Turkey’s internal equilibria and its foreign policy

Source:Modern Diplomacy Date:23Dec2019

A broad yet somewhat conspritorial view of Erdogan-Army relations, but worth a read becasue it does such a good job of covering the history of Army’s role in Turkish politics:

Turkey’s President Erdogan has recently dismissed almost all the Turkish flag officers still in service, thus leaving only a small proportion of them, with a view to later favouring the quick career of subordinate officers with a nationalist or Islamist background and training.

President Erdogan’s regime also actively supports all the Egyptian members of the Muslim Brotherhood who fled Egypt after Mohammed Morsi’s fall and Al Sisi’s coup. Moreover, the origins of Erdogan’s AKP Party are certainly obscure, but also clearly shrouded in the networks of the Turkish Brotherhood and in the more or less “moderate” political Islamism – just to use a trivial classification of Western political science.

To some extents the political-military choice made by the Turkish Presidency is still favoured by the long-term effects of the attempted coup against President Erdogan of July 15, 2016, when the Turkish Armed Forces were greatly purged of all officers who had even a slight or hidden “secularist” inclination – just to use  again the trivial classification of political science.