Freeden has spent nearly five decades on that question. He taught at Oxford from 1978 to 2011, first at Mansfield College, where he is now a professorial fellow, and he remains Emeritus Professor of Politics there. He founded the Journal of Political Ideologies and wrote the books that most political scientists reach for when they need to think carefully about the subject, among them Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach and Ideology: A Very Short Introduction. What follows is an outline of the ground we covered, for anyone who wants a map before pressing play, or a way back into the argument afterward.

Redefining Ideology

Freeden’s starting point is that ideology is not what people usually mean when they use the word as an insult. In everyday speech, calling something “ideological” suggests it is rigid, dogmatic, closed to evidence. Freeden’s own definition runs the other way. For him, an ideology is a framework that organises political thinking, and it does this by settling, at least for a while, the meaning of contested words like justice, freedom, or democracy. He calls this act of settling “decontestation.” Every one of those words can mean several different things at once. An ideology is what fixes one meaning as the operative one, so that people can act on it rather than argue about it indefinitely. Two people can use the word democracy and mean genuinely different things by it, and what decides which meaning governs a given political moment is not logic but the ideological framework each side is operating inside. This, Freeden argues, is not confined to party manifestos or parliamentary debate. It runs through daily life. Queuing for a bus involves an implicit theory of fairness and of who has authority over whom. Politics, in his account, is not a separate room we enter and leave. It is a layer running underneath ordinary social behaviour.

Against the Pragmatism Myth

Much of our conversation turned on a distinction Freeden considers false: the one between being ideological and being pragmatic. Politicians and commentators like to present pragmatism as the absence of ideology, a kind of neutral problem solving unburdened by belief. Freeden rejects this. Every ideology that survives, he told me, has to be able to adapt to new circumstances, the way an aircraft wing has to flex under pressure rather than staying rigid. An ideology that cannot bend will break. So a politician like Keir Starmer, frequently described as a pragmatist rather than an ideologue, is in Freeden’s reading pursuing a version of social democracy that has simply adapted itself to the political weather. The adaptation does not mean the ideology has disappeared. It sometimes changes so much, though, that it turns into something else entirely, which is why a party can keep a name like “Liberal” for generations after its politics have become thoroughly conservative, as happened in Japan.

Thick and Thin Ideologies

To explain how ideologies hold together while changing, Freeden uses what he calls a morphological approach, borrowing the biologist’s term for the study of structure and form. He compares an ideology to a piece of modular furniture. It has a core of components that cannot be removed without the whole thing collapsing, liberty for liberalism, for instance, and then a set of variable parts that can be swapped in and out, which is why there can be several legitimate versions of liberalism, or conservatism, or socialism, existing at once without any of them being a fake.

Within this structure, he separates ideologies that offer a full account of political life, which he calls thick-centred, such as liberalism and socialism, from those that address one domain and borrow the rest from elsewhere, which he calls thin-centred. Nationalism is his clearest example: on its own it offers little beyond solidarity and an emotional attachment to country, and it tends to import its economic or institutional programme from whichever thicker ideology it is paired with. Feminism, in his account, works similarly, contributing an original analysis of gendered power while taking its distributive politics from liberalism or socialism depending on the strand.

Islamism and Populism as Case Studies

Islamism gets the same treatment. Freeden describes it not as one doctrine but as a shifting combination of religious, nationalist and conservative material, which is why so many of its variants have proven able to accommodate elections and market economies, with Iran’s version standing out as the exception rather than the rule. Populism he treats as thinner still, built mainly on a binary between “the people” and “the elite” and a sense that one’s own group arrived first, with little else holding it up.

We ended on the far right, and on what Freeden calls the shift from democratic to demotic politics, the difference being that the first runs through institutions built to slow decisions down while the second runs directly through mass and social media, rewarding whoever is loudest. He connects some of this to the fading memory of the Nazi period among younger Europeans, and to a wider impatience with the slow work of governing.

What Comes Next

I asked Freeden, at the end, whether he was optimistic. He answered with an image before an answer. Governing, he said, is like a man surrounded by a pack of wolves with a limited number of bones to throw. You throw one to whichever wolf is closest and most threatening, it retreats, and then the next wolf takes its place, and you throw another. That, for him, is what governing actually is: not a plan carried out but a sequence of concessions made to whichever danger is nearest, over and over, with no point at which the wolves are gone for good.

He does not expect the kind of sweeping social transformation that reshaped societies in the 18-19-20th centuries, though he does not rule it out either. Change of that scale, he pointed out, can arrive with no warning: nobody predicted the end of apartheid, and nobody predicted the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany, both of which came in 1989. He raised North and South Korea as a case where such a reversal might still happen, and Vietnam as a case where formal unification has not erased the real differences that fifty or sixty years of separation left behind.

This is why Freeden thinks ideologies will keep developing piecemeal, reacting to events as they occur, rather than following a single coordinated programme of change of the kind intellectuals or ruling groups could once assemble. That older model depended on a small class of people with the standing to define ideas for everyone else, at a time when large parts of the population had no vote and therefore no recognised voice in political life, whatever ideas they may privately have held. The expansion of who now has access to political language and platforms is, in his view, a genuine achievement. It has also removed the filtering that used to come with that older, narrower arrangement, so the same opening that gave more people a voice has also opened the door to a great deal of irresponsibility.

Pressed again on optimism, he said he is optimistic, though not within his own lifetime, and perhaps only over the next fifty years. He was direct in setting his view against Francis Fukuyama’s argument that liberal democracy represented the endpoint of political development, a single line moving toward improvement. Freeden does not see one line. He sees many things moving at once, some getting better while others get worse in the same moment, technology being his example: a source of real medical progress and, elsewhere, a source of new harm.

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Hello hello, merhabalar, ahlan wa sahlan bikum…

I am back after a two-week break in which I marked a few graduate exams and read a couple of extraordinary theses. So I am ready for the next academic year, as Michaelmas, the first term of the Oxford year, is on the horizon.

So I thought it would be best to start off by gauging where we are in the region on a few critical matters.

Israel and Turkey - The crux of the problem

The tension between the two countries seems to be in an interregnum, but it has certainly not subsided. In his speech to the UN General Assembly this week, Erdoğan spoke with his usual bravado of genocide in Gaza and of Israel’s hostile expansionism in the region. Many heads of state did the same, in fact, King Abdullah II of Jordan being the most articulate. Netanyahu, by contrast, arrived in New York for his address on Thursday with few friends. Even Trump has no plans to meet him, and a year ago most delegations walked out of the giant auditorium as he took the stage. Erdoğan seems to have had a “successful” New York visit, and he continues to enjoy Trump’s usual praise. “Sometimes you get along with the toughest people, like him,” Trump said, gesturing to Erdoğan, at the NATO summit in Ankara in July. However, this is not necessarily good news where the escalation between Israel and Turkey is concerned. It would only make Netanyahu and his far-right cabinet more frustrated.

At its core lies the contest over what kind of state emerges from the collapse of the Assad regime in December 2024. I argue that everything else follows from that.

Since Assad fell, Turkey has made itself the principal external patron of the al-Sharaa government. It signed a defence and training agreement in August 2025, began training Syrian personnel that October, keeps bases in the north, and in August was reported to be preparing to deploy to a Syrian airbase. That is what annoyed Israel. Israel wants a Syria too weak and too decentralised to threaten it, with no powerful military on its northern border, which is why it has gone on striking Syrian military assets and has held on to the buffer zone it seized inside Syria after Assad fell.

The strikes on the Abu al-Duhur airbase in Idlib province on the night of 17 to 18 August (8 of them, according to Syrian state television), which Israel justified as pre-empting a Turkish deployment that Turkish sources denied, were the sharpest expression of this. Washington’s envoy, Tom Barrack, publicly called the strike an unnecessary escalation and said the US had checked Israel’s intelligence and been told no such deployment was happening.

On a broader level, we can say that the current conflict stems from the fact that Turkey and Israel hold fundamentally divergent visions of the regional order. Turkey favours integrated stability with strong central states. Israel’s current leadership prefers fragmented neighbours it sees as less threatening. There is huge distrust between the two sides, and extremely dangerous rhetoric that can bring unintended consequences.

The distrust lies in a mutual, unspoken conviction that the other is not merely a regional actor but an aspiring hegemon seeking to reshape the Middle East in its own image. Turkey sees that Israel fundamentally desires a fragmented, weak and chaotic neighbourhood to ensure its own security, and that it views any Turkish attempt to stabilise or centralise regional states as a direct threat to Israeli freedom of action. Conversely, Israel assumes Erdoğan’s “status quo” regionalism is a thin veil for neo-Ottoman expansionism, believing Turkey intends to tether Syria and other neighbours into a subservient orbit that would eventually constrain Israel’s strategic depth and its ability to counter Iranian influence. Both sides operate on the silent premise that the other’s regional vision is inherently zero-sum and incompatible with their own survival.

How will this tension play out after the Israeli elections on 27 October? It may be that the current Netanyahu government has been pulled to the far right and holds a deeply pessimistic and cautious worldview, viewing regional threats through a lens of existential vulnerability, partly because of the trauma of 7 October. But… Israel’s military and strategic decisions are often driven by institutional security assessments rather than direct political calculation. Yes, if Netanyahu leaves, the hawkish environment could be tempered, but seeing Turkey as a threat, I’m afraid, will continue. Would this push and pull turn into more direct confrontation? I am not as optimistic as some experts. The history of wars and conflicts is full of contingent moments that change everything. When tensions are this high, something can go wrong and lead to a head-to-head clash, especially in Syria.

My only hope is that Turkey believes it is winning in Syria without having to fight for it. Why open a front with Israel? A direct clash with Israel would put at risk the al-Sharaa government the Turkish government has spent nearly two years building up, would hand Netanyahu the confrontation that suits his campaign, and would strain the relationship with the US at the moment Trump is dangling the sale of the F-35 fighter jets Turkey has wanted for years. Sitting still costs the Turkish government little, true, but escalating would cost a great deal. I believe the Erdoğan regime believes time is on its side, and that is the behaviour of a power that thinks like that. But… and it is a big BUT… there is surely a limit to Turkey’s restraint.

Strait of Hormuz - Quo vadis, oil prices?

The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage between Iran and Oman through which roughly a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil and a fifth of its liquefied natural gas travelled before the war, has been largely closed since 28 February. On that day the United States and Israel launched their air war on Iran, and the Revolutionary Guard responded by forbidding passage, boarding and attacking merchant ships, and laying mines in the strait. Trump and Pezeshkian signed a memorandum of understanding on 17 June to end the war, and the US military lifted its blockade of Iranian ports the following day. Fighting resumed on 8 July, and the blockade was reinstated on 14 July.

By early September the Wall Street Journal was reporting that the blockade had halted new Iranian oil exports from the Gulf, leaving the Iranian government dependent on dwindling stocks already loaded onto tankers before July. The two sides then turned on each other’s shipping. The United States said it had struck three Iranian oil tankers after attacks on its warships, and a vessel caught fire in the strait after being hit by an unidentified projectile, shortly before Iranian and Gulf officials were due to meet in Oman to sign an agreement on shipping through the waterway. Even so, more ships are moving than at any point since the spring. Bloomberg reported that oil and gas flows through the strait had reached a six-month high, with Middle Eastern oil flows averaging 17.1 million barrels a day over ten days.

The diplomacy moved to New York this week, to the UN General Assembly. A senior Iranian official told Reuters that Iran could reopen the strait within seven days if the US eased its military pressure and lifted the blockade, and Iran has been negotiating with the Americans through a Qatari mediator. Pezeshkian set out the Iranian position in his speech to the General Assembly. He said other states could not enjoy free passage through the strait while using the same waterway to wage war on Iran and deny it access to its own waters. Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, said afterwards that the talks had produced no major breakthrough, which suggested the June memorandum is no longer on the table. The Iranian president also has enemies at home. Hardline factions regard any agreement with Trump as surrender, and Mohsen Rezaei, head of the Supreme National Security Council, told state media that Iran would now negotiate under a new framework requiring the Americans to take the first step.

When the strait was first closed, I shared with you the arguments of Helen Thompson, professor of political economy at Cambridge, about a paradigm shift in the global energy system. It is, I believe, slowly getting there.

The more interesting question is why the world has absorbed all this without the economic catastrophe everyone predicted in March. The clearest answer I have heard comes from Jason Bordoff, a former senior energy adviser in the Obama administration, and Meghan O’Sullivan, director of Harvard’s Belfer Center, who spoke to the editor of Foreign Affairs recently (Here is the link to their article). They have called the closure the largest disruption of global energy flows in history, yet prices never approached the levels energy planners had feared. They attribute this to four buffers. The oil market was in surplus when the war began, so there was spare supply to absorb the loss. Saudi Arabia and the UAE used existing pipelines to send large volumes around the strait to other ports. The International Energy Agency, through which the major oil-consuming countries coordinate their response to supply emergencies, organised releases from the strategic reserves governments hold for exactly this purpose. And China cut its imports sharply by halting stockpiling and running its refineries below capacity, which removed a large block of demand from the market.

However, they are equally clear that the calm should not be mistaken for safety. The surplus, the reserves and the spare pipeline capacity are finite, and all three are being used up. The market for refined products is already under acute strain, diesel above all, because Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries have coincided with the loss of Gulf export capacity. If the disruption continues, they argue, prices will eventually have to rise high enough to force what economists call demand destruction, meaning that households and businesses simply stop buying fuel they can no longer afford.

The costs of the crisis are also unevenly spread. The United States, as the world’s largest producer of oil and gas, is comparatively insulated from price shocks, and the two experts draw the uncomfortable conclusion that the costs of American foreign policy fall disproportionately on its allies and on poorer countries that import their fuel. The Gulf is divided in the same way. Saudi Arabia has been relatively protected, while the UAE has suffered physical damage and lost revenue. Their sharpest warning concerned Iran. If the Iranian government concludes that closing the strait is not achieving its aims, it may escalate by attacking other critical infrastructure, including Saudi refining capacity. On the same day they recorded the conversation, the Houthis launched a wave of missile and drone attacks on southwestern Saudi Arabia, setting fire to oil facilities and wounding 73 people in Abha, Jazan, Najran and Khamis Mushait. The Houthi campaign has its own Yemeni causes, which I turn to below, but it shows how quickly Saudi energy infrastructure can come within range of a war that began in the Gulf.

Mecca Pact - Whose idea?

The defence pact signed by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan on 7 August ruffled some feathers. Of course it did. Especially the feathers in Iran and Israel. Israel’s attack on the Abu al-Duhur airbase came on the heels of the announcement of the Mecca Pact, and some considered it a response. I do not think so. And I do not attach too great an operational importance to the pact either, as a Middle Eastern NATO or the like. I also strongly doubt the real-life effect of its Article 5-like clause, modelled on NATO’s rule that an attack on one member is an attack on all. I do not think any of the countries party to this pact would expect direct military help if one of them were attacked. I do not think, for example, that the Erdoğan regime would be able in any sense of the word to explain to the Turkish public the reason and logic for fighting on the Saudis’ behalf against the Houthis. That scenario is already here. The Houthis have been striking Saudi Arabia since the pact was signed, and so far the Turkish response has been words. On 19 September Fidan said the Saudis might have some military needs, especially on technical issues, and that Turkey would have no problem meeting them. Pakistan said no military response had even been discussed.

Nevertheless, in a lengthy interview with the state news agency Anadolu Ajansı the day after the signing, Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said that no common threat is written into the text, that the Mecca defence agreement is defensive, and that Iran is not its target. He was less conciliatory about Israel, saying its international isolation should continue. Of course, that is what any government says on signing a pact of this kind. Turkey and Saudi Arabia both want Iran weakened and contained but not broken and dismembered. Fidan said plainly that the Turkish government has kept talking to Tehran throughout. Leaving Iran unnamed is deliberate, and it leaves room to bring Tehran back in later.

Another important piece of information I learned from a former senior Turkish diplomat is that the Mecca Pact was Saudi Arabia’s idea and desire, which goes back to 2009. The Saudis kept bringing it to the table, a defensive pact with Turkey, Pakistan and Egypt, through different channels, sometimes via diplomats, sometimes via businessmen. So if we take out the years when the two countries, and more so Erdoğan and Mohammed bin Salman, fell out drastically after the Saudi dissident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered and dismembered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018, the idea has been on the table all along. Fidan himself said that preparations for this particular text had taken nearly two years and eight months.

What I am trying to say is that the idea of a pact like Mecca dates back almost two decades and is not the outcome of the current Israeli hostility and the Iran war.

Syria, protests and the economy

Unsurprisingly, Syria’s economic crises have started to overshadow the joy at the end of the conflict, and Syrians, who are under extreme economic pressure, now want betterment. But not much is on the horizon, even though the US has lifted its sanctions. I mean, it will recover, but it is going to be long and painful. We will talk about the reconstruction of the country, and the involvement of Turkey, the US and the Gulf states in it, over the next few weeks. But for now, let’s have a look at the latest fuel crisis, which spilled into open protest in mid-September.

Following increases of up to 40 per cent on diesel and 28 per cent on petrol on 13 September, demonstrations spread across several provinces, with some of the most visible unrest in Idlib. In Maarat al-Numan, protesters blocked the M5 highway connecting Damascus and Aleppo, while demonstrations elsewhere called for the price increases to be reversed and for senior officials responsible for energy policy to resign. The protests were the most widespread Syria had seen since the fall of Assad in December 2024.

What’s happening? Well, the crisis cannot be understood simply as the result of recent supply disruptions or regional instability. It is the product of a much longer structural collapse: the destruction of domestic production capacity during the war, the growing mismatch between the crude Syria produces and the refining capacity it retains, and the gradual withdrawal of a subsidy system that for years had kept fuel prices artificially low.

Before 2011, Syria produced around 380,000 to 390,000 barrels of crude oil a day and was able to export its surplus. War reduced output to roughly 100,000 barrels a day. According to the energy minister, the country now produces about 102,000 barrels a day against domestic demand of around 325,000, and imports the rest. The crude that is still extracted is also relatively heavy, creating compatibility problems for the country’s existing refineries.

Subsidies had already begun to shrink before the war. In 2005, the state covered around 78 per cent of the cost of diesel, but support was progressively reduced after price increases began in 2008. By 2019, around 30 per cent of the cost of petrol and 45 per cent of diesel remained subsidised. By 2023, the subsidy rate had fallen to around 19 per cent.

Since 2024, the new administration has largely removed fuel subsidies as part of its liberal economic programme. Prices have continued to rise despite the integration of the oil fields in the northeast into the central system. The consequences have spread across the economy, increasing industrial costs by 15 to 25 per cent, urban transport costs by 20 to 30 per cent, agricultural costs by 10 to 18 per cent, and food-sector costs by 12 to 20 per cent.

The public has not been persuaded by the government’s explanation, which pointed to global prices, the disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandab, and a two-month overhaul of the Baniyas refinery that has forced Syria to import more refined fuel. Anger has instead centred on the rising cost of living, the government’s economic priorities and perceptions of corruption and inequality. Under pressure from the protests, the government announced cheaper diesel for heating, agriculture and some industrial uses on 17 September, amounting to a partial retreat from the earlier price increases.

The Kirkuk-Baniyas pipeline, which would carry Iraqi crude to Syria’s Mediterranean coast, has been presented as a long-term answer. It is a distant one. Its proposed capacity is 2 million barrels a day, but estimates of its cost and timetable vary widely. A senior Syrian official has said the line could be running within three years, while other analyses put a full rebuild at $15 billion and at least four years of construction. Either way, it could not become operational before the end of the decade at the earliest.

The Houthis’ “successes”

The Houthis seized the strategic port city of Mocha on 10 September and, the next day, Perim island at the narrowest point of the Bab al-Mandab, tightening their grip on Yemen’s Red Sea coast. They also captured the Zuqar and Hanish islands. These gains stem from a year-long mobilisation featuring ballistic missiles, drones and advanced operational tactics. In contrast, Yemeni government forces were unprepared for an operation of this sophistication.

The collapse of anti-Houthi forces, especially those aligned with the Yemeni government, resulted from multiple factors: divisions fuelled by divergent Saudi and Emirati agendas, insufficient unity despite recent Saudi attempts to improve coordination, inferior equipment compared to the Houthis, and inadequate air cover to stop Houthi advances.

There is no doubt that Iran’s sustained, long-term backing has been pivotal to Houthi success. Since 2014-15, Iran has supplied training, commanders and technical experts, enabling the Houthis to develop a substantial domestic military industry. The Houthis can now produce drones at scale and assemble missiles, reducing their reliance on direct Iranian arms shipments. Iran’s approach focuses on making its allies self-sufficient.

In this context, it is important to understand that the Houthis are neither mere Iranian proxies nor fully independent. Iranian support was crucial in elevating them to a regional threat, but they have become significant actors with their own networks and resources. They are strong allies sharing strategic objectives. And what do they want? Well, they have a really rigid worldview and show little concern for governance or public welfare, treating Yemen primarily as a recruitment base to build military strength. Their ultimate objective is a divine mission to march on Mecca and Medina, destroy Israel, capture Jerusalem and establish a global Islamic state. Recent successes reinforce this belief, which makes it even harder to negotiate or reason with them. According to the Yemeni conflict analyst Nadwa al-Dawsari, the only effective way to contain the Houthi threat is strategic, sustained support for the Yemeni government and its forces to dislodge the Houthis from key territories on the ground, support that has been insufficient to date. The Houthi challenge is international, she says, and not merely Yemeni or Saudi, and it demands a bold, coordinated effort from the US and Europe, who cannot afford risk aversion. She also thinks that ceasefires are a bad and misguided strategy, as the Houthis routinely use them to prepare for the next offensive.

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My long essay, “Türkiye, HTS, and the New Spirit of Islamism,” is out in the Summer 2026 issue of the Middle East Journal (MEJ). It is the fullest version I have put on paper of an argument I have been making for a few years now, in my 2024 book and across this column.

When Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former jihadist commander once known by his nom de guerre, al-Jolani, entered Damascus in December 2024 at the head of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), and turned within months into a suited head of state, Türkiye was standing close behind him. Hakan Fidan, who ran Turkish intelligence for thirteen years before becoming foreign minister, had been in contact with al-Sharaa since 2019. İbrahim Kalın took over intelligence when Fidan left it. The first foreign minister to reach the new presidential palace was Fidan. The first intelligence chief to pray at the Umayyad Mosque was Kalın. The first gift to arrive was a suit from Vakko, Istanbul’s most established luxury house, and the photographs of the fig…

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On 30 July, Joseph Aoun became the first Lebanese head of state to set foot in Turkey in seventeen years. Erdoğan received him in Ankara with full ceremony, promised “all possible support” for rebuilding the devastated south, and floated the idea of folding Lebanon into the regional security bloc Turkey is assembling with Syria’s neighbours.

Three weeks earlier the prime minister, Nawaf Salam, had been in Istanbul, pressing for the relationship to be raised to what he called the level of a strategic partnership. And in June, before either visit, Erdoğan had stated that Turkish security “does not begin in Hatay, but in Aleppo, Damascus and Beirut,” and called the two Arab capitals sisters of Istanbul.

From there the story more or less tells itself, and much of the regional press has been telling it. It has an ironic side to it as well. A year ago, Turkey was talki…

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I followed the political developments regarding the Kurds in multiple countries over the last couple of weeks with a mixture of relief and anxiety.

Syrian president al-Sharaa hosted Iraqi Kurdistan leader Nechirvan Barzani. What a hosting, though. A giant Kurdistan flag was put next to the Syrian flag. Sources close to Barzani claimed that he was very impressed. Al-Sharaa then tweeted about the meeting in Kurdish, but this time his audience was Kurds in Syria, because the dialect was Kurmancî, the dia…

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Ankara, Tuesday 28 July 2026. Iraq and Turkey had finished a day of talks and moved to the part where the cameras want a row of ministers signing folders. One folder went unsigned.

Erdoğan, noticing the count was short, asked whether there were not meant to be five agreements. He made a gesture with his hand, opening five fingers, and underscored it first in English, then in his limited Arabic.

‘Five! Khamsa! Hakan?’ He called Turkey’s foreign minister to the podium to explain. Fidan said something to Erdoğan, his back turned to the cameras. We do not know what.

Ali al-Zaidi, Iraq’s prime minister since May, turned to his transport minister, Wahb al-Hasni, and asked him in Arabic why he had not put his name to the document on the Development Road, the road-and-rail corridor meant to carry Gulf cargo from the port of Faw up through Iraq and into Turkey.

The transport minister responded inaudibly.

Zaidi asked, ‘Shu mus…

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Özgür Özel resigned from the Republican People’s Party on Friday together with 90 of his colleagues in parliament. A court had removed him from the party leadership in May and restored Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the man he had beaten in a party congress in 2023, to the post. The 91 filed the founding petition of a new party the same afternoon, the 103rd anniversary of the Treaty of Lausanne, which fixed the borders of the Turkish republic in 1923 and which the CHP has always treated as its own inheritance. The party is called Yeni Parti, the New Party. This is the largest single break in the history of Turkish party politics, and its consequences run well past the CHP.

It also mattered in many households whose CHP membership dates back generations. My late father-in-law was a devoted CHP member. I am glad that he did not see these days, when Kılıçdaroğlu worked …

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My colleague and friend Ruşen Çakır, founder and editor-in-chief of Medyascope, one of the few outlets left in Turkey still doing independent journalism, travelled last week to Qandil, the mountain stronghold in northern Iraq that serves as the headquarters of the PKK, the armed wing of the Kurdish movement in Turkey. There he interviewed Duran Kalkan, one of the organisation’s blunt-spoken and sometimes hardline leaders.

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This week I come to you in podcast form as I promised earlier.

I interviewed Faisal Devji, a top historian and a public intellectual. He is the Beit Professor of Global and Imperial History at Oxford and a Fellow of Balliol College. He is the author of some of the most original books written on Muslim political thought in the past two decades, among them The Impossible Indian, on Gandhi, and Muslim Zion, his study of Pakistan as a political idea.

He is also, I should say, a friend, and one of those rare people I get to call a friend while also looking up to him. As an intellectual, as an academic, as a teacher, Faisal has a depth and an integrity that I have come to treat as a kind of benchmark. And he is also genuinely a kind person, which in our line of work does not always travel together with brilliance.

His new bo…

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Before the US-Israeli war with Iran resumed this week, for six days in July, the Islamic Republic of Iran buried the man the United States and Israel had killed four months earlier. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, supreme leader for more than three decades, died on 28 February, when a joint American and Israeli airstrike hit his office in Tehran on the opening morning of the war.

Islamic custom would have put him in the ground within days. Instead the regime waited until the bombing paused and staged the burial as a set piece. Khamenei lay in state on 4 July, the day the United States marked 250 years of independence. The ceremonies fell inside Muharram, the Shia month of mourning for the seventh-century martyrdom of Imam Hussein, and the casket was draped in a flag said to have flown over Hussein’s shrine.

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Yes, we had heard this before. His love for ‘the tough guy’ that Erdogan is. In his grammatically haphazard, structurally nonsensical and semantically void sentences, US president Donald Trump stated that Erdogan is a great leader who had stood by him during his hard times (he refers to the impeachment period) and that he managed to do something no one could, that is, ‘taking Syria’. Most recently he said that he would only come to the July 2026 NATO summit because his friend Erdogan is hosting.

And he did.

Gifts and contempt

Erdogan went to Esenboğa airport to welcome Trump to the capital, Ankara. The two walked arm in arm and talked about what I do not know, as Erdogan’s English is limited to non-existent. Surely they have a special bond.

Trump came to Ankara ‘bearing gifts that would make Erdogan very happy’ and repeated, whenever he found the opportunity, that the only reason he was attending the NATO summit wa…

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Next week, Ankara will host NATO’s 36th Summit.

It is an important meeting mostly because Trump threatened to quit NATO, as he has threatened to quit almost every alliance and treaty the US is party to. He also let it be known that he would only turn up because his good friend Erdogan is hosting! Masallah to this bromance.

A couple of years ago it was Erdogan who caused trouble by refusing to accept Sweden as a member; now he has become the glue, the linchpin that holds the alliance attached to Trump.

The conventional account of Turkey’s NATO accession in February 1952 is a security story. That is, the Soviet Union had made territorial demands on Turkey in 1945, the Truman Doctrine followed in 1947, and membership in the Atlantic alliance provided the formal guarantee that American power would stand behind Turkish borders. This is not wrong, but it is incomplete.

Turkey’s NATO journey

Turkey was twice refused N…

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While my colleagues and I sit down to read exam papers, I doubt Starmer, his cabinet, and the broader party will attempt any soul-searching about their clumsy budget management, which rightly angered pensioners, and was compounded by disability benefit cuts.

And then there was Starmer’s timid stance towards the warmongering Israeli government, and how his intransigence, as an international lawyer no less, in refusing to call what is happening in Gaza a genocide, cost him and his party. He just does not get this, does he?

Because that refusal was not merely a political miscalculation. It was a symptom of something deeper: a habit of mind, widespread among Western liberal leaders, of substituting legal proceduralism for moral clarity when it comes to war. It is what some scholars call the ‘juridifi…

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We have discussed over several posts what the Erdoğan regime really wants from its closeness to Ahmad al-Sharaa, the man who has led Syria since the fall of Assad. Part of it is the wish to write a success story for an Islamist government, the kind that came apart in the hands of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and Tunisia’s Ennahda. Remember how Hakan Fidan, the foreign minister, recently in an interview with Al Jazeera made the subtext explicit about Syria being exactly that. True or not, it is what Erdogan government wants Syria to be, an Islamist-led state turning into a success under Erdoğan’s auspices.

But the larger pull, as I keep underscoring, is political economy. Or should I say clientelism. Influence over Syria, and inside it, gives Erdoğan’s patrimonial network of favoured businessmen somewhere to invest, above all through build-operate-transfer, the trademark arrangement of the AKP years in which a chosen firm puts up an asset and runs it for years under state guarantees …

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What, in these times, could possibly have brought Turks, Kurds and Arabs into rare agreement?

There is a kind of achievement that eludes negotiators, summits and the whole machinery of regional diplomacy, and Tom Barrack has managed it without appearing to try. The peoples of the region agree on very little, and have spent the better part of a century disagreeing violently. They now hold one thing in common. They cannot stand him.

Oh, the extent of the contempt. Scroll the replies piled beneath any of his posts, if you can spare the time, and you will find dislike in all its variations.

Wallahi maşallah to Barrack. After decades in real estate, he has turned what may prove a brief diplomatic stint into the kind of achievement many diplomats never manage in a lifetime.

Barrack, a Lebanese-American property billionaire, a friend and fundraiser of Donald Trump, and since last year the US ambassador to Turkey and the president’s envoy to Syria, had his brief widened again on 1 June. In a Tru…

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The crux: Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has spent the past year dismantling the only party capable of beating him at the ballot box. Last week he reached its leader.

A court in Ankara stripped Özgür Özel of the chairmanship of the CHP (Republican People’s Party); the party that founded the modern Turkish republic a century ago and is now its main opposition. The court’s reasoning was technical, a dispute over how Özel was elected at a party congress two years ago. The effect was not technical at all. For the first time, a Turkish court has told an opposition party who it may not have as its leader.

Since 2024, hundreds of CHP members and elected officials have been detained on corruption charges the party rejects. Ekrem İmamoğlu, the Istanbul mayor and the candidate most able to defeat Erdoğan in a national contest, h…

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When I first started researching the relationship between Turkey’s ruling AKP and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB/Ikhwan) and Tunisia’s Ennahda in 2018, my main impetus was curiosity. I had just taken what I thought at the time was a break from my journalism career: amid an immense government crackdown, the liberal-left newspaper I was editing had been shut down, and I had embarked on an academic career for what I thought would be a fresh breath of air.

I did not return to journalism and continued on with academia. But back then the initial way in to understanding the deal among these three Islamist entities — the AKP, the Egyptian Ikhwan and Ennahda — came from my training as an investigative journalist. I am telling you this to clarify that I was not a scholar of Islamism, and my initial aim was not to come to broad conclusions about the praxis of Islam…

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Merhabalar…

This week I am including an interview in podcast form in Angle, Anchor and Voice. The reason is really simple: to let you hear the experts speak directly to you. My hope is that you come away from each conversation holding a better-formed version of the question that drew you in, rather than a neater version of its answer.

For this opening conversation I could not have asked for a more fitting scholar than Nathalie Tocci, a thinker I read with consistent admiration and one of the most incisive voices on what Europe is and on what it keeps failing to become. She holds a professorship of practice at Johns Hopkins in Bologna and a senior fellowship at Bocconi University’s Institute for European Policymaking. Between 2015 and 2022 she served as special advisor to two successive High Representatives, Federica Mogherini and then Josep Borrell, and in that role she drafted the 2016 EU Global Strategy, the text that gave the Union the language of “principled pragmatism” and “strategic autonomy” it has been struggling, with uneven results, to inhabit ever since. Her books are many, among them a co-authored volume on Turkey’s relationship with the EU. Her recent documentary, Why Europe Matters, has just been released. Here is the link to that.

I wanted to talk to her because the EU finds itself, once again, in the predicament it understands best and resents most, the predicament of having to make decisions it would rather defer. It has to decide how to deal with a Turkey that is both indispensable and impossible. It has to decide what to do about the credibility it has bled on Gaza, on enlargement, on the rule of law within its own borders. And it has to decide how to read Ursula von der Leyen, who told a Hamburg audience last month that the EU’s task was to complete the European continent so that no part of it would fall to Russia, Turkey or China. The two days that followed were spent in Brussels trying to soften the sentence. What was it all about? What is the current sentiment in Europe regarding Turkey?

Nathalie elaborates that Turkey is not viewed as one of the “baddies,” but it is also not on the “map of the goodies.” The current EU enlargement narrative is driven by a geopolitical logic of integrating a “free, secure and democratic grey zone” to prevent it from falling under adversarial influence. That logic, applied to Ukraine and Moldova, does not match Turkey’s situation.

Turkey hits a brick wall

While one could argue Turkey might one day “see the light” — e.g., post-Erdoğan — the logical next step, resuming accession, faces significant, often unconscious resistance within the EU. Because Turkey is an uncomfortable case that defies simple categorization, European discourse often avoids the topic. Nathalie identifies several sources of the “brick wall”: doubts about Turkey’s long-term potential to be a stable liberal democracy; concerns about its size and the complexity it would introduce to EU political balances; and underlying, often unstated, civilizational or religious biases.

The current “geopolitical” rationale for enlargement, which is about integrating vulnerable states for security, doesn’t apply to Turkey. Already in NATO and a strong military power, Turkey doesn’t fit the “integrate them or else” logic relevant to Ukraine. That leaves only the old, unresolved sources of resistance, making the topic hard to address.

For the other topics we touched upon — Ursula von der Leyen’s controversial statement on Turkey, the possible role of the Israeli lobby on her and other European leaders, and our collective failure to find an alternative to accession for EU–Turkey or EU–Britain relations — listen to the podcast. Once again, sorry for any unpleasantness in this podcast. I hope I will learn more along the way, and many thanks to Nathalie Tocci for her insights and her patience with me.

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The lecturer answering it was Comfort Ero, the President and the CEO of the International Crisis Group — perhaps one of the few organisations that produces genuinely granular, on-the-ground conflict analysis. Founded thirty years ago in response to the international community's failure to prevent the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda and the state collapse in Somalia, and animated by the dictum ‘never again’, Crisis Group spent most of its institutional life treating Europe as the stable periphery from which the world's diso…

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On 11 April, after a Turkish prosecutor sought sentences of more than 4,596 years for Benjamin Netanyahu and thirty-five other Israeli officials over the interception of the Sumud flotilla to Gaza, Netanyahu posted on X that Israel would continue to fight Iran's terror regime and its proxies, unlike Erdoğan, who accommodated them and had massacred his own Kurdish citizens. Hours later, Israel's defence minister Israel Katz went further. Erdoğan, he said, was a Muslim Brotherhood man, who massacred the Kurds. The phrase travelled the way these phrases now travel, repeated across Israeli media, picked up by Iranian outlets pleased with the symmetry, recycled in Turkish nationalist circles for the opposite reasons.

Two weeks before Katz spoke, the Foundation for Defence of Democracies (FDD) in Washington published a paper title…

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