Turkey's Gunboat Gambit in the Mediterranean by Burak Bekdil from The Gatestone Institute

Turkey's Gunboat Gambit in the Mediterranean

by Burak Bekdil  •  December 30th 

• Erdoğan seems to think that his best defense in the Mediterranean power game is an offense.
• One emerging power in Libya, however, is not a Western state actor.... Russia has the potential to step into the Libyan theater with a bigger proxy and direct force, to establish its second permanent Mediterranean military presence.
• Also as in Syria, Turkey's Islamist agenda will probably fail in Libya, but by the time Erdoğan understands that, it might be too late to get out of Moscow's orbit.

Since 2011, Turkey has been investing billions of dollars in naval technologies, in an apparent effort to build up the hardware it would one day require. Pictured: The Turkish Navy frigate TCG Fatih. (U.S. Dept. of Defense)

Turkey, since 2011, has been waging a pro-Sunni proxy war in Syria, in the hope of one day establishing in Damascus a pro-Turkey, Islamist regime. This ambition has failed, costing President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Turkey violent political turmoil on both sides of Turkey's 911-km border with Syria and billions of dollars spent on more than 4 million Syrian refugees scattered across the Turkish soil.

In Egypt, in 2011-2012, Erdoğan aggressively supported the failed Muslim Brotherhood government and deeply antagonized the incumbent -- then-general but now president -- Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Since Erdoğan's efforts in Syria and Egypt failed, his Sunni Islamist ambitions have found a new proxy-war theater: Libya.

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