In NATO Summit at Ankara, Turkey’s Deepening Crackdown on Dissent Was the Unspoken Issue

Istanbul’s most popular politician has spent more than 470 days behind bars. A Turkish businessman and philanthropist has spent more than 3,160. The country’s main opposition party just had its internal elections nullified by a court widely seen as an instrument of the presidential palace. This week, President Trump and every other NATO head of government walked into Ankara to shake President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s hand.The timing could not be more jarring or more revealing. NATO’s 36th summit convened Tuesday and Wednesday at the Beştepe Presidential Complex, only the second time Turkey has hosted the alliance since 2004. Mr. Erdogan spent two days standing beside the leaders of the free world’s most powerful military bloc. At the same time, his country’s courts continue grinding through cases against politicians, journalists, lawyers and activists that human rights groups describe as manufactured.“President Trump is not listening to the diversity of opinion he needs to hear, and that overshadows anything about holding Turkey to account,” a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and director of its Turkey program, Sinan Ciddi, tells The New York Sun.In plain terms: the American president is taking his cues from a small circle of Erdogan-friendly voices, not those sounding alarms over Turkey’s jails. So who, if anyone, is telling Mr. Erdogan he is out of line?A jailer with a seat at the tableThe list of casualties in Mr. Erdogan’s campaign against dissent keeps growing, and the case of Ekrem Imamoglu is the most visible.The popular Istanbul mayor, who had been expected to challenge Mr. Erdogan in the 2028 presidential election, was detained in March 2025 on charges that included corruption and support for terrorism. A day earlier, Istanbul University invalidated his university degree, a move that under Turkish law would disqualify him from the presidential race outright.Mr. Imamoglu’s party, the Republican People’s Party, nominated him anyway. Chairman Ozgur Ozel called the detention “an attempted coup against our next president.”In another case that has become a symbol of Turkey’s judicial drift, a businessman and civil society patron, Osman Kavala, has fared worse. Detained since October 2017 on charges tied to the 2013 Gezi Park protests and later convicted of attempting to overthrow the constitutional order, he is serving a life sentence without parole in Istanbul’s Silivri prison, a sentence the European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly said lacks any legitimate basis. Turkey has simply declined to comply with the court’s rulings.In May, a Turkish court nullified the Republican People’s Party’s own internal party elections and installed caretaker leadership more to Mr. Erdogan’s liking — a decision Human Rights Watch called a serious blow to the rule of law. Days later, police in riot gear broke into the party’s headquarters with tear gas to remove Chairman Ozel and allies who had refused to leave.In the weeks before the NATO summit, Turkish police arrested more than 200 people in Ankara alone, among them a journalist, an academic, two lawyers and more than a dozen members of a reforestation charity.“I’ve been writing about Turkey’s declining democracy since 2008,” a professor of Middle East history at St. Lawrence University, Howard Eissenstat, tells the Sun. “At some point it stops being newsworthy. So people have normalized it in a really unhealthy way, not recognizing how much worse it is. There’s a difference between an illiberal democracy and a hybrid regime. There’s a difference between a hybrid regime and full-bore authoritarianism and a single-party state.”In simple terms, Mr. Eissenstat is describing a country that has moved from merely bending its own rules to becoming one in which elections still happen, but real competition does not.Independent monitors agree. Turkey dropped to 163rd out of 180 countries in this year’s World Press Freedom Index, down from 159th a year earlier, landing below Sudan and Iraq and just ahead of Yemen, Belarus and Myanmar. Freedom House rates the country “not free,” pointing to Mr. Erdogan’s consolidation of power through constitutional changes and the jailing of political opponents, journalists and civil society figures.The base that buys silencePart of the reason lies at Incirlik Air Base, the sprawling installation near Adana that has hosted American nuclear-capable aircraft and served as a staging ground for the United States and allied operations across Iraq and Syria for decades.“Turkey’s geographic location makes it important to the alliance, giving Erdogan freedom of action he might not otherwise have,” the senior fellow and director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, Jennifer Kavanagh, tells the Sun.Mr. Trump has embraced that leverage rather than push back against it. He has twice pulled American troops back from the Syrian side of that nation’s border with Turkey, effectively clearing the way for Turkish operations against Kurdish forces who fought alongside the United States against the Islamic State. Further, Mr. Trump embraced Syria’s new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, and lifted sanctions on Damascus almost overnight, a decision that handed a win to Mr. Erdogan’s allies in Syria.Ahead of the summit, Mr. Trump said he was traveling to Ankara largely as a personal favor to the Turkish president, telling reporters, “I would not have gone for most people. But he called me up. He said: ‘Please, I have it in Turkey. You’ve got to be there.’ And so I’m going out of respect for President Erdogan.”Asked whether he was bringing Mr. Erdogan a “big gift bag,” Mr. Trump said he was — a reference, Mr. Ciddi says, to roughly $700 million in approved jet engine sales. The State Department notified Congress of the move over bipartisan objection.“Mr. Trump doesn’t just tolerate it; he praises Erdogan,” Mr. Ciddi tells the Sun. “This is part and parcel of his admiration for strongmen.”The director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum, Michael Rubin, argues that Washington has leverage it isn’t using. “Any F-35 or airline sale should be calibrated with a Turkish withdrawal from Cyprus,” Mr. Rubin tells the Sun. He points to Washington’s past use of objective criteria to place South Korea and Israel on human trafficking watch lists as a precedent for holding Ankara to similar standards on terror support or corruption. “Erdogan cowers like a whipped puppy when actually confronted,” Mr. Rubin says, pointing to the minor sanctions imposed during the Andrew Brunson affair.Mr. Brunson is an American pastor who was detained in Turkey in 2016 on terrorism-related charges widely seen as politically motivated. When Turkey refused to release him, the Trump administration in 2018 sanctioned two senior Turkish officials and doubled steel and aluminum tariffs on Turkey, prompting Ankara to release him within weeks. Turkey’s leverage now, some argue, may be weaker than it looks.“Erdogan can’t threaten to shut down air bases or kick the United States out, because he’s desperately in need,” Mr. Ciddi explains, noting Mr. Erdogan wants American engines for his indigenous fighter jet, movement on the F-35 program and sanctions relief.Ms. Kavanagh, meanwhile, describes the calculation on the European side in similarly stark terms.The goal of European leaders going into the NATO summit was “to have an uneventful summit that does not provoke further U.S. criticism of the alliance,” she says. “With the U.S. commitment to NATO in question, European allies need Turkey. Turkey has one of the biggest and best-equipped militaries after the United States and is a major defense producer. Europe’s NATO members cannot afford to alienate Erdogan at this moment.”As Washington’s own appetite for defending Europe grows less certain, Turkey’s army and arms industry have become a hedge the continent isn’t willing to gamble away over a crackdown on dissent.Europe’s quiet accommodationEuropean governments have been a little more vocal than Washington itself. Officials in Brussels and national capitals routinely express discomfort with Ankara’s treatment of dissent; yet at the diplomatic level they have settled into a transactional posture built around security cooperation, defense industrial ties and migration management.Turkish companies, including Baykar, TUSAŞ and Roketsan, have become significant players in NATO’s broader defense-industrial base, giving Ankara added weight at this week’s summit.Mr. Eissenstat traces the shift to the years before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when Europe struck migration deals with Ankara, and says it has since hardened into resignation.“European countries have voiced concern over and over for two decades, and they’re not willing to back it up,” he notes. “Maybe the argument becomes: If we’re not going to actually do anything, maybe we should shut up and just treat Turkey like Egypt.”From Mr. Eissenstat’s point of view, the NATO summit, for practical purposes, had two goals.“One is to put a happy face on an alliance that’s fundamentally collapsing,” he says. “And it’s about weapon sales.”Inside Turkey, though, the comparison people increasingly reach for isn’t Egypt. It’s Russia.“Turkey basically looks like Russia now,” Mr. Ciddi says. “There are elections, but [President Vladimir] Putin and his government essentially designate who the opposition is by jailing credible opponents. We haven’t gotten there with Turkey yet; they haven’t started killing them, just incarcerating them.”Whether any of this adds up to actual leverage over Ankara — enough to change Mr. Erdogan’s calculus, let alone free those he has jailed — is a separate question.“I don’t see any prospect for pressure on Ankara at this point,” Ms. Kavanagh says. “Europe needs Turkey much more than Turkey needs Europe right now.”For Mr. Kavala, watching from a cell in Silivri, and for Mr. Imamoglu, barred from the political life he once dominated, the NATO summit has changed little. Mr. Imamoglu’s own message, posted not long after his detention began, still spotlights the gap between what the West says it values and what it is willing to act on.“The will of the people cannot be silenced through intimidation or unlawful acts,” he wrote in an English-language post on X in the early hours of March 19, 2025, the day of his detention.

In NATO Summit at Ankara, Turkey’s Deepening Crackdown on Dissent Was the Unspoken Issue

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