Geostrategic Media Political Commentary, Analysis, Security, Defense
Dr. Yashwant Singh
Turkey’s contemporary foreign policy is better understood as a project of “middle-power revisionism,” in which imperial symbolism serves the pursuit of strategic indispensability rather than imperial restoration
Empires do not die the way states die. A republic can be founded on a single date, a constitution signed, a parliament convened. An empire, when it falls, leaves something behind that no founding document can cancel: the geography it organized, the trade routes it policed, the identities it half-erased and half-created. Turkey has spent a century discovering that it inherited this residue whether it wanted to or not. Therefore, the question of whether Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is pursuing “Neo-Ottomanism”, as the cornerstone of his foreign policy, is really a question about what a country does with an inheritance it cannot legally renounce.
The honest answer requires resisting two seductive simplifications. The first says Erdoğan is a sultan in a suit, rebuilding empire by other means. The second says the whole idea is orientalist theatre, that Turkey is just a normal middle power doing normal middle-power things, and the Ottoman references are folklore for domestic consumption. Both are too comfortable. The truth sits in the friction between them, and that friction is where the actual story lives.
What the Republic Tried to Forget
To understand what Erdoğan is doing, it helps to remember what Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was doing when he built the alternative. The empire he inherited in fragments had just lost a war on a scale that dwarfs most modern catastrophes: an empire that had stretched from Algiers to Baghdad, from Budapest to Aden at its height, reduced by 1923 to a rump Anatolian core. Atatürk did not mourn this. He treated it as liberation from overextension. He built a state on the premise that Turkey’s tragedy had been imperial ambition itself: the endless wars, the multiethnic instability, the vulnerability that came from ruling too many peoples who did not want to be ruled.
The republic’s founding gesture was renunciation. Renunciation of the caliphate, of Arabic script, of the fez, of claims on Mosul, of the idea that Ankara spoke for Muslims beyond its borders. This was not merely modernization; it was amputation as survival strategy. A smaller, more homogeneous, more defensible state would succeed where an overstretched multinational empire had failed.
For most of the 20th century, this bargain held. Turkey looked toward Brussels and Washington, not toward Damascus or Sarajevo. The Ottoman past became something closer to an embarrassment: the “sick man of Europe,” a byword for decline, best left in museums and schoolbooks.
What Erdoğan Restored Was Not Territory
Erdoğan’s project, beginning most visibly after 2002 and accelerating sharply after 2011, did not reverse this renunciation through conquest. Turkey has not annexed a single square kilometer of former Ottoman land. What changed was something subtler and, in some ways, more consequential: the emotional architecture underneath foreign policy.
Ottoman restoration projects reshaped Istanbul’s skyline. State television produced lavish dramas rehabilitating sultans the republic had taught schoolchildren to view with suspicion. The centennial of the republic in 2023 was marked less by celebration of Kemalist rupture than by a quiet reframing: the republic as continuation of a civilizational mission, not a rejection of one. Erdoğan did not need to say “we are restoring the empire.” He needed only to make Ottoman grandeur speakable again, a source of pride rather than shame. Once that shift occurred, “bridging the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic”, foreign policy had a new vocabulary available to it, a vocabulary of civilizational duty rather than narrow national interest.
This is the part observers most often get wrong. They look for the symbols and conclude the ambition is symbolic. But symbols are rarely just decoration for power; they are usually its permission structure. A country that has been taught for eighty years that ambition beyond its borders was a form of self-destruction needs a story that makes ambition legitimate again. Ottoman memory supplied that story.
The Instruments Changed. The Reflex Did Not.
Look, instead, at what Turkey has actually done, stripped of narrative. Military bases established in Qatar and Somalia – the first Turkish military footprint in the Gulf and the Horn of Africa in a century. Direct military intervention in northern Syria, repeated and sustained. A decisive tilt of the battlefield in Libya through drones and proxies. Unambiguous backingfor Azerbaijan against Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh, a conflict fought in territory the Ottomans once contested with the Russian and Persian empires. Turkish-made drones exported and deployed from the Sahel to Central Asia. A foreign ministry that negotiates simultaneously with Moscow, Kyiv, Washington, Brussels, and the Gulf monarchies, refusing exclusive alignment with any of them.
Janissaries have been replaced by Bayraktars, but the underlying reflex, the assumption that instability along old imperial frontiers is Turkey’s business rather than someone else’s, looks remarkably continuous. What has genuinely changed is the currency of power. The Ottomans measured reach in tax farms and garrisons. 21st-century Turkey measures reach in construction contracts, drone exports, mediating diplomacy, and control over migration flows into Europe. “Territory” has been replaced by “access”. Annexation has been replaced by leverage.
This is precisely why “Neo-Ottomanism” is both an illuminating label and a misleading one. It illuminates the geography, the places Turkey now insists on having a say: Syria, the Caucasus, Libya, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Horn of Africa, almost all of them former Ottoman provinces or spheres of influence. It misleads if it implies Turkey wants to govern these places the way Constantinople once did. Erdoğan does not want provinces. He wants veto (revisionist) power. He wants a map in which nothing significant happens in his old imperial neighbourhood without Ankara’s consent being at least consulted, even if never granted.
The Constraints the Sultans Never Faced
Here the essay must resist its own momentum, because the parallel to empire breaks down exactly where it matters most.
The Ottoman state was, for centuries, one of a handful of great powers setting the terms of the international system. Modern Turkey operates inside a system whose terms were set elsewhere, in Washington, Brussels, and increasingly Beijing. It remains a NATO member while buying Russian S-400 missile systems, a contradiction that would have been unthinkable for an empire answering to no alliance. It seeks leadership of the Muslim world while contending with Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth, Iran’s revolutionary network, Egypt’s demographic weight, and the UAE’s financial reach, none of which existed as rival power centres in the same way when Istanbul was the caliphate’s seat. It preaches strategic autonomy while its currency has, in recent years, been among the most volatile of any G20 economy, vulnerable to capital flight in a way no empire managing its own coinage ever was.
An empire extracts. Ottoman Anatolia’s periphery, the Balkans, the Levant, North Africa, sent revenue, grain, and soldiers inward. Modern Turkey imports capital, technology, and often energy from the very global economy its foreign policy sometimes rhetorically defies. This single asymmetry is the clearest evidence that Turkey is not building an empire. Empires are net importers of obedience and net exporters of extraction. Turkey, for all its regional assertiveness, remains a net importer of investment and a state whose foreign adventurism is regularly constrained by the price of its own currency.
A Better Name Than Neo-Ottomanism – “Middle-Power Revisionism”?
If the label doesn’t quite fit, what does? The more precise description may be “middle-power revisionism” with an imperial accent. Turkey is not trying to become an empire again. It is trying to escape the condition of being a regional actor whose consent nobody needs. It wants to be the country that cannot be bypassed, not consulted out of courtesy, but consulted because ignoring Ankara has become materially costly, whether in Syria, the Black Sea, the Mediterranean gas fields, or the Caucasus corridor. Recent studies have highlighted the persistent tensions and vulnerabilities in Turkey’s middle-power ambitions.
Ottoman memory is not the engine of this ambition. It is the fuel additive, the emotional legitimacy that makes an ambition, which geography would demand regardless of who rules from Ankara, feel like destiny rather than mere calculation. Strip away the sultans and the drama, and the underlying fact remains: Turkey sits at the hinge between Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and the Caucasus. No government in Ankara, secular or religious, Kemalist or Islamist, could have treated that position as something to be ignored indefinitely. Erdoğan did not invent Turkey’s geographic centrality. He gave it a civilizational script.
Recent scholarship increasingly corroborates this interpretation. Mohammad Hadi Khanmohammadi and Arash Reisinezhad argue that Ankara’s discourse has evolved from the earlier framework of Neo-Ottomanism toward the broader and more state-centric vision encapsulated in the “Century of Türkiye,” reflecting a shift from nostalgic imperial symbolism to a comprehensive strategy linking domestic political consolidation with regional activism and aspirations for greater global influence. Similarly, M. Hakan Yavuz conceptualizes Neo-Ottomanism not as a coherent project of territorial restoration but as a form of civilizational nationalism, wherein Ottoman memory serves to construct a distinctive Turkish identity that transcends the limitations of the Kemalist nation-state while providing normative justification for a more autonomous and activist foreign policy. In this reading, Ottoman references derive their political significance not from irredentist ambitions but from their capacity to furnish Turkey with a civilizational vocabulary through which claims to strategic autonomy, regional leadership, and international status are articulated.
Taken together, these perspectives suggest that the analytical value of Neo-Ottomanism lies less in its imperial connotations than in its symbolic and ideational functions. The concept becomes misleading when interpreted as evidence of an expansionist blueprint aimed at recreating the Ottoman Empire. It becomes analytically productive, however, when understood as the ideological language accompanying Turkey’s pursuit of status, influence, and strategic autonomy within an increasingly multipolar international order. The central objective is, therefore, not empire, but hierarchy: to reposition Turkey from a peripheral regional actor into an indispensable middle power capable of shaping the strategic calculations of both regional rivals and global powers.
The Deeper Historical Pattern
This is where the Turkish case joins a much larger and older pattern, one worth sitting with rather than rushing past. Post-imperial states rarely achieve clean severance from what they once were. Britain still frames its overseas relationships through habits of influence inherited from a period when a quarter of the globe answered to London: the Commonwealth, the special relationship, the reflexive assumption of a global voice disproportionate to current material weight. Russia continues to think about security in terms of buffer states, a habit inherited directly from Romanov and Soviet expansion, which is why Ukraine, Georgia, and the Baltic states remain, in Moscow’s calculus, never quite fully foreign. China invokes centuries-old tributary relationships even while dressed in the vocabulary of contemporary development finance and infrastructure diplomacy. France maintains currency arrangements, military bases, and political networks across West Africa that long outlived formal colonialism, and that persistence has generated real friction, coups, and backlash in recent years precisely because the old reflex collided with new refusals.
Turkey belongs in this company, not as an exception but as a fairly typical case. Former empires do not abandon their historical geography. They reinterpret it, dress it in the language of the present, and act on it when the opportunity arises. What distinguishes Erdoğan is not that he does this, but how openly he has narrated it, turning what other post-imperial states treat as an awkward legacy into an explicit source of political identity.
The Warning Inside the Precedent
But history offers this pattern as a caution as much as a template, and the essay would be dishonest to leave that caution out. The Ottoman Empire did not collapse for lack of martial ambition. It collapsed because its military reach outran its administrative and economic capacity for nearly two centuries before the final unravelling, because reform came slowerthan the pressures it was meant to answer, and because internal cohesion frayed under the weight of external rivals who were simply better financed and better organized.
Every power that tries to translate memory into reach eventually meets the same arithmetic. Influence that is not backedby durable economic strength becomes performance rather than power, impressive in the moment, hollow under sustained pressure. Turkey’s drone exports and mediating diplomacy have bought it real leverage over the past decade. Whether that leverage becomes structural depends on things no amount of Ottoman nostalgia can supply: a stable currency, an innovation base that does not depend on imported components, institutions resilient enough to survive political transition, and alliances that do not require playing every side against every other side indefinitely. That last habit, the multi-vector diplomacy that looks so clever in a single news cycle, is exactly the kind of position that becomes unsustainable the moment a genuine crisis forces a binary choice.
Where This Leaves the Question
So: is Erdoğan pursuing Neo-Ottomanism? If the term means armies marching to redraw borders and restore a caliphate’s territorial writ, the honest answer is no, and no serious evidence suggests otherwise. If the term means something looser and more accurate: a foreign policy that treats the Ottoman Empire’s old strategic space as Turkey’s natural sphere of concern, and that uses Ottoman memory to make this ambition feel like inheritance rather than opportunism, then the answer is yes, unmistakably.
But the more interesting question may not be about Turkey at all. It may be about whether the entire international system is drifting back toward an era where civilizational memory, geographic inheritance, and historical grievance shape great-power behaviour as much as GDP tables and treaty obligations do. If that drift is real, and the behaviour of Russia, China, and even parts of Western politics suggests it might be, then Erdoğan is not an anomaly explained by his own personality or party. He is an early and unusually candid example of a pattern other states are also relearning, more quietly, in their own idiom.
Turkey is not trying to become the Ottoman Empire again. It is doing something that may matter more: making sure that wherever the old empire once cast a shadow, that shadow still falls across the map when decisions get made, and betting, as every ambitious power eventually must, that this time the reach will not outrun the foundation beneath it.
Author’s Bio:
Dr. Yashwant Singh is a sociologist, recently served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at GITAM (Deemed to be) University, Bengaluru, India. He holds an M.Phil. in Sociology from the University of Delhi and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Hyderabad, India. His research interests include urban sociology, the sociology of development and geopolitics. His writings have appeared on several digital platforms, including Modern Diplomacy, South Asia Journal, World Geostrategic Insights and IA-Forum.
