Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman dream: Why a Turkish bid to reclaim the empire should worry U.S. Christians more than Jews
Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen has issued a stark warning about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ambitions to revive the Ottoman Empire’s regional dominance, including a claim on Jerusalem itself.
In an in-depth strategic analysis with the TOV Hebrew media network, Hacohen laid out a pattern of Turkish behavior, cross-border military expansion, sweeping maritime claims, and highly symbolic religious reversals, that he says amounts to a systematic project to project Turkish power far beyond its borders, reviving a 400-year Ottoman legacy (1516-1917) that once ruled almost the entire Middle East and stretched deep into Christian Europe.
That history is exactly why the project should alarm Christians as much as it alarms Israel. Wherever Ottoman rule once expanded, Christian populations that had lived in those lands for centuries went into steep, often catastrophic decline, a pattern already repeating itself today in the very countries Erdogan invokes.
Hacohen points to Turkey’s “Blue Homeland” doctrine, a maritime strategy claiming vast stretches of the Mediterranean and its economic resources as Turkish territory, backed by an increasingly assertive Turkish navy. The doctrine’s clearest expression on land is Turkey’s continued military occupation of northern Cyprus.
Erdogan has been direct about the scope of his ambition. “Turkey is larger than Turkey,” he has said, adding, “The borders of our hearts are elsewhere,” a reference to former Ottoman territory including Mosul and Kirkuk in modern Iraq.
Turkey now operates military bases directly inside former Ottoman domains in Syria, Libya, and Somalia, a footprint Arab News has also documented, marking a sharp break from the deliberately isolationist foreign policy the Turkish republic’s founders established a century ago.
“The Harbinger of the Liberation of Jerusalem”
Nowhere has Erdogan tied this ambition to religion more explicitly than in his government’s decision to convert Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia, for nearly a thousand years the largest cathedral in Christendom and the spiritual center of Eastern Christianity, back into a mosque in July 2020. Erdogan invoked the legacy of Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II directly in announcing the move, framing it as a restoration of the sultan’s 1453 conquest rather than a religious or cultural decision made by his own government. But Erdogan did not stop at restoring history.
In his own address announcing the conversion, he declared, “The resurrection of Hagia Sophia is the harbinger of the liberation of Masjid al-Aqsa in Jerusalem.” He was explicit that Hagia Sophia was only the first step, and that Jerusalem was the intended destination.
Erdogan has repeatedly and directly challenged the legitimacy of Israeli sovereignty over its own capital, using the same Ottoman-era religious framing. He told the Turkish Parliament flatly, “Jerusalem is our city, a city from us,” invoking the Ottoman Empire’s tearful retreat from the city during World War I and pointing to surviving Ottoman architecture, including Jerusalem’s Old City walls, as evidence of an enduring Turkish claim.
In a public dispute with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over ancient relics, Erdogan said, “Turkey will not give even a single pebble belonging to Jerusalem to Israel,” describing the city as a sacred trust belonging to all humanity rather than to the Jewish state whose eternal capital it has been for three thousand years. After the United States recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in 2017, Erdogan convened an extraordinary summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and declared the American decision “against ethics, history, and consciousness, and completely null and void.”
A Bid to Lead the Entire Muslim World
Erdogan’s Jerusalem rhetoric is not an isolated obsession. It is one piece of a broader campaign to position himself as the leader of the global Muslim ummah, a role the Ottoman sultans themselves once claimed through the historic Caliphate, abolished by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1924.
Analysts have noted that Erdogan calculated the Hagia Sophia decision would resonate with Muslim audiences “from Los Angeles to Jakarta, from Pakistan to South Africa,” reinforcing his image as defender of the faith even as it damaged Turkey’s relations with the West. Erdogan has absorbed thousands of Muslim Brotherhood activists fleeing Egypt and granted them refuge in Turkey, sought to expand Turkish influence in Sudan, and worked to position himself as a rival to Saudi Arabia’s custodianship of Islam’s two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, all while presenting himself internationally as the foremost defender of the Palestinian cause and of Al-Aqsa specifically.
The contradictions in that self-image are glaring. Erdogan condemns Israeli control of Judea and Samaria while his own forces occupy northern Cyprus, parts of Syria, and have deployed into Libya.
He casts himself as champion of Muslims worldwide while conducting military campaigns against the Kurds, who are themselves overwhelmingly Muslim. He postures as the Muslim world’s conscience on human rights while imprisoning journalists by the hundreds at home.
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