By Adil Rasheed
SUMMARY: Turkey is swiftly expanding its influence in a rapidly imploding Islamic world, as its ‘neo-Ottoman’ president is whipping up a new wave of Islamism across continents. The country is even intervening in South Asia now, by forging unwarranted defence deals with India’s neighbouring states — Pakistan and Bangladesh
Turkey (recently renamed as the Republic of Turkiye) has been a major beneficiary of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and appears to be sitting pretty in a conflicted neighborhood, with a weakened Russia, a beleaguered Europe, a distraught Israel and a defeated Iran.
In fact, the only game in town for now is the duplicitous party that played all sides without fully entering the fray, and is not only besought by contending transnational blocs as an intermediary, but is itself going full steam ahead with its ‘neo-Ottoman’ designs.Straddling two continents, Turkey is a NATO member that wants to join the rival BRICS and SCO blocs as it thinks it holds both benefic and baneful cards in high stakes global geopolitics.
For a long time, Ankara’s neighbours had mistakenly assumed that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the so-called “neo-Ottoman” sultan or caliph, would be imminently removed from power by the secular and democratic forces within his country. That has not happened, as the wily septuagenarian has turned Turkey’s parliamentary system into a near-authoritarian presidential one, and is now well entrenched to take advantage of the floundering geopolitical order in West Asia, Africa, and Eurasia.