EXPLAINING TURKEY

Europe on one side, Asia on the other, with Russia and Africa relatively nearby. Image source: Want to Know It?

Turkey has been in the news a lot recently, and mostly not for very good reasons. It’s a pivotal country with a big population and a strategic location, but it’s also going through profound changes, so the amount of coverage is understandable. Although Turkey tends to stay aloof from its Arab and Persian neighbors, understanding Turkey is key to understanding the intricate dynamics of West Asia, and that’s what this blog post will try to help with — as much as a single post can explain a country as deep as Turkey, anyway.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Although it’s not considered one of the ancient “centers of civilization” like Mesopotamia (Iraq) and China, Turkey ranks right up there in terms of how ancient its history is — the recent excavations at Göbekli Tepe reveal complex societies there 11,000 years ago. It was important in the ancient Greek and Roman eras and later became the center of the Byzantine Empire, the Greek successor to the Roman Empire in the east. However, this isn’t very relevant today, so fascinating as it is, I’ll skip it.

Modern Turks prefer to trace their history back to the Osmanlis (or “Ottomans”), a dynasty that took power in the 1300s. Their roots are in Central Asia, a huge region generally called “Turkestan” in the past and with a plethora of Turkish peoples (now called “Turkic” to distinguish them from the Turks in Turkey). The Byzantine Empire had already been pushed back by a Turkish people called the Seljuks; the Osmanlis wiped it out entirely and created a great empire stretching from the Balkans to North Africa and Arabia. In the 1500s it was one of the most powerful countries in the world and threatened to conquer Europe’s heartland. It held its own against Iran, then ruled by the powerful Safavid Empire. Its sultan declared himself caliph, or ruler of all Muslims, at least in a spiritual sense. Its capital, Istanbul, strategically situated on the narrow straits that separate Europe from Asia, became one of Islam’s most important cities and a melting pot of the various peoples of the Osmanli Empire (Greeks, Turks, Arabs, Albanians, Serbs, Kurds, Armenians, Bulgarians, Jews…).

But like all great empires, the Osmanli regime fell into decline. It was a slow, mostly imperceptible process, but mostly it just didn’t keep up with the changes happening elsewhere in Europe. North Africa became independent in all but name; Arabians away from the coast just ignored it; even rule over Arabs in the Levant and Mesopotamia (modern-day Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan) was mostly indirect. By the 1800s it was derided as the “sick man of Europe” and became tempting prey for Europe’s increasingly predatory empires. Their unending rivalries and paranoia prevented them from actually carving it up, but the new forces of nationalism helped fragment it anyway as Balkan countries started breaking off. An internal reform movement shifted power away from the sultan and toward bureaucrats, the military and eventually (1908) a legislature, but the decline continued.

The empire was finally shattered in World War I, when it sided with the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary) and found itself under attack from all sides. Stirred up by the British, the Arabs revolted and started their own countries. Much of the Armenian population was wiped out in a death-march to Syria to keep them from aiding the Russians, who seized northeast Turkey. By the war’s end, the empire had been whittled down to Turkey itself, or the peninsula once called Anatolia. It faced a punitive peace treaty afterward, with a big indemnity, zones of foreign occupation, and territorial losses to Greece, a new Armenian country, and maybe even Kurdistan. But — unique among the Central Powers — Turkey fought back under a new government led by disgruntled officers in a sort of regional sequel to World War I. A Greek invasion was repulsed, ethnic cleansing made Turkey more homogeneously Turkish (and Greece and Bulgaria less so), and the independent Armenia and Kurdistan and foreign occupation never happened (except for a short time around Istanbul).

The mastermind of this comeback, Mustafa Kemala, then set about creating a new Turkey. The old Osmanli Empire and its sultan were abolished (and the caliphate with it). The new Turkey would be much more European in its outlook, so the deep Islamic influences on Turkish culture were minimized: religious orders and schools were abolished, women were discouraged from wearing veils, men were banned from wearing fezzes (themselves an 1800s sign of modernization). Public displays of piety in general were curbed. Turkey was reorganized as a republic with Kemal as a dictator. The Western calendar and metric system were introduced. Thanks to the loss of its old empire and the recent ethnic cleansing, Turkey also became much more nationalist. Turkish was purged of as many Arabic words as possible, which were replaced by European loanwords or newly invented Turkish words. Arabic script was replaced by the Roman alphabet. Mass education helped spread these reforms to the new generation, along with barmy ideas about how Turks were the creators of civilization. A command economy along Soviet lines kept the country under the tight control of Kemal, who became known as “Atatürk,” or “Father of the Turks.” He is still revered in Turkey today and did more than anyone else to bring Turkey into the modern world.

Turkey’s history since then has mostly steered a middle path. It aligned with the Western camp in the Cold War, but stayed neutral in World War II. It continued to develop and modernize, but not as much as, say, Japan. It was roiled by political turmoil and dictatorship, but not as much as its unfortunate Asian neighbors. Atatürk’s dictatorship loosened by the mid-1900s as more Turks were drawn into the political process and populist leaders like Adnan Menderes and Süleyman Demirel opened up the economy and improved national infrastructure. Still, Atatürk had left Turkey a “deep state” — a cadre of bureaucrats and officers loyal to his original vision of a secular, authoritarian, Western-oriented country that remained in place throughout election cycles — and it fought back occasionally, although military rule would only last a few years and focused on paving the way for a more “responsible” successor. There was also an ongoing rift between Turkey’s rural, conservative hinterland and its more modern, liberal cities, especially in the west closer to Europe — although this rift also played out in Istanbul, which grew even bigger thanks to increased migration to its booming industries.

Image source: Ozan Kose/AFP via Getty Images

THE ERDOĞAN ERA
By 2000, Turkey seemed like it had turned a corner and left its sometimes turbulent recent past behind. The economy was growing at a fairly steady clip (3-7% a year), although it crashed in 2001; Turkey joined the G-20, an expanded version of the G-8 that includes the most important emerging economies. Turkey had joined a bunch of pan-European organizations (NATO, the Union of European Football Associations, Eurovision), and Turks had steadily migrated into Europe as manual laborers. It was more and more accepted as part of Europe, and the intellectual class had firmly aligned itself with European mores. The president elected in 2003, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (seen above), encouraged greater public expression of religiosity (veils, hijabs, Islamic schools, public prayer, mosques) while maintaining Turkey’s overall secular orientation and disdaining the fanaticism that gripped other Muslim societies. This form of political Islam (“Islamism”) was welcomed by Westerners nervous at the breakdown of society in many Muslim countries and the apparent dead ends in the Muslim world’s development. By 2005, Turkey was in talks to enter the EU, which would formally crown it as a member of the European community.

Yet Turkey didn’t end up traveling the track of European integration. The EU talks never went anywhere. The logistics of joining the EU were never really grappled with — with a population of 80 million, Turkey has about as many people as Germany and would be in a position to dominate the EU (or at least its parliament). That would be a “problem” because Europeans have never really wholeheartedly embraced Turkey as one of their own, either because of a long historical antagonism or Islamophobia — or just a sense that Turks are not really culturally European. In any case, Turks noticed this, and their relationship with Europe noticeably soured.

Meanwhile, Erdoğan began showing noticeable authoritarian traits. He is infamous for his short temper and lashes out at any critics. This meant going after journalists with unflattering stories or opposition politicians. He would explode in rage at stuff online that ran counter to his own views and take Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and YouTube down (in Turkey) for posting things that portrayed him in an unfavorable light. He also built a lavish, expensive palace for himself, complete with guards in medieval armor. In 2013, simmering popular discontent in Istanbul, especially among the youth, erupted in protests over plans to build over a park there. While it may have been a trivial local issue, the protests were energized by a sense that Erdoğan acted in a high-handed manner without concerns for his opponents — a sense that was vindicated when police used tear gas, water cannons and batons to break them up.

Image source: Reddit

These issues caused a good deal of concern abroad, but the turning point really came in 2016, when a disgruntled faction of the military attempted a coup. For a night the world watched anxiously as protesters attacked tanks in the streets of Ankara, the capital, warplanes zoomed overhead, and Erdoğan’s whereabouts were unclear. But Erdoğan still had popular support on his side, and the coup failed. The deep state has apparently been vanquished. To make sure, Erdoğan initiated a wide-ranging purge of Turkish society, getting rid of 170,000 bureaucrats, judges, lawyers, police, soldiers and teachers with suspect loyalties, especially if they were affiliated in some way with the man he blames for the coup, Fethullah Gülen. They were replaced by loyalists and members of his party, Justice and Development (AKP), irrespective of talent or qualifications.

Erdoğan cemented his dictatorship with a constitutional referendum last year that granted him broader presidential powers like rule by decree and increased appointment authority (he switched to the presidency in 2014). The vote was marred by fraud and the two sides didn’t have a level playing field. The courts are compliant and the media has been intimidated into submission (hostile news stories land their writers in jail and their outlets huge fines). While there are still opposition parties in parliament and they made a strong showing in this year’s election, it seems fair to say that Erdoğan’s power is secure and he no longer faces credible pushback. Throughout, he has maintained strong support among the Turkish populace, who admire his piety, working-class background, blunt, no-nonsense style and infrastructure projects. Though by no means the only example, he has become the poster-child for a new breed of dictator in the ’10s that works from a democratic basis to carefully and gradually gut the opposition and consolidate far-reaching control for themselves.

Like many dictators, Erdoğan also relies on nationalism to shore up support. Turks are proud of their imperial past and look back fondly on the Osmanli days (one of the plans for that Istanbul park is to rebuild the Osmanli barracks that once stood there). Erdoğan once claimed that Turks somehow discovered America. A constitutional article makes it a crime to insult “the Turkish nation.” Warm relationships with the Turkic countries of Central Asia have been cultivated after their 1991 independence. However, Turkey is still a multi-ethnic country, so this rhetoric causes friction with minorities. The Armenian Genocide is denied, and anyone who discusses it is attacked ferociously (in the case of Hrant Dink, an Armenian journalist, even assassination). Relations with the Kurds in the southeast have always been testy, since they are widely suspected of craving independence and generally resist attempts at integration. In recent decades, this testiness has periodically exploded into insurgency; since 2015, we are currently in one of these phases.

All of this has strained Turkey’s relations with Europe. Always somewhat uncomfortable with it, Europeans have now become outright hostile. Erdoğan has returned the favor by slamming the Netherlands and Germany as “Nazi” for preventing him from campaigning there during the 2017 referendum campaign. Like many other peoples, Turks increasingly view Europeans as sanctimonious, condescending and snooty, and even charge that democracy and human rights rhetoric are used as a cloak to justify excluding Muslims. Relations with Greece, Turkey’s historic enemy, remain frosty despite numerous cultural ties. Nevertheless, Turkey is still seen as a crucial bulwark against more threatening forces further east; these days, Europeans are terrified of Syrian refugees, and Turkey has taken in millions of them so Europe won’t have to — something European leaders are very grateful for.

Given that it borders Syria, the vicious war there has dominated Turkish foreign policy this decade. In general, relations weren’t good before the war; now Turkey is actively involved in trying to unseat Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad. Turkey plays host to NATO forces from its air base at Incirlik and the governing councils of Syria’s opposition forces. It is a crucial combatant in the war against the Islamic State. But NATO is also increasingly frustrated with Turkey because the latter cares way more about Kurds than the wider war. Syria’s small Kurdish community has borne the brunt of the fighting against the Islamic State and has created a quasi-state, Rojava, along the Turkish border. This could be the nucleus of a future Kurdistan encompassing southeast Turkey, so Turkey intervened earlier this year to create a buffer zone on its border to keep the Kurds apart. This has brought it into alignment with Russia (even though Russia supports Syria), and Turkey bought an advanced Russian anti-aircraft system last year. A full-blown alliance remains a distant prospect given their conflicting desires for Syria, but Turkey clearly no longer sees NATO as an appealing alliance.

This has naturally also led to strained ties with America. Throughout the war with the Islamic State, America has been begging Turkey to devote more resources to the jihadists and less to the Kurds, who were instrumental in IS’s defeat. A group of Erdoğan’s bodyguards beat up protesters when he visited Washington, D.C. Turks have long bought into conspiracy theories about the CIA’s intentions in Turkey and West Asia, and many are suspicious about its possible involvement in the 2016 coup attempt. Turkey has demanded America extradite Gülen, who lives on a rural estate there; America has refused. The latest imbroglio involves an American pastor, Andrew Brunson, whom Turkey has jailed as part of the post-coup purge. Turkish obstinacy over his detention led America to slap it with steel and aluminum tariffs. This has exacerbated a currency crisis going on throughout the year caused by Turkey’s high foreign debt and a strengthening dollar. Further exacerbating it is the Turkish government, which has become a financially illiterate clique dedicated to sucking up to Erdoğan (who refuses to raise interest rates because he thinks that would worsen inflation). It is a slow-moving crisis that hasn’t spread beyond Turkey much yet, but it has revealed how hollow the Erdoğan boom really was and scared most foreign investors away from Turkey.

In many ways, Turkey has similarities with Russia. Both are countries on the fringes of Europe with an ambivalent relationship with it — at times yearning to be a part of it, at others scoffing at it and emphasizing their distinctiveness and independence. Both look back on past days of glory and power fondly and yearn to relive them somehow. And both are examples of countries that traveled down the liberal democratic track before veering off course. Russia has done so more dramatically than Turkey, but Turkey’s recent example as a vibrant, proudly Muslim democracy with close ties to Europe and high living standards unrelated to oil wealth made its transformation especially painful for Westerners. Its future course remains uncertain — is it still interested in joining the EU, or does it see its future with Russia, Iran, the Persian Gulf and China? Will it ever resolve its old animosities with the Armenians, Greeks and Kurds? Will Erdoğan’s new dictatorship endure, or will the youthful discontent on display in 2013 erupt into something more akin to the Arab Spring? The answers to these questions are beyond the scope of this post, but suffice it to say that Turkey will engage the attentions of the world for many years to come as it combines unpredictability with strategic vitality.

AMERICA’S OBAMA

Image source: Nadav Kander for TIME

On January 20, the Obama Era of American history will come to a close. Like many of his predecessors, he leaves behind a contentious legacy that is sure to occupy the attentions of historians and biographers for decades to come. His supporters make him seem like a paragon of virtue and liberal ideals, while his opponents portray him as a socialist demagogue determined to destroy America. Now that his administration is passing into history, it seems fair and obvious that neither description really fits. So what kind of leader was he?

While some of Obama’s most contentious and consequential policies, like his signature initiative, the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), are beyond the scope of this blog, his foreign policy was important, and it’s worth taking a look back at what he managed to accomplish — and whether his policy will have an enduring impact.

Obama’s foreign policy was shaped above all by the legacy of his immediate predecessor, George W. Bush. Bush started 2 wars — in Afghanistan and Iraq — and created an enduring image of America as an oppressive bully, especially in the Muslim world. Obama — capitalizing on a growing war-weariness among the American public, even among Republicans — sought to put an end to this and project an image of a nicer, gentler, more reasonable America. Always a critic of the Iraq War, which had been a personal project of Bush and his oil industry buddies anyway, he wasted little time in pulling American troops out, which was finished in 2011. He made a concerted effort to reassure ordinary Muslims that America wasn’t Islamophobic and thuggish, for instance by giving a speech with these themes at Egypt’s prestigious Cairo University in 2009. He made some efforts to distance America from Israel’s right-wing policies like building settlements in the West Bank and launching repeated wars against the Gaza Strip.

While Obama successfully differentiated himself from Bush (he is beloved in Europe and even received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009), it’s hard to discern how pacifist America has really become. He never really ended the war in Afghanistan; after an ineffectual “surge” (sudden increase in troops) in 2009, he pulled troop numbers down to 10,000, which remain in Afghanistan in an advisory role to support the fragile government there. It remains unstable, violent and messy.

America was caught off-guard by the turbulence of the Arab Spring of 2011, and Obama had to play a delicate balancing act, pressuring Arab dictators to step down or at least heed the protesters’ demands without really withdrawing support or taking the protesters’ side. As a result, he alienated both sides. When Egypt lapsed back into dictatorship in 2013, he reaffirmed America’s old support for the Egyptian military. He supported Saudi Arabia’s war against a Shi’ite uprising in Yemen. He went to war in the air over Libya to ensure a rebel victory there.

Looming over all of this in Obama’s foreign policy legacy is the disastrous war in Syria, born out of Bashar al-Assad’s repression of the protests there. Amidst international clamor for the US to get involved there, he dithered. The one time he did threaten to attack Syria was in retaliation for a poison gas attack in Damascus in 2013, and that ended peacefully with the removal and destruction of Syria’s sarin gas stockpile. Instead, America’s attention has been fixated on the Islamic State, a jihadist rebel group in east Syria and northern Iraq. Ever since its dramatic expansion and declaration of a caliphate (transnational Islamic empire) in 2014, America has been bombing it relentlessly in concert with other concerned Western and regional countries. Given repeated Islamic State terrorist attacks in Europe and America, it’s hard to say that the policy is succeeding so far.

In other words, Obama has had to reconcile his desire for a more dovish foreign policy with the demands of national security. Mindful of domestic concerns about terrorism, he’s fought jihadists as hard as Bush did, but with an emphasis on drone strikes and commando operations to take them out. The former is how he killed Anwar al-Awlaqi, an American propagandist for suicide terrorism living in Yemen; the latter is how Usama bin Ladin, the head of al-Qaeda and mastermind behind the devastating terrorist attack of 2001, met his fate. He is as hard-nosed and ruthless as Bush when it comes to killing terrorists, but with a marked preference for methods other than full-on war and the messy and difficult state-building that comes with it. Whether his strategy actually makes America safer remains to be seen; it seems hard to imagine a real reduction in terrorism without a serious change in Muslim attitudes, since many of them have marked America and the West in general as the enemy and will persist in fighting it until something changes their minds.

The other aspect of Obama’s nicer foreign policy was a willingness to accommodate rogue and unfriendly regimes. Here he has had more obvious success. First came Myanmar, an isolated and repressive dictatorship long subject to international sanctions and criticism. In response to increasing Chinese encroachment, it offered to open up its political system in the hopes that America would then lift its sanctions and let it open up its economic system. It did, and Obama even visited Myanmar to celebrate its new international posture in 2012 and 2014. Several ongoing conflicts notwithstanding, Myanmar now seems headed on a more successful and promising path. Then came Iran, a vital player in West Asian politics isolated by its strident anti-Americanism, threats against Israel and nuclear program. Although Obama’s initial overtures toward the Iranian regime were rebuffed, a punishing round of international sanctions brought it to the negotiating table after a more accommodating president was elected in 2013. The resulting deal on its nuclear program forced Iran to make real concessions at relatively little cost to the US. Finally, there was Cuba, a Communist country embargoed by America for decades. America’s rigid isolation of it seemed outdated and ineffective long before Obama came to power, and he seized upon opening diplomatic relations with it as an easy way to score a political victory and appease annoyed Latinos. Tourism has picked up and momentum is building for increasing commercial and personal ties with the island.

But in all of these cases, it’s unclear if the progress America has made will be sustained after Obama leaves office. His replacement, Donald Trump, has a much more sour view of the world, and Republicans in general tend to view good relations with sketchy regimes as a sign of weakness and/or appeasement. Myanmar might be playing the outside world for quick and easy money, and the much-loathed military still has effective veto power. Iran still supports Shi’ite militias in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen and remains deeply skeptical of American intentions. Cuba remains under an embargo with an anti-American Communist dictator. There are a few anti-American countries Obama wasn’t able to woo, like Venezuela and North Korea; Trump will have to deal with them.

Another one is Russia. Although Russia wasn’t quite an enemy state or rogue regime, relations with America had suffered in the later years of the Bush presidency. Obama hoped to “reset” relations and be more cooperative. It didn’t work: Russia got freaked out by the unrest of the Arab Spring and American support for anti-government protests in Russia in 2011-12, seeing America’s relations with dictatorships as a way for it to undermine them. In 2014 Russia stopped the pretense that it is a “normal” country and annexed Crimea in retaliation for a popular uprising in Ukraine. Since then it has upped the ante with an insurgency in east Ukraine, anti-Western propaganda, ominous military exercises, bellicose rhetoric and electoral shenanigans in the West (including America). Obama has responded with international sanctions and increased (financial) support for Ukraine. While Republicans at first thundered that these strategies were way too soft, they’ve since flipped (thanks to Trump) and complain that Obama is unfairly and ineffectually isolating Russia. Trump seems to want to be friends with Russia, or at least reach some sort of accord, so Obama’s relations with Russia may go down in history as his most ineffective and inconsequential foreign initiative.

Another 1 of Obama’s goals was to “pivot to Asia.” With fond memories of a childhood spent in Indonesia, he saw East Asia as a golden opportunity for spreading American influence, business and cultural norms in a region intimidated by the rise of China and with rapidly fading memories of the brutish America that ruined Vietnam. Despite the unending stream of crises coming out of West Asia, he saw East Asia as the true fulcrum of global power in the 2000s. He deployed American troops to the Philippines and Australia, cozied up to Vietnam and India, hosted leaders from ASEAN (the Association of South-East Asian Nations), sent naval patrols through the South China Sea, and quietly encouraged better relations between the crucial allies of Japan and South Korea.

The linchpin of this pivot was the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation grouping of Asian, Oceanian, North and Latin American countries eager for free trade, transparent business practices, and standardization of goods and services. After years of expecting the agreement to be just around the corner, especially after the normally globalist Republicans took both houses of Congress in 2014, the initiative faced a stunning defeat when Trump got elected, since he hates globalization. Despite continued interest in the deal from Japan (the other dominant partner), the future of the partnership without America looks uncertain. This defeat, combined with China’s renewed diplomatic, economic, and military overtures in East Asia, makes the importance of the pivot dubious. Asians always doubted how committed America was to their region, and betting too much on American influence seemed risky given that it’s not an Asian country. With Trump’s election, the Philippines’ new president caustically spurning America, and a chill in Thai-American relations after a coup there in 2014, it’s more common now to read dismissive evaluations of the pivot.

With ongoing war in Afghanistan and Iraq, a bloody mess in Syria, aggressive counter-terrorism operations, a newly hostile Russia, and a China apparently determined to gradually shove America out of East Asia, it might seem that Obama’s foreign policy record is bleak. There is certainly plenty of ammo for his critics to harp on and the rosy evaluations of his fans seem far-fetched or out of touch with reality. But Obama’s greatest success was in projecting a certain image of America, of reminding the world that the Texan “cowboy” caricature embodied by Bush is only 1 side of America’s identity. For all the cynical politicians who saw him as a naive weakling ripe for manipulation, there were an equal or greater number who appreciated his diplomatic, reasonable, nuanced approach and easygoing style. His interest in issues like regulating carbon emissions to limit the effects of climate change or promoting a bigger electricity grid in Africa won him many admirers, as did his willingness to engage with “ordinary” people in townhall events in India, China and Vietnam. His warm relations with other world leaders made it much easier to throw together international efforts like the sanctions against Iran and Russia, the nuclear deal with Iran, and the coalitions against Libya and the Islamic State.

Obama is often described as a “cool” president, both because he’s a pretty chill guy who relates well to ordinary people and because he takes a levelheaded, pragmatic approach to policy. He embraced Bill Clinton’s worldview — an America ready to use military force when (it feels that it’s) needed but more inclined toward soft power, like diplomacy, commercial pressure and foreign aid. He also took cues from Republican presidents like Dwight Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush (“First Bush”), who used America’s formidable military power but opted for restraint and deft diplomacy in more delicate situations. And if I may indulge in a personal opinion here, I believe that his background — a mixed-race man with a father of a different nationality and a childhood spent partially overseas — has shaped his worldview somewhat. Traditional American foreign policy credos like “America must be the world’s policeman, intervening in trouble spots to uphold international law & order” or “America is a liberal bastion of the best political, economic, and ideological systems ever invented and we should spread them wherever we can” are favored by the white, Protestant “Eastern Establishment” that has long dominated American politics and especially foreign policy. Obama is probably better able to see the world and its issues from a different perspective — that of the browner parts of the globe, who regard America with at least a little apprehension given its overwhelming power and influence.

Obama’s foreign policy was only a partial success. Too often people went easy on him for just Not Being Bush instead of what he actually did. In cases like Russia and Syria (which combined to horrifying effect near the end of his 2nd term), he didn’t always seem to know what to do. The world may now face yet another side of the American identity as Trump revises American foreign policy along his own lines. But Obama’s foreign policy may yet prove to be as inspirational to those who care about this stuff as his domestic policy was to young, liberal Americans. It suggests an America that’s not overbearing, loud, or obnoxious, that knows how to rub elbows and build careful strategic relationships and project a positive image to the world, yet also willing to strike hard and fast when world order or its own security is at threat. Most likely, more people will regret Obama’s departure than cheer it.

MAN OF THE YEAR

Image source: Daily Kos

AN OPINION PIECE

At the end of every year, the American newsweekly TIME Magazine designates someone as “Man of the Year” — the person who, for good or for ill, most influenced the course of events in the past year. For the most part, it is an unreliable indicator of the year’s main mover and shaker, but it’s still a fun tradition, and I’ve always enjoyed predicting (or at least speculating) on who the latest choice will be. So here are my choices for 2016’s Man of the Year.

First, let’s see who TIME chose as its runners-up. I find Hillary Clinton to be a weak choice; she lost the American presidential election, after all. America may be the world’s most important country, but it’s not THAT important. It is hard to exercise influence when you’ve lost the election. Perhaps you could argue that her hard-fought campaign and popular vote victory inspired politically minded women everywhere, but it’s hard to wield influence when you lose.

Hackers were certainly influential this year, as data ransacking of the American Democratic party, theft from the Russian central bank, and data wiping at Saudi Arabia’s aviation regulator made clear. Cybersecurity is a growing concern for technologically adept governments and businesses and its specter will only expand. But I prefer identifying actual people, not broad, vague (and in this case, totally anonymous) groups.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is actually a good choice. Turkey has become more and more geopolitically vital, with both the EU and Russia trying to court it as the key link between Europe and war-torn West Asia. At the same time, Erdoğan has become more assertive and powerful within his country, especially after a failed coup on July 15 was followed up by a massive and deep purge of suspected dissidents. I don’t think his influence extends far enough in regional affairs to be a top contender for Man of the Year, though.

The CRISPR pioneers are an interesting choice in the science field. The new technique of CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), a form of genetic engineering, promises to have wide-ranging effects in crop nutritional enhancement, genetic mutations, and most of all, in fighting tough conditions like cancer. The pioneers of this method (namely, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier) might be worthy of the Women of the Year honor. But it’s hard to tell at this early stage how much impact CRISPR will have; the crucial trials to see whether it can cure cancer take place next year.

It’s hard to gauge the influence of figures like Beyoncé. On the one hand, it’s clear that she’s an enormously famous and influential singer, and one with an international fanbase. But the main reason TIME honored her this year is her passionate activism for feminism and improved race relations, and the latter is primarily an American issue. I’m also not convinced that she’s had a lot of influence in these fields; it seems more like wishful thinking on TIME’s part. Most of the people she has reached probably already believe her messages anyway. The smash success of her album Lemonade this year definitely makes her one of the main figures in the cultural field, though.

And now for some other possible candidates:

– Juan Manuel Santos probably deserves recognition as one of the most influential people of the year for bringing Colombia’s 50-year civil war to an end. His accord may have been rejected by voters in a plebiscite in October, but it still earned him a well-earned Nobel Peace Prize, and a peace agreement with the FARC rebels was eventually reached anyway. Still, his influence is mostly local.
– Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, was my pick for Woman of the Year last year, but this year she didn’t make many headlines. Instead, she found herself on the defensive against a growing backlash within Germany against welcoming refugees and keeping the borders often and against growing discontent in Europe with sanctions against Russia.
– Bashar al-Assad, the dictator of Syria, continued to make headlines with his cruel and destructive war, the world’s worst. It has an impact beyond its region but Assad is no longer the key factor here.
– Xi Jinping, the dictator of China, consolidated his control this year, but made no headline-making moves. China, in general, is a difficult country for these sorts of exercises; it is extremely important and influential, but its leadership is mostly collective and its influence is incremental. A Chinese leader could be Man of the Year just about any year, because their decisions (especially economic and monetary ones) have enormous global impact.
– Rodrigo Duterte is another possible candidate. The new president of the Philippines has rattled East Asia with his unpredictability and realignment away from America and towards China. He could herald a turning of the tide in East Asia away from the American security umbrella and socioeconomic model (and away from democratic norms too). He is probably #4 this year given how this development would probably not have happened without him (well, at least not this fast). But his influence is still mostly regional, and it’s still unclear how much weight his words actually carry (at least in foreign policy).

The overriding theme in global affairs this year is a noticeable, transnational turn away from boring but pragmatic liberal democratic politics and toward angry, usually right-wing, protectionist and nationalist populism. Therefore it is worth keeping in mind which figures are doing the most to drive this trend. They are the ones I chose for 2016’s Men of the Year.

BORIS JOHNSON

The first of two big political earthquakes this year with global repercussions was Brexit — the British exit from the EU. Even though it hasn’t even happened yet, the notion that such an important European country would leave the institution that binds the continent together rattled elites across the West. The British economy is suffering, British politics are in a state of uncertainty, and the leaders of the EU and its major countries are nervous about a precedent being set. While I didn’t cover it for this blog, it was undeniably a Big Deal. Although the referendum was a collective effort, Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, was the face of the Brexit campaign. His victory even sparked predictions that he would take David Cameron’s place as British prime minister. That didn’t happen, but he is Foreign Secretary and still an influential figure in the Brexit negotiations. He deserves credit for the vote and its impact on global politics. (The other major figure would be Nigel Farage, leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party until very recently.)

VLADIMIR PUTIN

Putin’s back, baby! For the third time in a row, he makes my list. Despite all that the West has done to squeeze the Russian economy and elite, it remains an influential global player and wild card in geopolitics. Putin continued to rely on his preferred covert ops methods — hacking, espionage, pro-Russian media, funding for divisive politicians — to aggravate the growing cracks within the transatlantic alliance. Meanwhile, he continued to leverage Russia’s considerable hard power to punish Syrian rebels and the innocent Syrian people to make Russia look big and strong. Ukraine remains tied down by the war in the Donbass and Putin’s approval rating remains above 80%. A mostly unsuccessful effort this month by Japan to coax Putin into territorial and economic concessions proved once again that Putin is a man with a lot of leverage. His crowning achievement may have been getting Donald Trump, a candidate few took seriously, elected president of the United States. With the West in disarray and China more or less friendly, Russia is in good shape — and it’s mostly thanks to Putin.

DONALD TRUMP

Last year I wrote “I expect next year we’ll see Hillary Clinton on TIME’s cover as she takes the mantle of world’s most powerful and influential woman.” During the year I began to doubt this due to the continuing media fixation with Trump. I never imagined that it wouldn’t be true because Clinton would actually lose.

Trump’s election, as you have probably guessed, was the second big political earthquake of the year. It’s a development that came completely out of nowhere: in 2014 no one would’ve predicted this, and even in 2015 his victory seemed far-fetched given that Republican (and sometimes Democratic) voters have a tendency to favor wacky candidates at the beginning. Although he’s a Republican, he upended the normal dynamics of American politics with his platform, which favors protectionism and tight border controls as well as closer relations with Russia. The usual Republican concerns — small government, Christian values, a strong military — he ignored. Democrats, of course, are repulsed by his political incorrectness.

Although right-wing populism predates Trump, he has emerged as sort of the global standard-bearer for it. Others, like Farage, Marine le Pen in France, and Frauke Petry in Germany, cheered his win and see him as an inspiration. His revisionist foreign policy, which will involve some sort of retreat from America’s position of influence worldwide, has rattled governments everywhere. His election has made 2017 very uncertain. No one quite knows what to expect from him, given how many of his statements he’s backtracked on. Although it may seem premature to name him Man of the Year when he hasn’t even taken office yet, this is TIME’s standard practice with election winners, and the strong media spotlight given the American elections means his tweets and cabinet picks have major repercussions.

I find Trump to be an arrogant, boastful, brutish, bullying, crude, hateful, ignorant, lying, obnoxious, pandering, pessimistic, petty, racist, sexist, tacky asshole whose victory fills me with shame and dread, but that does not necessarily mean he is not influential. Throughout 2016, electorates have endorsed decisions that are tantamount to national suicide: a president who encourages drug addicts to get gunned down in the street and brags about murdering them himself; a split from a union that has delivered Britain peace, prosperity and new opportunities; an accord that brings Colombia peace and reconciliation with minimal risk; a constitutional reform that would’ve given Italy a fighting chance to overcome its quarrelsome political habits. Trump’s election is just the biggest and worst in this series. 2016 has given Chinese critics of democracy a lot of ammo in their argument that popular sovereignty is a dangerous system.

Note: Despite my fixation with political figures, I do acknowledge that business, scientific, technological and even cultural figures can have widespread influence too. But in most years it’s hard to measure their influence against the years before. Ongoing developments in robotics, self-driving cars, mobile devices, and so on could shake the world much more than the likes of Putin or Trump, but it’s hard to tell at this point.