ERDOGAN'S GRAND VISION

Rise and Decline

Hillel Fradkin and Lewis Libby

"A great nation, a great power"-the recent Fourth General Congress of Turkish Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AKP party proclaimed this ambitious goal for 2023, the hundredth
anniversary of the founding of the Turkish Republic. The Congress celebrated Erdogan's
leadership and reelected him as party chairman. With his party's backing, and through a
prospective new constitution that will create a powerful "presidential system," Erdogan expects
to preside over the anniversary celebrations as president of a transformed Turkey that
dominates the Middle East.
But what would be the shape of Erdogan's golden age?
Would Turkey be a moderating influence on political Islam, in particular on the Muslim
Brotherhood parties now dominant in much of the new Middle East? Will Erdogan make the
country a unique Islamic liberal democracy that will reconcile the Muslim world to the West?
Or is he presiding, as a growing number of observers fear, over an Islamist transformation of
Turkey that would put it at odds with the West as it consolidates a "neo-Ottoman" regime? Those
who worry about such an outcome find a portent in his remarks-well noted in Turkey but not
elsewhere—at his party's recent Congress. There, Erdogan urged the youth of
Hillel Fradkin is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. Lewis Libby is a senior vice president at
the Hudson Institute.
MARCH/APRIL 2013
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