Adnan R. Khan: Turkey’s standoff with 10 ambassadors, including Canada’s, was political grandstanding, and Erdogan came out the winner
Erdogan addresses his ruling party members at the parliament, in Ankara, Turkey, on Feb. 12, 2020
No one embodies this sense of wounded pride better than Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He has deployed it against the European Union for its alleged hostility to Turkey’s accession bid; he has used it in large dollops against the U.S.
Predictably, Erdogan did as Erdogan does: he feigned outrage. Over the following days, he hinted that the ambassadors would be expelled from Turkey. If he followed through on the threat, it would be the worst diplomatic crisis in Turkey’s history, but whether the threat was genuine or not was up for debate.
The last few years have been particularly damaging for European nations, as well as the U.S., with questionable leaders like Donald Trump, Britain’s Boris Johnson and France’s Emmanuel Macron creating the impression here that the West writ large is on the decline.
Human rights activists point out that the only “crime” Kavala appears to have committed is posing a threat to Erdogan and the ruling AK Party because of his personal wealth and access to resources, which he has used to support civil society movements calling for the rule of law to be respected in Turkey.
Those moves will hurt the Turkish economy, which will inevitably make Erdogan’s re-election prospects dimmer than they already are. A symbolic statement from a group of diplomats was never going to have much of an impact.
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