Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan attends a press conference with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic in Belgrade, Serbia, Friday. [Zorana Jevtic/Reuters]
Speaking from the United Nations podium on September 24, 2024, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan likened Turkey to the Allied Powers who defeated Nazism during World War II. “Just as Hitler was stopped by the alliance of humanity 70 years ago, [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and his murder squad must be stopped by the ‘alliance of humanity.’”
It is a ridiculous analogy, but a Hitler obsession is central to Erdogan’s character. In 2005, “Mein Kampf” became a bestseller in Turkey as Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) subsidized multiple print runs and promoted the book to its members. Just over a decade later, as he amended Turkey’s constitution to support a stronger presidency, he cited Nazi Germany as an example to emulate, not because of its mass murder of Jews, but rather because he saw the Third Reich as efficient. Having to win consensus or debate ideas can be so inconvenient, after all, to someone who believes anyone who disagrees with him to be Untermensch.
To be fair, Erdogan’s aides eventually convinced him that Hitler was not a scion of statesmanship. In 2017, Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus explained, “We make these metaphors about fascism and Nazism because we worry about the future of our European friends.” To take Kurtulmus seriously, however, would be to accept that Erdogan was a paradigm of virtue and morality.
No amount of spin, however, can stop Erdogan’s Hitler obsession. To understand the degree to which Erdogan has Hitler on his mind, consider all the world leaders he has likened to Hitler or Nazis in the last decade. First, it was German Chancellor Angela Merkel, then French President Emmanuel Macron. Every few weeks now, he compares Israeli leaders to Nazis and Israel itself to Hitler’s Germany. After Netanyahu addressed Congress earlier this year, Erdogan called the Israeli leader “the Hitler of our time.”
Perhaps the world can excuse Erdogan’s stupidity. He was always more of a street urchin than a student of history; he failed to win admission to Turkey’s top-ranked schools or even the country’s second-tier institutions. He claimed to have a college degree, but it was fraudulent. The diploma listed a department that did not at the time exist. At best, Erdogan gets a “Σχεδόν καλώς” (almost good) for forgery.
Both Erdogan’s embrace of Hitler and ignorance should concern policy makers not out of spite at the man himself, but because they hint at how he constructs Turkey’s policy and interprets the world.
Consider Cyprus: During the same UN address that made headlines for Erdogan’s most recent Netanyahu-Hitler comparison, he demanded the international community recognize Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus as an independent state. “There are two separate states and two separate peoples on the island,” he declared.
To understand Erdogan is to recognize how Hitler’s unilateralism inspires him. Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus’ march back into Varosha? Hitler set the precedent in Rhineland. Turkey’s puppet “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” Erdogan views it as the Turkish Sudetenland, a territory to march into and absorb if he can convince the West he does it only to defend fellow Turks. He has already hinted at the next step when, earlier this year, he lamented that 50 years ago Turkey did not conquer the rest of the country. “Perhaps if we had pushed south, and I say this as a child of the present,” he explained, “there would be no more south and north and Cyprus would be ours only.”
Europe and the United States should understand history more than an overgrown Islamist street urchin, however. Had the British and French responded forcefully to Hitler’s 1936 remilitarization of the Rhineland, they might have avoided millions of subsequent deaths. Perhaps Europe and the United Nations might have taken the same lesson with Varosha. Likewise, forcing the cessation of Sudetenland no more satiated Hitler’s desire for the rest of Czechoslovakia than would agreeing to the partition of Cyprus end Erdogan’s imperialist hunger.
The correct response to Erdogan’s UN speech is neither silence nor acquiescence. When Erdogan speaks of the “alliance of humanity” that defeated Hitler, he ignores that Turkey remained neutral until World War II’s final weeks, only even sold Hitler chromite and other military goods for the profit of Ismet Inonu, Ataturk’s corrupt and dictatorial successor.
What Cyprus needs now is a new “alliance of humanity,” with arms superior to Turkey’s, and European and US military assistance prepared to protect every meter of Cyprus, its coastline and its territorial waters.
Michael Rubin is director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.