around the EU’s border in the European Intervention Initiative — which includes the UK.

As, in late 2019, it became clear that Johnson was likely to prevail over the parliamentary Remainers, Merkel joined Macron in calling for a post-Brexit European Security Council. But, emboldened by the Conservatives’ substantial parliamentary majority, Johnson has proved less pliable to Macron’s strategic ambitions than May. Contrary to the French President’s hopes, Johnson’s post-election government decided that foreign and security policy should not be any part of the negotiations on the future UK-EU relationship.

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In the absence of any confederal European architecture to ground broad foreign policy co-ordination, there has been little to constrain the divergent paths the UK and the EU have taken towards China since the middle of last year. To some degree, the weight of the UK’s historical relationship with Hong Kong and the nature of Germany’s deep economic relationship with China has made this separation near inevitable. But the British and French governments have pretty similar objectives in the Indo-Pacific. It is the absence of something akin to a European Security Council that ensures there will be less internal European pressure on Berlin to lead an EU policy that extends beyond economic and climate matters, and begins to engage with the probable future pressure points on access in the South China Sea.

Whether it is China or Northern Ireland, Britain’s relationship with the EU is beset with uncertainty. On Northern Ireland, Macron insists that the UK must stick to what it negotiated. But the Johnson government won’t take responsibility for protecting the Single Market any more than the EU will treat the Democratic Unionists as their problem. The present impasse has arisen from a series of misjudgements in the UK and continental capitals about the likely outcomes arising from the political constraints at work, played out against a backdrop of a world being transformed by Sino-American strategic rivalry. This is a fracture in European geopolitics for which neither the UK government nor the EU prepared. Now it is all too evident, the question is whether there is the political space for a grand bargain to repair it.

Some of the country’s 6,000,000 Muslims worship in informal prayer rooms which occasionally become breeding grounds for radical, anti-western Islamist teaching. Financing new mosques is difficult in a secular country where public subsidies for religion are banned.

In any case, planning permission is systematically opposed by a range of Right-wing politicians, who also complain when Muslim prayers spill over into the street.

So a decision in 2013 to build Europe’s biggest mosque in Strasbourg — with the blessing of national and local politicians — seemed at the time to be an important breakthrough. Work began four years ago in an unlovely industrial estate on the southern fringes of the Alsatian capital; the Turkish Prime Minister was present, as were French national and local officials.

Construction of the Very Big Mosque — described ambitiously by its promoters as a rival to the magnificent 12^th century red-stone Strasbourg Cathedral — was haphazard. Eight of the 30 domes were completed. The bases of two minarets appeared.

Building halted in 2020 and resumed this year – but stopped again last month in the midst of a many-sided political row stretching from Alsace to Paris to Ankara. Everyone involved now accuses everyone else of acting in bad faith; everyone seems to be partially right and partially wrong.

In the background — not very far in the background — is President Emmanuel Macron’s campaign to curb the spread of extremist Islamic ideology in France. Further in the background (again, not much further) are the presidential elections next April and May in which the far-Right leader Marine Le Pen hopes to exploit fear of radical Islam — and Islamophobia more generally — to reach the Elysée Palace.

The row over the Grande Mosquée de Strasbourg is, however, confusing and elusive. Macron’s interior minister Gérald Darmanin said last month that the mosque was “part of a project to impose political Islam” in France.

Is he right? Not really. The mosque’s Franco-Turkish promoters, although ultra-conservative, have nothing to do with the anti-western, jihadist ideology which has generated more than 30 terrorist attacks in France in the last six years. Almost all were committed by radicalised French or foreign-born Muslims linked to France’s 5,000,000 or so people of North African or Arab descent.

The Strasbourg mega-mosque is the project of the 700,000-strong French community of Turkish origin, which is heavily concentrated in Alsace. No Franco-Turk has been involved in any of the jihadist attacks in France, although some have been accused of acts of intra-Turkish or anti-Kurdish terrorism on French soil.

The big row over the big mosque is part of a separate, but interwoven, confrontation between France and Turkey and in particular between President Macron and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The two men have frequently wrangled and exchanged insults in the last two years over their two countries’ involvement in the Libyan conflict or illegal Turkish exploration for gas deposits in Greek territorial waters.

Turkey experts say that Erdoğan does have a political project in Europe, but it is about national influence and his own hold on power in Ankara, not the advance of Islam. His aim is to impose his own conservative nationalist interpretation of the Islamic faith on the large Turkish diaspora in Germany, France and other countries.

“The Turkish Government wanted to use this mosque as a kind of soft power,” said Erkan Toguslu, an expert on Turkish affairs at Leuven university in Belgium. “Erdoğan’s aim is not so much religious as nationalist.”

President Erdogan and the Turkish Government are, however, no longer directly involved in the Strasbourg Mosque. The ultra-conservative Turkish movement behind the project, Milli Görüs, has been close to Erdogan at various periods in the past, but Ankara cut off funding for the Grande Mosquée after falling out with Milli Görüs in Turkey last year.

So a bizarre situation has arisen. Successive French governments and local administrations gave their enthusiastic blessing to the Big Mosque when it was linked to Erdogan; after Erdogan ended his involvement it became, according to interior minister Darmanin, a Turkish Trojan Horse — an example of “foreign meddling on our soil”.

When they lost access to funds from Ankara, the mosque’s promoters asked for money from a newly-elected Green and Socialist administration at Strasbourg town hall. Previous local administrations of Right and Left had offered money for the mosque but were turned down. The new Green mayor, Jeanne Barseghian, agreed in principal to make a € 3mcontribution – almost 10% of the total cost.

Although public funding of religious projects is illegal under France’s 1905 “secularity” law, Alsace was not part of France at the time, having been annexed by Germany after the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.

When Alsace returned to France in 1919, it preserved some of its own laws and characteristics, and to this days Alsatian trains run on the right-hand track, as they do in Germany, not on the left as they do in most of France. The German-speaking province also retains a Napoleonic-era right to public funding of religious projects.

There was therefore nothing illegal in the decision earlier this year of the Green mayor of Strasbourg to promise the funds – yet all hell let loose all the same.

Darmanin and other members of the government accused Ms Barseghian of being politically naïve. The far-Right accused her of surrendering to so-called islamogauchisme (an alleged unholy alliance between radical Islam and the Left).

She received death threats from the ultra-Right, and was also bitterly criticised by French-Armenians — of which is she one — for helping an association which refuses to recognise the post-1915 genocide of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.

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The man who leads the organisation which is building the mosque says that Mayor Barseghian has been the victim of shameless political hypocrisy. “Almost every other local political party has offered to helps us in the past,” said Eyüp Sahin, head of the Milli Görüs federation in the eastern region of France. “She never promised anything beforehand. Now they are attacking her.”

Milli Görüs has now withdrawn its request for money from the Strasbourg city authorities and, as a result, Mr Sahin says that completion of the giant mosque will be delayed until 2024 or 2025.

“It has become impossible to deal with French politics and politicians,” he said. “If we seek to raise money abroad, we are attacked. When we seek local money, the sky falls in.

“When it suits them, we are French; when it doesn’t suit them, we are Turks. They demand integration. Well, we are integrated. My accent may not be French but it’s not Turkish either. It’s Alsatian.”

Mr Sahin protests a little too much, however. His organisation, Milli Görüs, is a powerful German-based movement which promotes a very conservative interpretation of Islam and seeks to preserve the Turkishness of the diaspora in Europe into the second, third and fourth generations.

Milli Görüs itself means “national dream”, and the nation that the title refers to is neither France nor Germany.

As part of President Macron’s drive to curb the growing extreme Islamist influence in France, more than a dozen Muslim organisations were asked to sign a charter earlier this year – the Charter for the Principles of French Islam — which rejects foreign influence and recognises the primacy of democracy and secular laws over sharia law. Only three refused, including Milli Görüs and another Turkish organisation even more closely associated with the Turkish state.

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The balkanisation of France’s Muslim community into organisations linked directly or partly to countries of origin was once encouraged by French governments. It is now recognised as part of the problem. There already is, for instance, a big mosque in Strasbourg which is also called confusingly “La Grande Mosquée”, and which attracts worshippers from the local Maghrebin (North African) communities but not Franco-Turks.

Interior minister Mr Darmanin is threatening to dissolve Milli Görüs, as an organisation which refuses the supremacy of French law and is “tied to a foreign power”. Samim Akgönül, head of Turkish studies as Strasbourg university, says that Darmanin is missing the point and missing a trick.

Since Milli Görüs seems to have parted ways with Erdogan the French government should be finding ways, he says, to draw them into French life, not push them away.

“By refusing to consider these populations as part of French society, we are giving them up to Turkey. But in truth they are Strasbourgers,” Mr Akgönül said.

Another academic who knows Turkey well, but who asked not to be named, said that the Strasbourg Mosque row, far from curbing Erdogan’s power, was playing into his hands. “Erdogan uses France in the same way that the Johnson government does in Britain,” he said. “For both of them, stirring up anti-French feeling is a useful way of stirring up national feeling.”

President Macron’s drive to restrain extremist Islamist ideology in France was necessary and well-intentioned.

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It was grotesquely misrepresented in some parts of the Muslim world – and by liberal media in the United States. Unfortunately, however, Macron has allowed his ambitious interior minister to muddle the issue with tough-man posturing – on the Strasbourg Mosque and other issues.

The big, and often misleading, row over the big mosque is part of a wider and dangerous polarisation of attitudes to Islam in France. The far-Right and even part of the traditional Right exploit Islamist excesses and exaggerate Islamist influence to disguise and promote more generalised Islamophobia. Meanwhile, part of the Left refuses to admit that violent, Islamist ideology is advancing — or even that it exists.

The Strasbourg row is confusing — far more than it needed to be — but that’s not surprising. As the 2022 elections approach, it has become increasingly impossible to speak rationally about Islam in France.

When not currying favor with Xi, Erdoğan has also been busy consulting with Vladimir Putin — despite the fact that their two nations backed different sides in the Syrian Civil War. After a face-to-face meeting with Putin in March just before the global shutdown, the Turkish and Russian presidents were coordinating policy on everything from Syria to Libya to a new border war between two of their shared neighbours.

Welcome to the Dictators’ Club. Erdoğan’s antics are just a few indicators of a growing network of personal connections and cooperation between the world’s most notorious autocrats. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are clearly the ring leaders: the two have built a high-profile relationship, having met several times a year since the Chinese President took power. Xi refers to the Russian leader as his “best friend“; Putin has marked Xi’s birthday by buying him ice cream. Each was among the first to congratulate the other for their respective “re-elections” in 2018, and they have publicly supported each other’s altering of their constitutions to extend their power for years to come.

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And together they have their hearts set on expanding the club. Xi has had multiple summits with Kim Jong Un, continuing China’s support for the North Korean dictator’s family; Putin met Kim for the first time last year, strengthening what had been a tangential relationship between Russia and its most secretive neighbour. Not to be outdone, Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader Mohammed bin Salman has been shaking hands with Xi and high-fiving Putin. Meanwhile, Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and Syria’s Bashir al-Assad have each grown publicly closer to the Chinese and Russian Presidents — and have established a relationship with one another as well. Both Xi and Putin have even met directly with the reclusive Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The Dictators’ Club is more than just high fives and ice creams: it’s a source of significant material support as well. The Wall Street Journal warns of a “China-Russia-Iran arms alliance” as China and Russia oppose extending US-backed arms sanctions against the Islamic Republic; Iran will likely make arms deals with both nations if the sanctions are lifted. Similarly, both China and Russia have emerged as conduits through which Venezuela has been evading US oil sanctions, and Xi and Putin have both made oil deals with MBS. Individually and jointly through the UN Security Council, the ringleaders have been working to prop up beleaguered dictators, gaining customers for Russian weapons and partners for China’s massive Belt and Road Initiative in return.

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The Dictators’ Club is alarming, but not unprecedented. On the contrary, the current moment in international relations is reminiscent of the century that followed the defeat of Napoleon, when the hereditary monarchs and nobility of Europe fought to suppress a wave of nationalism, republicanism and liberalism fanning out from France.

When the French Revolution beheaded King Louis XVI, France’s neighbours responded by launching war against the country. The monarchs of Europe wanted not only to strike their rival while it was internally divided, but also to contain the revolutionary ideology. To the surprise of Europe, France won these wars, and then went on the offensive under Napoleon’s leadership. It wasn’t just Mr. Bonaparte’s tactical brilliance that had given France an edge. The French armies, mobilised by a new spirit of nationalism, proved to be more motivated and effective than the forces of other European powers fighting at the command of distant monarchs. Liberty, equality and fraternity were inspiring forces — and dangerous to the status quo.

And so the monarchs of Europe dedicated themselves to cooperating in suppression of these forces. The resultant international order, the Concert of Europe, brought together Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox autocrats; united Germans and Slavs; and superseded national rivalries in the name of propping up the existing political order.

Likewise, the members of the current Dictators’ Club have largely put aside religion, culture and ideology in lieu of naked power — hence why Erdoğan, MBS and Khamenei (all self-proclaimed defenders of Islam) have been silent or supportive of China’s oppression of its Muslim Uighurs. As the club expands, it has courted dictators from across the political spectrum, ranging from socialist Maduro to Right-wing dictators-in-the-making like Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines.

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It wasn’t supposed to be this way. After the end of the Cold War, a number of scholars made bold predictions of what the new international order would look like, but none of them quite match what we see today. Francis Fukuyama boldly proclaimed that we’d reached the “end of history”: the moment when liberal democracy had triumphed over all its alternatives — from monarchy to fascism to communism — as the only legitimate form of government. Even dictators, he claimed, would pretend to be democracies and attempt to legitimise their rule, and in the long run, real elections and respect for human and civil rights would proliferate.

In contrast, Fukuyama’s former teacher, famed political scientist Samuel Huntington, predicted that the world would again divide into opposing camps, not based on nationality or economic systems but along more fundamental lines of religion, culture and worldview.  The resultant “clash of civilizations” would carve up the world into a handful of mutually antagonist blocs — Western, Islamic, Confucian, Latin American and so on — with a high degree of tension and war between the civilizations to be expected.

Still others, such as John Mearsheimer, assumed a return to “great power politics” — the international system that characterised Europe for centuries before the Concert, and during the early twentieth century. In the two World Wars, for instance, multiple powerful countries competed for power and position — fighting wars, making and breaking alliances, racing each other for colonial possessions, and so on.

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By 2020, however, all these predictions seem faulty. Political liberty has entered a period of decline: the number of democracies in the world has dropped, and the remaining democracies are becoming less democratic. Meanwhile, after a period in which terrorism and religious fundamentalism appeared to back up the idea of incompatible civilisations, authoritarian-led countries are making alliances that cut across worldview. Just as Muslim autocrats are supporting Xi’s repression of Islam, Putin — who has taken a page from past Russian czars by presenting himself as a defender of Orthodox Christianity — has brushed aside Russian Christian’s outrage over Erdoğan’s decision to turn the disputed cathedral-turned-mosque-turned-museum that is the Hagia Sophia back to a mosque.

And even though states like China, Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia have been interfering with their neighbours, annexing territory and generally expanding their regional or world influence, there have not emerged the sort of great power conflicts that some have been worried would return. Today, these various expansionary and interventionist states have largely been content to stay out of one another’s way — allowing each to develop its own sphere of influence (the mutually hostile Iran and Saudi Arabia being the notable exception). Even before Covid-19, neither the predictions based on democracy nor culture nor political realism seemed to match the present reality.

The modern Dictators’ Club, much like the old Concert of Europe, is laser-focused on suppressing democracy and liberty. After Napoleon’s defeat, the European powers managed to last a whole century with few major wars between them, in which time they largely suppressed liberal revolutions within their territories and abroad. The monarchs intervened, for instance, to squash revolutions in Italy and Spain during the 1820s. Today, Russia and China are selling spying technology and techniques to authoritarians around the world. Yet the Concert of Europe broke down — temporarily, as nationalist and liberal revolts swept across Europe in 1848, and then permanently, as simmering tensions between the major powers boiled over into the First World War, a conflict that swept aside the last conservative monarchs of Europe.

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Today’s Dictators’ Club is similarly powerful but fragile. Its strength is in many ways an effect of the unique foreign policy of Donald Trump — a confusing and incoherent mix of tough talk, admiration for autocrats, and most important, indifference to much of the world. Should Trump lose in November — or be convinced to take a different approach to the world in a second term — it might not be hard to widen the pre-existing cracks that exist between the world’s dictatorial regimes.

Significant, sometimes violent, tensions exist between Xi and Putin’s allies. Take the Middle Eastern triumvirate of MBS, Khamenei and Erdoğan: Saudi Arabia and Iran are engaged in a Cold War; Iran and Turkey have have supported opposing sides in Syria; and Erdoğan has personally embarrassed MBS over the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Friendship with Xi and Putin also comes with costs that their autocratic buddies may not always be willing to pay. Duterte and Xi have still not come to terms over their disputed claims in the South China Sea; Russia and Saudi Arabia are fierce rivals in the international oil market and engaged in a brief price war just a few months ago. And some dictators, like Kim Jong Un, simply remain wild cards, who won’t be tamed. The friendship between the two ringleaders themselves may not be sustainable: the Brookings Institute recently issued a report concluding that strategic, economic and cultural differences between Russia and China will likely outweigh Xi and Putin’s personal relationship in the long run.

But even if these mutually supportive dictators are willing to ignore one another’s offences, the public may not be so forgiving. There has been outrage among Saudis and Iranians over the plight of the Uighurs; the Russian Orthodox church has condemned Erdoğan’s reverting the Hagia Sophia into a mosque. Sometimes even dictators have to listen to their citizens, when they shout loud enough. Neither Xi nor Putin is invincible: both are currently facing significant public protests, in Hong Kong and eastern Russia respectively. And China and Russia (not to mention Iran) have been among the countries hardest hit by Covid-19 (of course, so too have the US and UK), which has had destabilising effects in both countries.

Two hundred years ago, the choice by the kings, emperors, and tsars of Europe to cooperate came from a place of weakness, not of strength. Napoleon’s victories and the growing sentiments of liberalism and nationalism had exposed the fragility of monarchy. And yet the Concert system lasted, partly because liberal states like the UK supported them for the sake of stability, while the US focused on its own hemisphere. Now, as long as the democratic powers remain divided, indifferent and ambivalent towards democracy (at home and abroad) the Dictators’ Club can continue to thrive — to the detriment of Hong Kongers, Uighurs, opposition leaders and others looking for liberty and freedom around the world.

The end of secularism is nigh

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In recent decades, the mingled regret and yearning that the memory of Rama’s capital can inspire among Hindus had come to be focused on one particular location in the modern city of Ayodhya: the Ram Janmabhoomi, the ‘birthplace of Rama’. At the moment, nothing serves to mark the sacred spot. But soon enough that will change. A great complex of buildings will rise. As Modi, officially declaring the process of construction begun, put it: “A great temple will now be built for our Lord Rama.”

A fortnight earlier, the President of Turkey had celebrated a similar reconsecration. In 1453, when the Christian capital of Constantinople fell to the Ottomans, its most stupefying building, the great cathedral of Hagia Sophia, had been converted into a mosque, and duly served for almost half a millennium as a monument to the triumph of Islam over a defeated and superceded order. Then, in 1935, a decade and more after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and its replacement within its heartlands by a Turkish republic, the mosque of Ayasofya was turned into a museum. So, for decades, it remained. Then, this summer, the museum once again became a mosque. On 24 July, Hagia Sophia opened for Friday prayers. “It is breaking away from its chains of captivity,” President Erdogan declared rhapsodically. “It was the greatest dream of our youth. It was the yearning of our people and it has been accomplished.”

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The synchronicity between Modi’s trip to Ayodhya and Erdogan’s to Hagia Sophia is striking, and only flimsily obscured by the fact that the Prime Minister of India is trampling the legacy of an Islamic empire much as the President of Turkey has trampled the legacy of a Christian one. In the early sixteenth century, shortly after the Moghul conquest of the lands that once, so Hindus believed, had constituted the Ram Rajya, the ‘realm of Rama’, a mosque was built in Ayodhya. By the twentieth century, large numbers of Hindus had come to believe that this same mosque, the Babri Masjid, stood directly on the site of the Ram Janmabhoomi. In the 1980s, the BJP — the party to which Modi belongs — began a campaign to demolish it. In 1992 a mob duly tore it down. Communal riots exploded. Thousands died.

Last November, even as the site was formally granted to Hindus, the Supreme Court of India condemned the demolition of the mosque as a crime. But a crime by whose standards? Not, it would seem, by Modi’s. Just as Erdogan justified the conversion of Hagia Sophia to a mosque by “right of conquest”, so the Prime Minister of India, hailing the opportunity to build a temple on the site where the Babri Masjid had stood, invoked the ancient traditions of his country. It was, he declared, “a unique gift from law-abiding India to truth, non-violence, faith and sacrifice.” History as well as justice stood on his side.

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That both developments — the building of the temple and the reconsecration of the mosque — have provoked very similar expressions of alarm from secularists illustrates the degree to which the Hindu prime minister and the Muslim president, despite their many differences, are at war with a common enemy.

Modi, in his speech at Ayodhya last week, made a telling comparison between India’s freedom struggle and what he described as the “centuries-old penance, sacrifices and resolve” of those who had campaigned to raise a temple to Lord Rama on the site of the god’s birth. The comment infuriated India’s secularists — as well it might have done. Modi, in effect, was accusing them of collaboration. The British Raj might be gone, but not so its pernicious legacy. The founding fathers of independent India, who had constituted the country as a secular republic, had betrayed its primordial characteristic of Hindutva: the qualities that for millennia had defined it as Hindu through and through.

In like manner, Erdogan’s real target was not Byzantium, nor the Orthodox Church, nor even Greece, but the secular status of the country which he rules as president. Just as Justinian, the emperor who originally built Hagia Sophia back in the sixth century, had claimed to have vanquished Solomon, so might Erdogan, by abolishing its status as a museum, have claimed to have vanquished Atatürk. The father of Turkish secularism, whose contempt for Islam had been matched only by his admiration for the model of modernity provided by Europe, had consciously sought to wrest his country from the hold of its history. Now, no less consciously, Erdogan is engaged in a mighty effort to redeem Turkey from secularism, and restore it to the embrace of its Islamic past.

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All of which should serve as a wake-up call to the West that it is not only its financial, economic and military muscle that is currently atrophying. So too is its ability to market its culturally conditioned assumptions as universal. The concept of the secular is not, as many in West like to think, a neutral one. Quite the opposite. As the very word betrays, it derives from the distinctive theology and history of Latin Christendom: for ‘saeculum’, the word given by the Romans to the endless flux of things, was counterpointed by St Augustine and his heirs to the religio, the ‘bond’, that, so Augustine had taught, joined the pilgrim Church on its journey through the centuries to the radiant eternity of the City of God.

Over time, these two words had evolved to become words in the language that the British had then exported to India, and around the world. That there existed things called ‘religions’ — ‘Hinduism’, ‘Islam’, ‘Judaism’ ­— and that these functioned in a dimension distinct from entire spheres of human activity — spheres called ‘secular’ in English — was not a conviction native to anywhere except for Western Europe. None of which had prevented it from proving an astoundingly successful export: no less influential in Atatürk’s Turkey than in Nehru’s India. Long after the collapse of Europe’s empires, its colonisation of elites around the world endured.

Yet if the West, over the duration of its global hegemony, had proven itself skilled in the art of repackaging Christian concepts for non-Christian audiences, then the spread of secularism inevitably depended for its success upon the care with which it covered its tracks. Those tracks, as the era of Western hegemony slips away, are becoming ever more evident. Modi and Erdogan have certainly spotted them. The summer of 2020, notable as it already is, will surely be remembered by historians of the future as a key waystop on what is likely to prove perhaps the key narrative of the 21^st century: the decline of the West and the rise of a multi-polar world. The temple of Lord Rama and the mosque of Ayasofya will stand as monuments to a changing of the global guard.

America’s decline is impossible to disentangle from China’s rise, so it is natural that the rapid climb of the Middle Kingdom back to its historic global primacy dominates discussion of the civilisation-state. Though the phrase was popularised by the British writer Martin Jacques, the political theorist Christopher Coker observed in his excellent recent book on civilisation-states that “the turn to Confucianism began in 2005, when President Hu Jintao applauded the Confucian concept of social harmony and instructed party cadres to build a ‘harmonious society.’” In any case, it is only under his successor Xi’s rule that China as a rival civilisation-state has really penetrated the Western consciousness. “The advent of Xi Jinping as the Chinese president in 2012 propelled the idea of ‘civilization-state’ to the forefront of the political discourse,” the Indian international relations scholar Ravi Dutt Bajpai remarks, “as Xi believes that ‘a civilization carries on its back the soul of a country or nation.’” 

This civilisational ethos radiates from Chinese analysis of the country’s future path. In his influential 2012 book The China Wave: Rise of a Civilizational State, the Chinese political theorist Zhang Weiwei observed with pride that “China is now the only country in the world which has amalgamated the world’s longest continuous civilization with a huge modern state… Being the world’s longest continuous civilization has allowed China’s traditions to evolve, develop and adapt in virtually all branches of human knowledge and practices, such as political governance, economics, education, art, music, literature, architecture, military, sports, food and medicine. The original, continuous and endogenous nature of these traditions is indeed rare and unique in the world.” Unlike the ever-changing West, constantly searching after progress and reordering its societies to suit the intellectual fashions of the moment, Weiwei observes that “China draws on its ancient traditions and wisdoms,” and its return to pre-eminence is the natural result.

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It is in these hallowed traditions, of a centralised state with a 4000-year history, of an efficient bureaucratic class adhering to Confucian values, and of an emphasis on stability and social harmony over liberty, that Chinese theorists credit their civilisation-state’s rise, now “seemingly unstoppable and irreversible”. Surveying a West in decline and a Middle East mired in bloody chaos, Weiwei remarks with cool detachment that “if the ancient Roman empire had not disintegrated and been able to accomplish the transformation into a modern state, then today’s Europe could also be a medium-sized civilisational state; if the Islamic world today made up of dozens of countries could become unified under one modern governing regime, it could also be a civilisational state with more than a billion people, but the chance for all these scenarios has long gone, and in the world today, China is the sole country where the world’s longest continuous civilisation and a modern state are merged into one.”

Yet the appeal of the civilisation-state model is not limited to China. Under Putin, the other great Eurasian empire, Russia, has publicly abandoned the Europe-focused liberalising projects of the 1990s — a period of dramatic economic and societal collapse driven by adherence to the policies of Western liberal theorists — for its own cultural sonderweg or special path of a uniquely Russian civilisation centred on an all-powerful state. In a 2013 address to the Valdai Club, Putin remarked that Russia “has always evolved as a state‑civilisation, reinforced by the Russian people, Russian language, Russian culture, Russian Orthodox Church and the country’s other traditional religions. It is precisely the state‑civilisation model that has shaped our state polity.” In a 2012 speech to the Russian Federal Assembly, Putin likewise asserted that “we must value the unique experience passed on to us by our forefathers. For centuries, Russia developed as a multi‑ethnic nation (from the very beginning), a state‑civilisation bonded by the Russian people, Russian language and Russian culture native for all of us, uniting us and preventing us from dissolving in this diverse world.” 

It is worthy of note that while Russia is frequently characterised by both liberal commentators and far-right enthusiasts alike, particularly Americans, as a breeding ground for state-backed white nationalism, this claim derives from the racial obsessions of the United States rather than the actual ideology of the Russian state. Indeed, for Putin it is Russia’s heritage as a polyglot empire that makes the state he helms a civilisation state rather than a mere nation, explicitly stressing that “the self‑definition of the Russian people is that of a multi‑ethnic civilisation.” 

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In a revealing 2018 essay, Putin’s adviser Vladislav Surkov — who was fired from his role this February — foregrounded this hybridity, part-European and part-Asian, as the central characteristic of the Russian soul. “Our cultural and geopolitical identity is reminiscent of a volatile identity of the one born into a mixed-race family,” Surkov wrote. “A half-blood, a cross-breed, a weird-looking guy. Russia is a Western-Eastern half-breed nation. With its double-headed statehood, hybrid mentality, intercontinental territory and bipolar history, it is charismatic, talented, beautiful and lonely. Just as a half-breed should be.” For Surkov, Russia’s destiny as a civilisation-state, like that of the Byzantium it succeeded, is one as “a civilisation that has absorbed the East and the West. European and Asian at the same time, and for this reason neither quite Asian and nor quite European.” 

This unresolved tension between East and West, Europe and Asia defines the political stance of Byzantium’s other successor state and Nato’s current problem child, Turkey. Like China, a great premodern empire eclipsed by the rise of the West to global dominance, Turkey under Erdogan now cloaks its revanchist desires in the sumptuous mantle of the Ottoman past, reviling the West even as Erdogan depends on Trump’s America and Merkel’s Germany for his regime’s survival. When the new imam of the newly-converted Haghia Sophia mosque mounted the pulpit last month, sabre in hand, to proclaim the rebirth of Turkey and curse the memory of the country’s Europe-facing moderniser Ataturk, it was to underline that Turkey’s glorious future depends on reviving its Ottoman past. The date of the ceremony, the 97th anniversary of the Treaty of Lausanne which dissolved the Ottoman Empire and replaced it with the Turkish Republic was equally symbolic. Just as Justinian, on entering his great new cathedral, remarked that he had surpassed Solomon, so had Erdogan surpassed Ataturk. The age of pleading to join Europe, as an impoverished supplicant, had ended; the age of conquest had returned.

Trapped in the post-historical dreams of liberalism, many Western observers of Erdogan’s growing aggression had missed these symbolic cues, or dismissed them as empty rhetoric, a luxury not available to Turkey’s former subject peoples in the Balkans and Middle East. When, in March, Turkey attempted to force Greece’s borders open with thousands of migrants assembled from the slums of Istanbul, the Bayraktar drone that hovered above the contested border fence bore the callsign 1453, the date of the fall of Constantinople, just as the drill-ships that constantly threaten to violate Greek and Cypriot sovereignty bear the names of the Ottoman admirals and corsairs who ravaged the coasts of Greece and Europe. 

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Turkey’s intent, the country’s interior minister Suleyman Soylu boasted during the border crisis, was to destroy the European Union. “Europe cannot endure this, cannot handle this,” he claimed. “The governments in Europe will change, their economies will deteriorate, their stock markets will collapse.” In a speech this month, at the same time as the Turkish navy threatened Greece with war, Soylu outlined Turkey’s civilisational vision of the new world order: “On this path,” he told the assembled audience of military dignitaries, “we’ll design by embracing the entire world with our civilisation, holding the West and East with one hand, the North and South in the other, the Middle East and the Balkans in one hand, the Caucasus and Europe in the other.”

In the newly-annexed regions of northern Syria, Turkey’s rebel proxy militias, dominated by ethnic Turkmen, name themselves after Ottoman sultans, adopt the Ottoman seal as their logos and give interviews in front of maps of the Ottoman Empire at its greatest extent, all while expelling the region’s Kurds and Christians from their homes. In Syria as in Libya and Iraq, Erdogan’s expansionist vision explicitly cites the Ottoman Empire as legitimation for its path of conquest, tracing Erdogan’s “borders of the heart” far beyond the reach of modern Turkey, from Thessaloniki in the West to Mosul in the East. Seizing on weakness wherever he finds it, even the heart of liberal Europe itself lies in the Turkish strongman’s sights. 

When his ministers were barred from addressing crowds of ethnic Turks in the Netherlands and his supporters rioted in The Hague, Erdogan called the Dutch government “Nazis” before telling the Turks of Europe: “Make not three, but five children. Because you are the future of Europe. That will be the best response to the injustices against you.” Alternating, with all the passionate inconsistency of a SOAS undergraduate, between triumphalist Islamic expansionism and accusations of racism and Islamophobia wherever his will is thwarted, the Turkish strongman crows over his starring role in the continent’s decline, boasting that “Europe will pay for what they have done. God willing, the question of the European Union will again be on the table,” and exulting that while “they said a century ago that we were the ‘sick man,’ now they are the ‘sick man.’ Europe is collapsing.” 

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As with the Netherlands, urging Turks in Europe to outbreed their native hosts and then calling European leaders Nazis when they protest, Erdogan’s civilisational discourse exists in a strange symbiosis with the Western far-right, seen most dramatically in his response to the Christchurch shooting last year. When the killer Brandon Tarrant slaughtered 51 Muslim worshippers in the Christchurch mosque, it was with a rifle on which he had scrawled the names of various European battles against the Ottomans. In his manifesto, Tarrant had explicitly cited Erdogan as “leader of one of the oldest enemies of our people” and threatened Turks, who he described as “ethnic soldiers currently occupying Europe,” that “we will kill you and drive you roaches from our lands. We are coming for Constantinople and will destroy every mosque and minaret in the city. The Haghia Sophia will be free of minarets and Constantinople will be rightfully Christian-owned once more.” In direct response, Erdogan aired Tarrant’s livestream of the slaughter at his campaign rallies, to the horror of the New Zealand government, declaring days after the killings that “you will not turn Istanbul into Constantinople,” and vowing that ”Hagia Sophia will no longer be called a museum. Its status will change. We will call it a mosque,” a promise he fulfilled last month, leading the faithful in prayer in the great cathedral’s second conquest. 

To the horror of liberal European politicians, like the Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, who Turkish foreign Mevlut Çavuşoğlu warned was “dragging Europe into the abyss,” and that “Holy wars will soon begin in Europe,” Erdogan’s AKP party revels in the rhetoric of civilisational conflict. Intentionally or not, Erdogan is doing much to drag the continent’s centrist politicians rightwards. Through his actions, he stokes fear and distrust of Europe’s Muslim minority, and then reaps the domestic rewards of the response his warlike discourse brings. But as with many of his stunts, Erdogan’s short-term gains may have unintended consequences stretching far into the future, both for Turkey and for Europe. 

Turkey’s growing naval provocations in the Mediterranean are fuelling such an angry response from European politicians, helmed by Emmanuel Macron, that the EU’s foreign minister Josep Borrell remarked with exasperation in the European Parliament recently that, listening to the mood of the assembled MEPs, “I thought I saw in the Chamber that Pope Pius V had resurfaced calling for the Holy Alliance against Turkey and mobilising the troops of Christendom to face the Ottoman invasion.” It is not difficult to foresee Macron, tacking right as he heads towards the election season, fusing his campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood at home with an assertive European posture against Turkey abroad. A civilisation, like an ethnic group, is defined as much in opposition to a rival Other as from any intrinsic cultural content, and in each other both Erdogan and Macron may have found the perfect foils for their civilisational projects.

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Indeed, it is striking that Europe’s soi-disant liberal saviour is the most prominent Western adopter of the new language of civilisation-states: no doubt the former Hegel scholar has discerned the Weltgeist. In an overlooked speech last year to a gathering of France’s ambassadors, Macron mused that China, Russia and India were not merely economic rivals but “genuine civilisation states… which have not just disrupted our international order, assumed a key role in the economic order, but have also very forcefully reshaped the political order and the political thinking that goes with it, with a great deal more inspiration than we have.” Macron observed that “they have a lot more political inspiration than Europeans today. They take a logical approach to the world, they have a genuine philosophy, a resourcefulness that we have to a certain extent lost.”

Warning his audience that “we know that civilisations are disappearing; countries as well. Europe will disappear,” Macron lauded the civilisational projects of Russia and Hungary, which “have a cultural, civilisational vitality that is inspiring,” and declared that France’s mission, its historic destiny, was to guide Europe into a civilisational renewal, forging a “collective narrative and a collective imagination. That is why I believe very deeply that this is our project and must be undertaken as a project of European civilisation.”

There is much here for British conservatives to like, certainly far more than the Global Britain fantasies which neoconservative and neoliberal thinktankers persist in trying to sell the Johnson government. Writing for a British audience in The Guardian last year, Macron remarked that “nationalists are misguided when they claim to defend our identity by withdrawing from the EU, because it is European civilisation that unites, frees and protects us.” Instead, he urged, “we are at a pivotal moment for our continent, a moment when together we need to politically and culturally reinvent the shape of our civilisation in a changing world. Now is the time for a European renaissance.” Yet for Britain, as for the rest of Europe, defining the essential nature of that civilisation is a harder question than it is for China or for Russia. 

Whereas the rising civilisation-states of Eurasia define themselves against the liberal West, the West, and Europe, struggle to define their own very natures, and place greater intellectual emphasis on deconstructing it than on defending it: an urge that is, like the impetus to deny the existence of civilisations as bounded entities, itself ironically a unique marker of our own civilisation. Perhaps a civilisation is merely an empire that survived through and past the age of nation states, yet it is nation states, carved from the bloody wreckage of past empires, that define modern Europe. Perhaps Guy Verhofstadt, the risible butt of Brexiteer mirth, was right after all when he observed that “the world order of tomorrow is not a world order based on nation states or countries. It’s a world order that is based on empires.” 

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But then, though there are strong political taboos against observing it, we already live as subjects of an American empire, though few would want to claim America as a civilisation; fewer, indeed, than view the struggling hegemon as an anti-civilisation, dissolving the variety of European and other cultures in the harsh solvent of global capital.  Does even the West exist as a coherent, bounded entity? As Coker notes, “Neither the Greeks nor sixteenth-century Europeans… regarded themselves as ‘Western’, a term which dates back only to the late eighteenth century.” Macron urges us to root our sense of belonging to a specific European civilisation in the Enlightenment, yet this is a far from convincing prospect. After all, it was the universalising tendencies contained in Enlightenment liberalism that led us to this impasse in the first place. As Portugal’s former foreign minister Bruno Macaes observed in a perceptive recent essay, it is precisely the global aspirations of liberalism that have severed the West, and Europe particularly, from its own cultural roots. 

“Western societies have sacrificed their specific cultures for the sake of a universal project,” Macaes notes. “One can no longer find the old tapestry of traditions and customs or a vision of the good life in these societies.” Our naive faith that liberalism, derived from the political and cultural traditions of Northern Europe, would conquer the world has now been shattered for good. Instead, it is the defiantly non-liberal civilisation-states of Eurasia that threaten to swallow us whole. Where then, does that leave Europe, and what are we to do with liberalism? “Now that we have sacrificed our own cultural traditions to create a universal framework for the whole planet,” Macaes asks, “are we now supposed to be the only ones to adopt it?”

In 1996, the political theorist Samuel P. Huntington observed that ‘in the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, the Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: It is false, it is immoral and it is dangerous. Imperialism is the necessary logical consequence of universalism.” Yet Huntington, like his critics, was writing at a time of unchallenged American pre-eminence. Critics of Huntington’s civilisational thesis, like modern academic critics of the concept of civilisation-states, are challenging a construct that no longer exists, of an all-powerful West arrogantly dismissing the rest from a standpoint of political superiority. Now, however, it is we in the West who are in decline and it is in the universalising myths of liberalism that our powerful civilisational rivals trace the root causes of our failure.

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By aris roussinos

In any case, even within the American empire, the collapse of US power abroad and the growing disfavour with which European civilisation is held in the United States itself do not bode well for the longterm survival of a coherent Western civilisation. If the West, like liberalism, is at this stage merely a justifying ideology for the American empire, then we will be forced to replace it with something else soon enough. It is precisely this problem of determining what that replacement will be that will define Britain and Europe’s politics for the rest of our lifetimes. Europe’s ageing liberal ideologues, the fading 1968 generation which has dominated our politics for so long, do not appear to have answers for these questions; indeed, they do not even seem to realise, even now, that these questions exist. 

It is only when we see Macron struggling to rally European civilisation for the coming age of empires, or observe European strongmen like Viktor Orban, hailed by many Anglo-Saxon conservatives as the saviour of Western civilisation, railing against the West with all the passion and fury of an anti-colonial revolutionary, that we see glimpses of a future stranger and more complex than our current political discourse allows. When we see Poland mandating the study of Latin in schools to imbue pupils with an understanding of “the Latin roots of our civilisation,” or the young rising star of the Dutch radical right Thierry Baudet asserting that we are living through a “European spring,” “contradictory to the political spectrum that has dominated the West since the French Revolution,” which will “change the direction that all our countries are going to take in the coming two generations,” we discern, just as we do in the BLM protests or the spread of the American social justice faith in our streets and universities, the political battlegrounds of Europe’s future.

The most perceptive critique of Huntington’s civilisational thesis was always that the bloodiest confrontations were within civilisations and not between them. In the new age of the civilisation-state, perhaps the greatest challenge to our social harmony will come not from the challengers beyond our cultural borders, but from the battle within them to define who and what they defend.

The experiment succeeded beyond Gavotti’s wildest dreams: the concept proven, aerial bombing would dominate the warfare of the ensuing century, levelling Europe’s cities in the following decades, and later the historic trading cities of the Levant in the Arab Spring wars. 

Exactly one hundred years after Gavotti’s fateful flight, protestors in the eastern city of Benghazi rose up against the dictator Muammar al-Gadhafi and the current Libyan war began. Nato intervened, winning UN approval for a humanitarian intervention to protect Benghazi and its lightly armed rebels from Gadhafi’s vengeful army, whose tanks were just entering the city’s outskirts when they were incinerated from the sky by the high-tech descendants of Gavotti’s experiment. It is safe to say, at this point, that the results of the Nato intervention were not as intended. 

The dreams of an Arab world breaking off the shackles of authoritarianism and joining Europe and America in liberal democratic harmony were shattered by the chaos that followed. Russia’s displeasure at the humanitarian intervention it had reluctantly acceded to escalating into regime change led directly to Putin’s refusal to countenance Western airstrikes against the Syrian government, and to Russia’s own, brutal and — so far — successful aerial intervention to prop up Assad’s rule. Even Benghazi’s Italianate architecture, its unique glory, has been destroyed, not by Gadhafi’s tanks but by the bitter fighting which ravaged the city in the decade since the Western alliance declared victory.

The Nato intervention promised at the time to herald a new wave of military campaigns for humanitarian ends, and to give the Atlantic alliance a cause to justify its continued existence long after the end of the Cold War. Instead, allies are now locked in a naval standoff off Libya’s coast which threatens to break the alliance apart, and to drag European militaries into the ever-widening chaos of the Arab Spring wars. 

The current Libyan conflict derives from longstanding regional rivalries within the country, but has become subject to the antagonisms destabilising the region as a whole, sucked into the Middle East Cold War now playing out from the Red Sea to Italy’s shores. 

The Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, along with its financial backer Qatar saw the Arab Spring as an opportunity to promote revolutionary Muslim Brotherhood governance projects across the Arab world. It also supports the Tripoli administration of Fayez al-Sarraj, which nominally leads an unstable coalition of Islamist groups, regional autonomists from the coastal city of Misrata and from the western Amazigh Berber minority, and urban militias indistinguishable from organised crime cartels.

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On the opposing side, the counterrevolutionary Gulf kingdoms of the UAE and Saudi Arabia, along with their local client Egypt, back the would-be strongman Khalifa Haftar and Libya’s rival government in the eastern city of Tobruk. The Libyan National Army forces there are composed of Cyrenaican tribesmen and quietist Salafist militias, along with mercenaries from Sudan and Chad.

Having taken control of almost all the country, Haftar’s LNA forces, heavily-armed and lavishly equipped through the largesse of the UAE, launched a push to seize the capital last April. It precipitated an intensified Turkish intervention to prop up the Tripoli government. Erdogan flooded the battle space with Bayraktar drones, armoured vehicles, Turkish military advisors and thousands of Syrian mercenaries from Turkey’s proxy militias, still notionally referred to as Syrian rebels.

The Turkish intervention changed the course of the war, with Haftar’s forces retreating from Tripoli in disarray, harried by drone strikes from the air and artillery on the ground. Last week, Turkey’s foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu and spy chief Hakan Fidan visited Tripoli in triumph, promising a new era of strategic and economic cooperation between Erdogan’s government and its Libyan client.

It is the expansionist nature of this cooperation that most alarms European officials. Earlier this year, shortly before intervening in force in Libya, the Turkish government signed a memorandum of understanding with Sarraj’s besieged Tripoli administration, dividing up much of the Eastern Mediterranean, and its plentiful undersea deposits of oil and gas, between them. This MoU, which saw Turkey claim for itself Greek waters up to the coast of Crete, immediately drew condemnation from the European Union and the United States. 

The discovery of petroleum deposits beneath the Eastern Mediterranean had already drawn the region into a Cold War of sorts, with Greece and Cyprus assembling a regional defence and energy coalition including Israel and Egypt to box Turkey in and divide the potential oil wealth between them. The United States backs the alliance, seeing a future Eastern Mediterranean oil pipeline as a rival to Russia’s petroleum exports to the EU, diminishing the diplomatic leverage Putin’s market dominance holds over Germany and central Europe.

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Turkish threats to send drill ships into Greek and Cypriot waters, along with Erdogan’s alternating requests for Greece to demilitarise its eastern islands and threats to invade them, already risk an incident in the Eastern Mediterranean escalating into a war between the two notional Nato allies. France, increasingly hostile to Turkey and a major strategic player in the Eastern Mediterranean for the first time since the mid-19th century, has stepped in as Greece’s military patron, conducting joint naval and aerial drills, and deploying frigates and an aircraft carrier to ward off Turkish encroachment in Greek and Cypriot water. The defence partnership has been derided by the Turkish foriegn ministry as the “axis of malice”. 

Indeed, Emmanuel Macron has now emerged as Erdogan’s fiercest critic within the Nato, accusing the Turkish government of supporting ISIS in Syria, of destabilising the region by launching wars against America’s Syrian Kurdish allies, and of accelerating the “brain death” of the Western alliance. Quietly backing Haftar, France now finds itself working alongside Russia in Libya, with the wartorn country emerging as the testing ground for Macron’s rapprochement with Nato’s eastern rival.

Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group, perhaps paid for by the UAE, are now deployed against the Tripoli government and its Turkish and Syrian mercenary allies on the battlefields of Libya. Advanced Russian fighter jets, perhaps also piloted by mercenaries, have been flown to Libya to counteract Turkey’s aerial superiority in the conflict, as each escalation leads to counter-escalation on the part of the rival factions’ external patrons. As Haftar’s forces pull back towards the east of the country, neighbouring Egypt, another American client state at odds with Turkey since its military ruler Abdel Fattah el-Sisi overthrew his predecessor Mohammed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood government in 2014, has threatened to intervene directly. With the possibility of outright victory likely to elude each side, a division of the country into two warring entities, each a proxy of rival regional powers, is emerging on Europe’s southern doorstep.

For the European Union, Libya’s growing chaos is a strategic disaster. With the country both a training hub for terrorism and the central launching ground for the migrant boats upending the continent’s politics, EU officials had hoped that Libya would become the trial run for the continental bloc’s new policy of strategic autonomy. After all, a Turkish government that so vigorously uses migrants as a diplomatic weapon against the EU’s eastern borders will surely not be a reliable partner controlling migration from the south.

Similarly, Turkey’s indulgent attitude to jihadist fighters in Syria does not bode well for its role in Libya, or in the wider Sahel where French and European forces are already struggling to control a growing jihadist insurgency. “It’s a danger to ourselves,” French defence minister Yves Le Drian told Le Figaro last week, “an unacceptable strategic risk, because it’s 200 km from the Italian coast.”

Yet the EU’s Irini naval operation, which sees French and Greek warships join German reconnaissance aircraft in a mission to enforce the UN arms embargo on the warring factions, was slow to begin and controversial from the start. By focusing on shipments by sea, Irini has no mandate to monitor or intercept weapons shipments to Haftar’s LNA forces from the UAE and Egypt, validating Turkish claims that the mission is biased against its own intervention. Yet by fusing the separate disputes over the Eastern Mediterranean’s oilfields, the Syrian war and the battle for control of Libya into one interwoven and escalating conflict, Erdogan’s Turkey has created an intractable mess almost impossible to de-escalate, with the risk of open warfare between Nato members growing every day. 

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Only last week, France accused Turkish warships of locking their missile-launching radar onto the French frigate Courbet, an “aggressive act” designed to deter the French navy from intercepting arms shipments to Tripoli. “The Turks are behaving in an unacceptable manner and are exploiting NATO,” a French official told the press, “France cannot just stand by.” Turkey’s foreign ministry responded with a statement claiming that “the support France has provided to the putschist and pirate Haftar … has exacerbated the crisis in Libya.  What should actually be a cause for concern are France’s dark ties. It is unacceptable for a NATO ally to behave this way.”

Similarly, Greece’s defence minister Nikos Panagiotopoulos warned this month that Greece is ready for war with Turkey, telling journalists that “we are preparing for any scenarios. Among these possibilities is also military intervention. We do not want to go there, but we want to make it clear that we will do whatever it takes to defend our sovereign rights to the fullest extent possible.” 

The Nato intervention in Libya almost a decade ago was surely the high water mark of American hegemony and its post-Cold War justifying ideology of liberal interventionism. America and its European allies were able to overthrow a brutal dictator, but soon found themselves entirely powerless to influence what replaced him. Now the United States finds itself a backseat spectator to the region’s spiralling chaos, the security of its European allies threatened by the jostling for position America’s growing weakness has unleashed, and the future of the Nato alliance itself threatened by the fruits of its own poorly-conceived campaign. 

The EU, equally, had long hoped to be a new kind of superpower, where soft power and the assumed appeal of the European way of life would obviate the need to sully itself with the rough business of force. Yet as the escalating crisis in the Mediterranean shows, Europe’s inability to project hard power leaves the continent’s security at the mercy of smaller but more forceful actors. European states who had hoped to export democracy to Libya instead find themselves importing terrorism from the country, as shown by Saturday’s lethal attack in Reading.

In a reversal of Gavotti’s historic experiment, it is Turkey and other Middle Eastern states who are now the expansionist military innovators in Libya and the wider region and European governments who are passive spectators to history, defensive and fearful of what is coming next.

The furthest edge of the European Union has recently become the centre of the continental bloc’s attention; and what happened in Kastanies is reverberating in Brussels, Paris and Berlin, as Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan, humiliated by the loss of at least 33 Turkish soldiers in an airstrike in Syria’s Idlib, takes his rage out on Europe.

Since the multi-billion Euro refugee deal with Europe in 2016, Erdogan, like Gaddafi before him, has wielded the prospect of unleashing an unstoppable wave of migrants as a threat against the soft, rich and disunited European powers he incessantly rails against.

Until now, the threat has always worked, both for extracting Danegeld at will from fearful European leaders, especially the perennially pliant Angela Merkel, and for ensuring European acquiescence to his military adventures in Northern Syria. Among them, the January 2018 invasion of the Kurdish region of Afrin, and the October 2019 invasion of the country’s Kurdish-dominated northeast each saw hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians flee their homes in the face of war crimes carried out by Turkey’s rebel proxy militias and a systematic Turkish campaign of ethnic cleansing and forced demographic change.

But this week, when Erdogan finally pulled the trigger, European leaders did something few expected, least of all the Turkish despot himself: they said no, and pulled together in what became the first display of European diplomatic unity and common purpose since Brexit unsettled the fragile union.

Erdogan had hoped that European leaders would support his faltering war against the Syrian government and its Russian backer in the county’s northwestern Idlib governorate. Here Assad’s forces, backed by brutal and indiscriminate airstrikes against civilians as well as the mixed rebel and al-Qaeda-linked jihadist forces backed by Turkey on the ground, are regaining territory lost in the first years of the almost decade-long war, causing one million civilians to flee their homes in the process.

Erdogan’s propaganda channels, like the state-run broadcaster TRT, linked the sudden arrival of tens of thousands of migrants at Greece’s border with the humanitarian crisis in Idlib, claiming that the huddled masses seeking to gain entrance to Europe were fleeing Russian and Syrian government bombing. Despite this claim being boosted by well-meaning Western commentators, it is entirely untrue. The dispossessed of Idlib remain trapped in Idlib, barred from entering Turkey by the second-largest wall on earth, manned by Turkish border guards ordered to use lethal force to prevent their entry.

Instead, the flow of migrants who appeared at Greece’s border demanding onward passage to the UK, Germany and Sweden were drawn from the migrant underclass of Istanbul and other Western Turkish cities, mostly Afghans from the country’s Hazara Shia minority working in the country’s booming sweatshops as well as Pakistanis, Moroccans and other recent migrants drawn in by visa-free travel to what has become the easiest point of access to the European Union.

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Lied to by the Turkish state, which informed them that Europe’s borders were now open, they were then bussed to the border in free coaches laid on by the Erdogan government for this sole purpose. When they realised that the border was closed, they attempted to gain entry by force, hurling rocks and tear gas grenades at the Greek soldiers and police guarding the border, or rushing weak sections of the border fence as Turkish police fired tear gas at Greek officials to distract them, and used armoured cars to pull down the border fence.

The images of an angry mass of mostly economic migrants attempting to enter Greece by force, urged on and openly supported by Turkish security forces, have awoken a strong feeling of patriotic and indeed nationalist sentiment in Greece, where the new conservative government has directly labelled the events at the border as a form of hybrid warfare, in which Erdogan utilises migrants as weapons and the Turkish and international media as a force multiplier to secure his aims.

Civilian hunters, fishermen and military reservists from border villages have formed semi-official patrol groups along the frontier, capturing and detaining migrants who have broken through and handing them to the Greek army and police for immediate return to Turkey. Convoys of military reinforcements trucked to the frontier have been met by applauding crowds as they trundle through the towns and villages of Greece’s border regions, where many Greeks see the sudden, forced migrant crisis as part of Erdogan’s longstanding campaign to weaken Greek sovereignty over areas of the nation only liberated from long centuries of Ottoman rule in 1913, and which Erdogan repeatedly threatens to take back under Turkish control.

It is unclear why Erdogan attempted to achieve his goals in this precise fashion, using unhappy humans as weapons in a manner directly contradicting claims that this crisis has its roots in Syria. Greek government statistics disseminated to journalists last week asserted that of the 252 migrants who had then been detained after illegally entering Greece over the land border, 69% were from Afghanistan, 19% from Pakistan and only 4% from Syria- fewer than the 5% from Turkey itself.

If Erdogan had wanted to round up a sufficient number of genuine Syrian refugees to hurl at the border, he could easily have done so. But by weaponising a random assortment of migrants of dubious or non-existent refugee status, the Turkish government not only weakened its case to be acting out of a humanitarian desire to assuage Syria’s human misery, but has also weakened the entire concept of asylum in the eyes of European observers and voters.

The Greek government’s response, halting all new asylum claims, whatever their merits, until the end of the border crisis and immediately returning all new arrivals to Turkey, has met with the warm approval of Europe’s political mainstream.  Greece has been termed Europe’s “shield” in a newly warlike turn of phrase, and €700m of support for new border infrastructure has been pledged, as well as hundreds of personnel to repel attempts to enter what is now an officially sanctioned Fortress Europe.

The massive disjunct between the Turkish government’s narrative of events at the border and that witnessed by journalists on the Greek side has also highlighted the sadly now firmly established weaponisation of media in 21^st century conflicts. In attempting to expand the Syrian war to the frontiers of Europe, Erdogan also expanded the online meta-conflict to the sphere of European politics, a trend which will not enhance ordinary consumers’ trust in the news they watch and read.

Accelerated by social media, the Syrian War has blurred the distinction between protagonist, activist, analyst and journalist like no previous conflict. As various factions and proxy militias battle on the ground, this meta-conflict between western commentators rages on social media, as each side, radicalised by the secret DM groups in which they communicate, attempts to sway the public narrative in their chosen direction.

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Consequently, those journalists and commentators keen to promote Western military intervention in Syria on behalf of either the civilians or armed rebel groups of Idlib have uncritically shared Turkish narratives of desperate Syrians pleading to enter the safety of Europe, despite their almost total lack of correspondence with reality.

As Stalin learned nearly a century ago, and other dictators have realised since, Western journalists will quite happily ignore the evidence of their own eyes if doing so allows them to flaunt their humanitarian and progressive values, a situation drastically exacerbated by Twitter.

Yet whatever the merits of Western military intervention in Syria, the dire situation of the country’s civilians will not be improved by allowing Turkish-resident Afghan and Pakistani economic migrants to enter Europe en masse whenever Erdogan deems it useful. Instead, by eroding the already-waning attachment of European voters to the very concept of asylum, Erdogan’s cynical border gambit will do great harm to those genuine victims of conflict, now and in future, who need it most.

What Erdogan did not realise is that the Europe of 2015 no longer exists, shunted into distant, unrecoverable history by the political hangover of that year’s refugee crisis. The wave of right-wing populism that has eviscerated Europe’s once dominant centre-left now threatens the continent’s centre-right, causing mainstream conservatives to shift dramatically rightwards for their own survival. In 2015, right-wing populists in Hungary and Poland were shunned outliers in the European system, written off as aberrations from an only semi-liberalised Mitteleuropa. Five years later, right-wing populists are the rising challengers even in the continent’s western heartlands.

In France, only a few percentage points separate Le Pen from Macron for dominance entering next year’s presidential election. In Italy, the likelihood is that Salvini will assume power within the next year or so, most likely in coalition with the far more radical Brothers of Italy party. In Spain, the outlandishly Francoist VOX party seeks to enter coalition government with mainstream conservatives nationally, as it already has in Madrid.

In Sweden and Finland, the heartlands of the Nordic social democracy so beloved by British and American liberals, right-wing populist parties seeing to halt migration and overturn the liberal consensus are the most popular political forces in each country.

In Germany itself, the entire political system has been paralysed by the rise of the right-wing AfD party in response to Merkel’s handling of the 2015 crisis, with Merkel taking six months to form a government after the 2017 election, and German politics now reducible to a series of experiments in unlikely and unstable coalitions just to keep the populists out of power.

The country has also been shaken by a series of extreme right-wing terror attacks against both ethnic minorities and pro-migration politicians alike, and a rolling drumbeat of alarming incidents of radicalisation within the German security forces, like the 2017 Day X plot in which troopers in the German equivalent of the SAS allegedly conspired to assassinate liberal politicians, including the country’s president, and launch a guerrilla campaign against the state.

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In Austria and Denmark, the onward march of right-wing populism has been halted, but only by centrist governments of right and left adopting the rhetoric and policies of the populist right, including a zero tolerance approach to illegal migration. It is little wonder that Orban himself has declared the European Union’s reponse to this crisis a moral victory: the policies he was shunned for in 2015 are now the stated policy of the European Union as a whole, with Europe’s mainstream conservatives falling over themselves to claim Greece’s hardline border policy as their own.

This is not, as an aside, the Europe that Britain’s FBPE contingent so idealised during our own long-running political crisis, but it is the continent’s political mainstream for the foreseeable future. Given that the majority of Afghan and Pakistani migrants will have aimed for the UK as their ultimate destination, drawn by long-existing communities of fellow kin and a facility with the national language, it is ironic that at the same time Turkish police were firing volleys of tear gas at their Greek counterparts to enable their entry, Dominic Raab was in Ankara declaring his full-throated support for Turkish foreign policy, despite the fact that its success at Europe’s borders would direly threaten his own government.

The European Union — with the exception of Merkel’s Germany, lumbering distractedly and painfully towards geopolitical irrelevance — has finally awoken to the threat posed to the continent by a Turkish autocrat lurching from one self-engineered crisis to another in his desire not to relinquish his hold on power.

Threatened at home by a secular Kemalist section of the electorate dissatisfied at the country’s bloody and so far unsuccessful war in Syria, by the presence of millions of refugees, by slow-motion economic collapse and by the country’s growing slide into authoritarian Islamism, Erdogan survives only by engineering crises which pit the Turkish nation against the world. Switching from the United States to Russia to Europe and back again as the existential foe of the moment, Erdogan’s Turkey is the greatest destabilising factor in our near abroad.

Claiming that Turkey’s borders as settled by the 1923 treaty are too small to contain the might and needs of the Turkish nation, Erdogan has effectively annexed large chunks of northern Syria, expanded its military presence in Iraq and Libya, claiming them to be within the Turkish “borders of the heart,” and threatens constantly to invade and annex Greece’s eastern islands.

It is only by chance that the 2016 coup attempt against him failed and that Turkey avoided a serious civil conflict, and Europe will need to be similarly fortunate to avoid being dragged into a conflict of the autocrat’s choosing in the near future. The chances of a peaceful transition of power away from Erdogan are exceedingly slim, and Europe, including Britain, will need to reassess its relations with its unhappy neighbour sooner rather than later, a process begun, it seems, at a sleepy Balkan border crossing the Turkish strongman last week turned, on a whim, into a battlefield.