Turkey, Transnational Illiberalism, and the Poverty of Our Political Vocabulary

There is a particular kind of danger that arrives not as an army but as a narrative, one that does not breach a border so much as dissolve the very idea of one. The world has grown reasonably competent at recognizing the former kind of threat. It has built treaties, doctrines, and deterrents to manage it. But the latter kind, ideological, digital, transnational, operating through the capillaries of social media rather than the arteries of state power, continues to metastasize in a conceptual vacuum. We lack, quite simply, the words to describe what is happening. And without the words, we cannot build the institutions. And without the institutions, we are defenseless.

Turkey’s evolving role in this landscape is one of the most instructive and least examined case studies in contemporary geopolitics.

The Transformation of a Pivot State

To understand what Turkey has become, one must first appreciate what it was meant to be. The republic that Atatürk forged from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire was, whatever its contradictions, a deliberate wager on secular modernism. For decades, Turkey served as a living proof-of-concept for the proposition that a Muslim-majority society could sustain Western-style institutions, participate in NATO’s collective security architecture, and orient itself toward European norms. It was a hinge state: imperfect, contentious, but strategically indispensable to the liberal international order.

That hinge has now turned in a different direction. Under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey has undergone a profound reorientation, ideologically, institutionally, and geopolitically. The erosion of judicial independence, the systematic hollowing of press freedom, the imprisonment of journalists and political opponents, the replacement of technocratic governance with personalist rule, and the invocation of Islamic identity as a political instrument: these are well-documented by organizations ranging from Freedom House to Reporters Without Borders. What is less examined is how this domestic transformation has acquired an international vector, how Turkey’s illiberal turn has become, through design or diffusion, an export.

The New Anatomy of Influence

Classical theories of geopolitical influence were built around hard instruments: armies, sanctions, alliances, the control of territory and resources. Soft power, Joseph Nye’s elegant formulation, acknowledged that attraction could substitute for coercion. But neither framework was designed for what we now observe: the engineering of ideological atmospheres across borders through digital platforms, the algorithmic amplification of divisive narratives, and the cultivation of transnational communities of ideological alignment that owe no formal allegiance to any state yet serve its strategic interests.

Turkey has developed a sophisticated ecosystem for projecting influence in this mode. The state broadcaster TRT World delivers programming to global audiences in multiple languages, framing Turkish foreign policy interests within a veneer of journalistic credibility. The Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı, Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs, operates one of the largest networks of mosques and religious institutions outside the Muslim world, functioning in effect as a soft-power infrastructure with reach into Central Asia, the Balkans, Africa, and Western Europe. The Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TİKA)  deploys development aid as a mechanism of cultural alignment. These institutions do not constitute a........

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