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where it hoped for a regime change
instigated by the Free Syrian Army, and
on Egypt, where it placed all its chips on
the Muslim Brotherhood. The Davuto-
glu doctrine allowed Erdogan to reinvent
himsel as a global Islamic leader, some-
one who could improve the lot o Mus-
lims not only in Turkey but elsewhere,
too. “Believe me, Sarajevo won today as
much as Istanbul,” he said after winning
a third term as prime minister in 2011.
“Beirut won as much as Izmir. Damascus
won as much as Ankara. Ramallah,
Nablus, Jenin, the West Bank, Jerusalem
won as much as Diyarbakir.”
Two events shattered those dreams.
The ¿rst was the unraveling o Erdo-
gan’s foreign policy in the Middle East.
In Egypt, President Mohamed Morsi
and other leaders in the Muslim Broth-
erhood refused Erdogan’s call to look to
secular Turkey as a “model democracy,”
and after Morsi was toppled in a coup,
Erdogan’s hopes for a secular version o
the Muslim Brotherhood across the
region began to look fantastic. In Syria,
the Kurds formed a breakaway region in
the country’s north, leading Kurds in
Turkey, who had long been seeking a
separate state, to pull out o the ongoing
peace process with the central govern-
ment. The second event was a domestic
uprising. In 2013, millions o leftists
and environmentalists marched in
Istanbul’s Gezi Park and in city squares
across Turkey. It was then that Erdogan,
having lost support from the Gulenists,
the Kurds, and the liberals, turned to
Turkish nationalists to remain in
power. He now spoke admiringly o
Ataturk and his politics, described his
own critics as “rabble-rousers,” and
claimed that Turkey was under siege
by the West.generals resigned in protest o the
Gulenist takeover o the civil adminis-
tration. Those who didn’t quit were
purged in massive court cases in 2008
and 2010; some received life sentences.
In the judiciary, newly appointed
prosecutors and judges who supported
the purge were promoted around 2010
and 2012. The press approved: one
liberal paper, since bankrupted, com-
pared the prosecutions to the Nuremberg
trials. But nationalist Turks were
angry, and the ¦ lost their votes in
Anatolia. To regain control, Erdogan
broke with the Gulenists, cutting his
support for their educational institu-
tions and purging its members from
the bureaucracy.
In foreign policy, another ¿eld in
which his cadres lacked expertise,
Erdogan handed the reins to Ahmet
Davutoglu, a scholar o international
relations often described as “the Turkish
Henry Kissinger,” and named him
foreign minister in 2009. The ¦ foreign
ministers who preceded Davutoglu had
preserved Turkey’s Western-focused
foreign policy doctrine. As a member
o £¬¡¢, a U.S. ally, and a candidate for
¤ membership since 1999, Turkey had
kept its distance from China, Iran, and
Russia. Now, the bespectacled, soft-
spoken professor proposed a dierent
route. Turkey was the inheritor o the
Ottoman caliphate, Davutoglu wrote,
and it needed to move from a “wing
state” o the West to a “pivot state.”
Taking advantage o its location at the
intersection o the Black Sea, the
Caucasus, the Middle East, and Europe,
it was poised to lead Islamic nations.
Erdogan relished these grandiose
ambitions, and as the Arab Spring
unfolded, Turkey set its sights on Syria,