Loading summary
Transcript78 lines
- [00:00]
A
Insurance isn't one size fits all, and shopping for it shouldn't feel like squeezing into something that just doesn't fit. That's why drivers have enjoyed Progressive's name your price tool for years. With the name your price tool, you tell them what you want to pay and they show you options that fit your budget enough. Hunting for discounts, trying to calculate rates, and tinkering with coverages. Maybe you're picking out your very first policy, or maybe you're just looking for something that works better for you and your family. Either way, they make it simple to see your options. No guesswork, no surprises. Ready to see how easy and fun shopping for car insurance can be? Visit progressive.com and give the name your price tool a try. Take the stress out of shopping and find coverage that fits your life on your terms. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Price and coverage match Limited by state law
- [00:56]
B
It's Wednesday, April 29, 2026. From Peachfish Productions, it's the G. I'm Mike Pesca. A maniac with no real chance of harming his intended political targets was stopped at a security checkpoint and did no harm to his political targets. It was shocking. It was not good. But really, guy with no chance of doing harm does no harm isn't a great headline, but that is what happened the other day at the White House Correspondents dinner. And so the discussion turns to guns, a little slogans, hatred, responsibility for rhetoric. Yeah, a little bit. But the guy with the big microphone, the big guy, the guy paying most attention to in this matter, wants us to think of something else. He wants us to think of ballroom.
- [01:40]
C
I didn't want to say this, but this is why we have to have we need the ballroom.
- [01:45]
B
Ballroom is the new wall. Think about it. They're both tangible. Trump loves the tangible. They're both vehemently opposed by Democrats. They're both going to be paid for by someone else. In the case of ballroom, it is true. It will be paid for by wealthy donors from Apple to Miriam Adelson. In the case of Wal, it is not true is always the fake claim of and Mexico is going to pay for the wall. Here are two more similarities between wall and ball room. One, there are terrible initiatives. I mean, they're being done terribly. But if they weren't, there's a logic to a wall. We've always had some amount of wall. And by the way, you know, if a ballroom were built and if it was more tasteful and in accordance with architectural practices and in line with regulations, yeah, there'd be Some use for that, but they are made to seem more terrible than they are because Trump wants it that way. He understands them to be infuriating to his opponents. So like a human tongue working his way around a sensitive tooth, which is all of us, he prods and prods. The wall takes on spikes, is painted black. The ballroom grows like one of those magic grow capsules. You know, the spongy growing animals leave them overnight and they expand to horrific sizes. And the aesthetics, oh, the aesthetics. The guy knows what he' doing. But here's another similarity between wall and ball. Neither are actually the logical solution to the situation from which they arose. Walls are imperfect. They're always porous. They can be traversed. Also, we don't have a full scale border wall, but Trump brought down border crossings to basically zero without wall. And ballroom is a bad answer to the question what do we do about guys with basically no chance of causing damage who are unable to get past security checkpoints? I don't think we have to do much about them. The system's working. It's scary. We wish there weren't those guys. But if you're on the outside of the security checkpoints, that checkpoint provided security. Also. We did, as I said, eventually got wall, mostly wall. And Trump didn't realize full credit. So the thing he wanted happened, we didn't associate it with him. That was one of the things that allowed it to happen. And I think ballroom may be similar. I East wing's gone. There's a hole in it. You got to fill it with something. On the show today, Susie Hansen is here. She is an American reporter who moved to Turkey and has learned so much about that country and brings her knowledge back to us. She writes for the New York Times Magazine, other Places, and she's out with, I believe, her second book from Life itself, Turkey, Istanbul and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdogan.
- [04:31]
C
Foreign.
- [04:38]
B
Susie Hansen is an American journalist, as you will hear from the accent, who has been living in Turkey, the magical, mysterious, mystical, but also frustrating and hard to explain land of Turkey. For many years. She has written for New York Magazine, the New York Times. She has written an award winning book called Notes on a Foreign country. And now she is out with, from life itself, Turkey, Ista and a neighborhood in the Age of Erdogan. Susie, welcome to the Gist.
- [05:08]
C
Thank you so much for having me.
- [05:10]
B
So the neighborhood, the neighborhood that tells the story of a country where it's going actually as much as where it's been is the neighborhood of Karagumruk. I hope I said that close to correctly. Tell me about this neighborhood.
- [05:23]
C
Well, it's Karagumruk. But you did. You did very well. Hard language. Kargumruk is in the old city of Istanbul. It's in Fatih. Many people know this peninsula because it's where they go when they visit Istanbul. It's where the Hagia Sophia is. It's where the Blue Mosque is. But this is a tiny little mahale. In Istanbul, neighborhoods are broken down into tiny little parts. And this one is one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city. It's just inside the old city walls. And it was the place from which or to where all migration to Istanbul came into the city. And that's why it's called Karagamruk. And the name of.
- [06:05]
B
What does Kargram Rook mean?
- [06:07]
C
It means land. Customs.
- [06:09]
B
Okay, yeah, the customs.
- [06:10]
C
Okay, yeah, Customs.
- [06:11]
B
What's a customs house?
- [06:11]
C
Exactly. Exactly. And so, you know, in over time, the neighborhood, for a long time was this beautiful, cosmopolitan Ottoman neighborhood. It was very much old Constantinople, and it was populated by Greeks and Armenians and Jews as well as Turks. And then there were pogroms, sent all of the minorities out of Turkey, killed many of them, forced many of them to leave. And the neighborhood fell on hard times, and it became actually a quite nationalistic, I would say, xenophobic neighborhood. And it was sort of known for a place that taxi drivers didn't want to go and where there were a lot of tough guys.
- [06:51]
B
Yeah, yeah. They wouldn't even drive into Cargrim Rook. And it was the kind of place where just let the locals, let them be themselves there, because we don't want to intercede, even though it was this crossroads, this customs house.
- [07:04]
C
Yes, yes. It was a place where I noted at one point in the book, you know, young men sat on the roof and shot at the stars. There were guns, there was thievery, there were drugs. But it's kind of emblematic of a neighborhood that is on the periphery of the city. I mean, this is actually quite close to the center, but it's a marginal neighborhood. It's not a neighborhood that has been developed by young people, young couples. People don't move there. They usually leave.
- [07:33]
B
And I assume they never hit the stars. But that was never the point.
- [07:36]
C
Never the point.
- [07:38]
B
So the book starts and the story is told through an attack, speaking of pogroms. An attack in 2019. And this time the Syrians were beset by the inhabitants of Cargo.
- [07:55]
C
And.
- [07:55]
B
And, well, you tell me what you learned of that attack, because I don't think you were a witness to it firsthand, but you talked to people who were, and you did a lot of reporting on that. So if we were. If you were to do the inverted pyramid style of just telling us what happened, what would that sound like?
- [08:12]
C
I started going to Cargill right at the. Sort of in the beginning of the Syrian refugee crisis. And so a lot of Syrian refugees had moved into this neighborhood and sort of filled up the empty buildings. And I spent four years there, reporting continuously. And then one day in 2019, I got a phone call that there had been an attack on the Syrian sweet shop, which is a place I had spent time, and I had interviewed the people who worked there. And what I heard at first was that it was a group of men who had bashed into the windows of the shop, and they all got into a brawl on the street. And this was something that was actually starting to happen all over Istanbul at the time. I think the refugees had been there since 2011, and the economy was failing, and Turks were finally getting angry. They had done pretty well for a long time, but they were finally getting angry. And so then I went to the neighborhood after I heard about the attack, and I reported it out. And of course, what I found was a little bit different than what my expectation was. My expectation was, of course, that it was a racist attack and that was it an anti migrant, anti Arab attack. Because Turks, contrary to what people might believe, because they are both Muslim, are quite prejudiced against Arabs.
- [09:29]
B
Yeah, yeah. So are Persians, probably the other way around. There are a lot of subtleties, but there were these dislocations from the Syrian civil war. I remember when I was in Turkey, the number of beggars. Perhaps there's another way to say this. On the street were legion, all of them seemingly Syrian refugees. And it did create many strains on the economy, which Erdogan, who's a major character in the book, I don't know how much he could have done. Angela Merkel and whoever was lead Sweden did not do so much faced with this influx of refugees. But let's just take a moment and assess his policies towards this gigantic influx of refugees from the neighbor.
- [10:14]
C
Well, I think it's interesting because he's different from the other authoritarian leaders in the world in terms of how he looked at migration. He actually, at first welcomed them.
- [10:23]
B
Right, right. And that's why I even contrasted him with Merkel and the Swedes, people who are, you know, ostensibly well, welcoming to them and open to them until they weren't, because their politics dictated that. But, sorry, Go ahead.
- [10:35]
C
Right. But Erdogan kept millions and millions of them when. When Europe shut them out. But of course, they will get to that. The deal that they made in the beginning. Erdogan said, you know, we welcome our Muslim brothers. And he told his people to take. Everyone should take care of one Syrian. He said, you should look after them. And so, you know, at first, there were these really quite nice refugee camps along the border that the Turkish government had buil. And I think another thing that was very important during that time is that Erdogan rejected the international community and to some degree, the humanitarian aid community. He said, these people are coming into my country. This is my country. I will deal with the refugee crisis, which I think was the beginning of also his emergence on the world stage as a world leader. But otherwise, because, of course, the war went on and on, and more and more people came, and they couldn't all fit in the refugee camp. So they went everywhere throughout this country. It's an enormous country, 80 million people, northwest, south, east. The Syrians ended up in every town. And many of them, the majority of them, ended up in Istanbul, where, of course, there was a lot of work to be found and where they could also open their own shops. But it was basically a laissez faire policy. They had to make their own way. They had to get their kids into school. There might have been help here and there, but it certainly was basically up to them to survive. And the one thing that they had at their disposal for a little while was a thriving economy, which was also at Erdogan's initiation for the first 10 years of his rule. And then that, when that started to fade, that's really when the problems began to happen.
- [12:15]
B
We heard how Erdogan sold this to his public, and. Which was smart. He's a decent enough politician. There's probably some truth to it. We're going to welcome our Syrian Muslim brothers. But what else was going on? What were his calculations about why to try to absorb these people into the country and into the economy? Did the calculations include his desires for the outcome in the Syrian civil war?
- [12:41]
C
I think he wanted a seat at the table, and I think he had once he became against Assad. He was an ally of Assad in the beginning, and then he turned against him. I mean, some people do believe he. He really was horrified by the slaughtering of Sunni Muslims by the Assad regime, and that motivated him in the beginning. But I think it also was a display, it was a show of power to the world to say, look, we can take in these refugees. And I think eventually, and I think he did think that it would help his economy, but eventually he recognized that he could use the Syrians as a bargaining chip against Europe's demands. So essentially, Europe was looking at an area Erdogan regime that was becoming more and more repressive and of course would normally criticize him or hold things against him. And he was able to say, well, I'm going to keep these refugees in exchange for money and I won't let them go into Europe. I will actually hold them back. But I would say something else. I think that what was also going on with Erdogan was that he was expanding the idea of the Turkish identity. He was changing it from Ataturk's old secularist, Western looking identity to one that was more embracing of the east, of the Middle east and of his Sunni religious identity. And that was also very important to him.
- [14:03]
B
Yes. So he did hold, he did hold Europe hostage via the people of the Syrians. How did that work out for him long term? And how did that work out for them, not just in this one horrible attack, but overall their experience in Turkey? You know, you'd have to answer the question, given the alternatives.
- [14:25]
C
I mean, I think Syrians became unbelievably miserable in Turkey, especially the people who were living in the south. They desperately still wanted to go to Europe because what they were encountering in Turkey amongst the people, no matter what the government said, and I would say the real sea change was around 2018, 2019, when the economy basically crashed, is they were experiencing this horrific racism. I mean, nobody wanted them there. It was very difficult to find places to live or to live comfortably. Their children were being made fun of or they were being beaten up. And I was following the headlines. I mean, I followed the headlines about Syrians in turkey for about 10 years. And I can tell you people were dying all the time, I mean, in random killings because they drowned in a river. There were no protections, there was no safety. And they were living these incredibly precarious lives. But I think it was that the anger on the part of the Turks that eventually really got to many of them. And that is why they kept trying to go to Europe and risking their lives, often sent back, mostly failed. And it's also why when the Assad regime collapsed, many of them immediately went home.
- [15:41]
B
Did Erdogan have any real say in how these people were treated?
- [15:45]
C
Well, of course. I mean, he could have instituted more expansive policies in terms of healthcare, education, or in terms of communicating his position to the Police. There are things he could have done, but I will say the rhetoric was not nearly as bad as compared to most places that we are familiar with. When it comes to refugees, I think they do deserve a certain amount of credit. But it. It really took a turn for the worse when Turkey and the EU actually teamed up together to start trying to send more and more Syrians back to Syria. This is where Erdogan's own policy in Syria comes into play, because, of course, he involved himself in the Syrian war. He supported Sunni rebel groups against Assad. I think he very much, in the long term, wanted a peace of Syria. He wanted to have control over whatever happened there. And he had sent his army in multiple times and was clearing out areas in the north. He was also obviously incredibly agitated by the emergence of a nascent Kurdish state in northern Syria. And that was one of his main concerns, because it is Turkey's most important security concern. And so when he started doing military operations there, he started occupying northern Syria. And he saw it as a way to also create a space for the Syrian refugee in Turkey to go.
- [17:18]
B
Yeah, yeah. A bulwark against the Kurds. The PKK being a labeled terrorist group within Turkey for many years. And this is bona fide. This is a bona fide opinion that almost everyone in Turkey has. The Kurds probably do not want to take over Turkey. They'd want their own land. But the land right now is Turkey, or was Syria. And also in Syria, you have these very strange bedfellows where. Where almost everyone is. Has an alliance with someone or an opposition to someone in the Turkish theater that elsewhere they wouldn't have or sometimes had the exact opposite alliance. And it was. Well, I would say that if I was a leader there, I would think that I was playing a pretty dangerous game. But, you know, then again, I'm not Putin, Bashir Al Assad, or. Or Erdogan.
- [18:08]
C
Well, I don't think they were very good at it at the beginning. I think that that's the. The conventional wisdom. The Turks were really learning. I mean, look, Turke of its existence had been defensive. They were not. It was not a country that got involved in foreign conflicts very much. And the army had sort of been built and designed to be a defensive army. They were very concerned about what was going on in their own borders. Obviously, there were problems with Greece.
- [18:30]
B
You mean post Ottoman Empire. You mean literally Turkey, right?
- [18:33]
C
Literally Turkey, yes. Before Erdogan. And Erdogan, of course, became, you know, Turkey's first imperialist and got involved in Syria. And then he had broader ambitions. He saw himself as someone who was kind of going to a sort of patriarchal figure, overlord of the Middle East. And this was his neo Ottoman outlook. But I think it was also for power and it was for land. He also, if we think about what kept Tayyip Erdogan in power all those years and what allowed him to establish that power base was because he was very good to his businessman cronies, many of whom were in construction and so in imperial endeavors, also allowed for more building, for more contracts, for more business. And this was important, very important for him to keep going.
- [19:26]
B
Yeah, much of the world, look at the concrete magnets. Whoever they're aligned with, has the most power from Iran to Turkey to all the states of Azerbaijan and Eastern Asia. This is a constant.
- [19:38]
C
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, as in my book, I try to bring all of these threads together, but where they do come together is in the 2023 earthquake. Because, of course, his lenience and his, honestly, a kind of mania for building in the last 20 years led to overlooking safety standards and building standards. And when the 2023 earthquake happened in February 2023, so many of these buildings that had been built over the years, just pancakes straight to the ground. And I think the number is at 55,000 dead. But, you know, honestly, nobody really even believes that number. It seemed like it was so many more.
- [20:22]
B
So tell me about one of your main characters, because this is good. You know, so many of these people so well, and it's so interesting, the cross currents that people have or the cross pressures of who to be aligned with. So you talk about Hussein, who was a witness to the attack and also is very anti Arab, but very pro Erdogan. How did he square that with himself?
- [20:52]
C
I mean, I think he was the most sympathetic person to the refugees and particularly to this family that ran the sweet shop. And he was an evangelist for Erdogan, but not necessarily because, I mean, many people loved Erdogan because they had been religious and they felt oppressed and they felt people made fun of them and they were, you know, held with a certain amount of contempt by most of the society. Hussein wasn't really like that. Hussein was a bit businessman who was just very excited about all these mega projects that Erdogan was building, about this newfound prosperity and development. And it made him feel proud. I mean, I really mean it when I say Erdogan improved people's self esteem. So he might not have been 100% happy about Arabs coming into the country, but he certainly listened to erdogan took care of them. And he's a tough guy himself. He's known as a kabadaya, which is this kind of urban cowboy. And by the way, Erdogan was also known as a kabadiah in his own neighborhood. And so I, of course, admired him to a certain degree. You hear in the book the way his daughters speak of him so proudly because he's the only, as one of his daughters says, he's the only man in Kargamruk who speaks up for the Syrians. But that doesn't mean he's not, yes, a serious Turkish nationalist as well.
- [22:15]
B
So that attack took place in 2019. What's the neighborhood like today?
- [22:20]
C
The neighborhood is more or less the same. I mean, it's doing very poorly that the entire country is doing so poorly economically. It's great tragedy. And this is it's kind of incredible to see what Erdogan has done or what his autocracy has managed to let happen, because as we all know, it was this economic success story in the beginning for all kinds of reasons that I go into in the book. But it really has at this point collapsed. People can't afford food. I mean, so the neighborhood is. But a lot of the Syrians have left, and I think more and more of them are leaving. And I believe I did speak to someone from the sweets shop who said they also are going home. And I think the big question there was going to be, would these Turkish families that have been there for 10 years, their children speak Turkish? They're basically Turkish kids. Would they just stay? Would they become permanent citizens? But it seems as though many of them do want to go home.
- [23:21]
B
We'll be back with more of Susie after the break. We're back with Susie Hansen, author of the new book From Life Itself, Turkey, Istanbul in a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdogan. So we were talking a little bit about economics, and I do have to say I think your analysis of the economic boom times under Erdogan was a little bit forgiving to his agenda and theories. There were very many mistakes that he made, though, if you want to talk about it politically. Sure, he wrote A Wave and he built on economic successes. But I know you do consider this in the book. Maybe we just weigh these factors differently. I would say the great majority of what showed up on the balance sheet is growth. It was growth, absolutely. But the buildings were being built all over the country, some of them able to withstand tremors. But it was a sort of house of cards, maybe, I don't know, more Concrete than usual, house of cards. But it was all of this stimulus that was based on him overspending. And he really does not understand basic economics. For years he would make these bizarre claims and he totally get it wrong about how interest rates work and how everyone in the financial community would say, this isn't going to turn out well. But he was right. But he was wrong. He was wrong. It didn't turn out well. I do invite you to weigh in. Do you agree that so much of his success was based on building and based on a bill coming due one day that he would never be able to pay?
- [25:01]
C
I mean, I think that was definitely the explanation for the failure. I do think Turkey had a pretty strong economy, productive economy, for a long time. I think you're right that there was a tremendous amount of hot money flowing into the country that he was then spending, spending, spending. And we are seeing the results of this now. But I think there is a story here of competence and decreasing competence the longer that the leader is in power. One of the really fascinating things about AKP Erdogan's party is it was kind of a miracle in the beginning. In its inception, it was very diverse. It included all different kinds of people and stakeholders in the country. And also he had a lot of really smart men around him. I mean, Abdulah Gul, there was a lot of these figures who founded the party who were extremely well educated. And he also was very open minded into having people in the party who were not, you know, just worshipful of him. And that all faded over time. Slowly, slowly, he began kicking people out, just wanting people around him who were going to tell him what he wanted to hear. And by the time we get to the interest rate fiasco, I mean, he has appointed his son as, as Finance Minister. He's not listening to anyone who really understands how the economy works. And you'll notice that after 2023, when he realized that his votes were really dwindling and that he only very, very barely got back in or won the presidency, he immediately reverted to the old guard, the smarter economic wise men and women.
- [26:41]
B
And yeah, so what was he doing? What was he doing when he was saying, you know, high interest rates were the tool of the devil? Was he just, you know, playing to the mob, or did he honestly have this total inverted theory of monetary policy?
- [26:56]
C
I don't actually know if he totally did, but I do think there was a lot of playing to the mob. And there's always a lot of playing to the mob with Erdogan, which I think is Kind of difficult for people to understand on the outside. You know, he could blame the west for the interest rates. Right. So he. And he could, he could. I mean, blaming the west is something that he's going to do quite a lot. And so it sounds like he's tremendously anti American. But I will say that that relationship and his relationships with all of the countries and regions around him always maintain pretty strong. But if you listen to the rhetoric, especially about Israel, it's going to sound as if he's a radical leader. But a lot of this is just for his audience and a lot of it is because he is actually losing support.
- [27:39]
B
Right, right. And it's always very tempting for many leaders in the area to blame Israel for their problems. And that usually, even if the leaders are actually in making agreements with Israeli leadership, that's something you often will say to placate the masses. But I want to go back to when he was first gaining power. Do you think that he had democratic instincts and they eroded over time, or was it more the case that he correctly assessed that his path to power would be through popularity at first and then, I don't know, maybe he didn't even think about it afterwards.
- [28:22]
C
This is such a hard question. I think that he had no path to power without being expansive and inclusive. Right. I mean, this is a person who had been sent to jail, who was the very popular mayor of Istanbul, did a great job. More and more people were interested in him as a leader because of that. But he knew that the secular state, which at that time was the military and the judiciary, was very much against an Islamist or formerly Islamist party coming to power. And so I do think that he always felt paranoid about that. And so I think that he knew he had to be inclusive in those early years with the akp. And he also had to speak the language of democracy and human rights to appeal to the west and to appeal to a lot of the liberals and the intelligentsia in the country. But look, know.
- [29:14]
B
And that happened, by the way, I remember reading, I didn't read the Turkish press, but I remember reading about his rise and I was very interested in places like the New York Times. And there was right below the surface a cheering on of this guy who was going to strike a blow against the imposed secularism of Ataturk. In other words, whether they were taking a stance on any one religion or not, there was a sense of oppression. The Turkish people were being oppressed. This was a guy who would be the liberator of the oppressed people. And therefore you know, pro democratic on that basis alone. And that was. Well, you tell me. But that was definitely the impression I got early on. An exciting guy. Of course, this is an earlier and different time when the winds of change were, we thought, adding up to mostly good things in the world. But this was an exciting guy who would be a liberating force in this oppressive country.
- [30:08]
C
Yeah. And I think this is what makes him different from Trump in some ways. I mean, he's similar in that he's a populist and he likes what he became.
- [30:15]
B
Trumpian. Yeah.
- [30:16]
C
But he likes to emphasize his victimhood. Right. And I just want to always clear this up. The great victims in Turkey actually were the Kurds and to some degree, the leftist movement over the 20th century. So the religious people definitely were oppressed. They definitely were discriminated against, and they definitely did suffer. But he exaggerates it to a large degree with a lot of his rhetoric. Yeah. And I think that they. I think a lot of people just felt, well, the country has to do this because the secularist military has also been abusive in the past and has oppressed people. But also we have to include the entire country in our democratic system to be a full democracy. So I think that people felt that way. But the question of whether he was just using all of this in order to become an authoritarian, the thing I try to do with my book and the reason why the Syrian refugees and the Syrian war plays such a large role in it, is because I want to raise the possibility that the Syrian war helped to radicalize him and helped to make him more authoritarian, which I just think is something interesting in terms of the entire region. The war on terror, the war in Iraq, and then the war in Syria, all of these things are related. And I think that they had effects on a lot of other governments in ways that we're just beginning to see. And Erdogan suddenly having a war on his borders, a refugee crisis, a war that he. I mean, it was his choice to get involved. Whenever people get involved in war, you know, they are repressive at home. They start clamping down on the media and on academics and on any opposition. And certainly he was clamping down on the Kurdish opposition, which had been burgeoning as a new democratic force in Turkish Society in 2015. So, again, I think these contradictions of the Erdogan era are really interesting. I mean, he did not become an autocrat until about halfway through. So it's that turning point, those years around 2030, 13, 14, 15, 16, that I think are really crucial.
- [32:19]
B
And what's your assessment of who or what caused the Syrian war?
- [32:23]
C
You mean, what caused it to become so. To have so many different powers involved and, and. Or why did it break out in the first place?
- [32:32]
B
Well, you're putting. You're putting together a somewhat causal argument that explains Erdogan's shift. You just said because of a reaction to the war. War. Now, the war happens for reasons. It starts in the Arab Spring, but of course it has roots. And I want. I was interested in, you know, which of the roots you would emphasize.
- [32:57]
C
I would just say that Syria was a much. I mean, the Assad regime was a much more repressive, murderous regime to begin with than maybe some of the others. I mean, they were all bad. But, you know, very, very quickly, Assad fired into the crowds, killed people, kidnapped people, tortured people. And then you had, from Iraq, of course, the formation of the Islamic State and the entrance of the Islamic State, which happened very, very quickly. They wanted to. I mean, they immediately emerged as a rebel group in Syria against Assad. And so this is a kind of chaos. You know, a leader who has a country on the border like Turkey did would have to worry about. Not only that, he has to worry about the pkk, he has to worry about the Islamic State. He has to worry about whether or not this regime is going to fall or not. And then the refugee crisis. It's a question, you know, did he get involved in the Syrian war or was he. Was he forced to get involved because of the refugee crisis or because of the presence of terrorist groups, et cetera? I think. I think that's a tough one to determine.
- [34:01]
B
But in your estimation, is the roots of the war? Is there an aspect of it that it's a bank shot of American imperialism because America goes into Iraq, destabilizes that country, ISIS emerges as a powerful force. ISIS encroaches on Syria, drags Assad into war. So is this a story, to some extent, of American overreach and imperialism?
- [34:25]
C
I do believe that the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq created just a tremendous amount of. Of horror and violence in the Middle east that has had just one effect after another, and even, I would say, in some ways continues today. I think it's not over. And I think Syria bore the brunt of that and became almost. I remember at the time, many of us foreign correspondents, I mean, we thought of it as World War 3. There were so many different countries involved, so many different groups that were fighting, being sponsored by so many different countries, and the Us, in a weird way, was not as much involved as, say, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, but it certainly
- [35:08]
B
was very much, very much Barack Obama agreeing to whatever you decide, Congress, which I guess is the ideal under the War Powers act, but quite eager to not be drawn into that war. So, yeah, in a way that the other powers who are more in touch with their autocratic natures were not.
- [35:26]
C
Well, and also, I think that part of the reason why was because of the Iran deal that was ongoing at that time. I mean, I think he was walking a very fine balance, you know, fine balance between what do we want to do in Syria, what do we want to do in Iran, or which thing is more important. So Iran was involved in the Syrian war, and so fighting against them while also getting a deal, a nuclear deal, would have been quite difficult. But I think the great thing, I mean, the really fascinating thing about Obama's decision then, which was a story, the reporting I read on this was in the New Yorker. I mean, he was the only. Anyone who didn't want to arm groups there. I mean, they did arm groups there, but he, you know, he was under a lot of pressure to get more involved in Syria, and he was taking the lessons of Iraq to heart.
- [36:14]
B
Yeah, well, what happens, we learn our last lessons of the last war. Probably learn them too well. Was that a Dexter Filkins article?
- [36:21]
C
It was, yeah.
- [36:22]
B
Yeah.
- [36:22]
C
Yes.
- [36:23]
B
Okay. So I think that you're no doubt right, that the destabilization of the Iraq war, war created some of these circumstances. On the other hand, Assad's a Baathist, Saddam Hussein's a Baathist. They don't. They both believe in pan nationalism. His father is as brutal as anyone in that region is. And it's a. It's a brutal, brutal region. The winds of hope from the Arab Spring, enabled by technology, are this new factor added all up. There's some explanations that can be apportioned everywhere. I just don't know that the preponderance of it redounds to the Americans.
- [37:08]
C
No, no, no. I don't want to overstate that. I think. I think it's sort of an environment and an atmosphere that, you know, needs to be acknowledged. I don't want to. I don't want to put everything on them, but I think Isis, I mean, this. This group. And it's so strange because we've sort of forgotten about them at this point, but at that time, that's what we
- [37:29]
B
do with history as Americans. Not in Turkey, maybe not when it's all around you and built up. You look on a street and you can see a thousand years of history.
- [37:38]
C
Yeah, it sort of felt like the end of the world, to be honest. I mean, watching a terrorist group that was formed out of the hell of Iraq moving across borders like that. And then the old borders, the old World War I border, post World War I borders, are sort of collapsing around Syria and Iraq. And I very much felt at that time, even though isis, it had a presence in Turkey, because that's how a lot of fighters were coming in. They were coming through Istanbul and then flying to the south. But it just felt as though, I think that I felt the same way that many people began feeling in 2016, that there was a sort of reversal of progress happening or that things were going backwards, or that we had entered into some new era of disorder. And I think that ISIS made a lot of people feel that way in 2014 and 15, before Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. And then after that, it just sort of felt like we were all feeling as if some great rupture had happened. And in Turkey, the thing that was happening was that all of this forward momentum with Erdogan, this feeling that Turkey was, you know, Istanbul was the center of the world and everybody wanted to come visit and young people had all of these opportunities that that was all coming to an end and reversing as well.
- [38:59]
B
And finally, I'm going to ask an obnoxious question because it's centered around the country I'm from, but, hey, wait, it's a country you're from. What can America do to nudge Erdogan along, nudge him out, or just improve the situation with democracy in that country?
- [39:16]
C
At this point, I'm not really sure that they can do anything. I guess they could be withholding various kinds of support or cooperation through NATO, but I don't.
- [39:30]
B
NATO.
- [39:30]
C
Yeah, I know, I know. Well, are we talking about Trump or some future, better administration, if we have one? I mean, I'm not really sure, but I think that Erdogan is able to. To play all sides, and he's not going to stop his relationship. He's proven this. He's not going to stop his close relationship with Russia or with any other countries in the region. For us, I mean, we would have to have much more to offer to him. But I think, on the other hand, an interesting thing to think about with Turkey is for our own situation, is why the opposition failed there and what we could possibly learn, learn from that. And I think that many people believe that what this opposition party failed to do. The main opposition party was to fully recognize the threat of Erdogan and of authoritarianism and to remake themselves. That they did not recognize that their old party simply did not work anymore. That as soon as the autocrat comes to power, power, it's over, the old politics are over and you have to reinvent and come up with something new. And I think that we can see that our Democratic Party is really struggling with that.
- [40:52]
B
Yeah, it's true. Although I don't know. Is Magyar an affirmation of that thesis or a rebuttal?
- [41:00]
C
I don't think we can really judge anything about Hungary right now. Honestly. The election just happened. Yes, he has fallen, but I'm not holding that my breath. You know, you're right. They. I'm not saying that the Democratic Party should necessarily remake itself as a radical leftist party, although, you know, but I'm just saying that it's got to be something new. It can't be the same, the same old people or the same old language. And I think the language has a lot to do with it.
- [41:27]
B
Susie Hanson is who we've been talking to. She is the author of From Life Itself, Turkey, Istanbul and A Neighborhood in the Age of Erdogan. Thank you so much.
- [41:36]
C
Much. Thank you so much for having me.
- [41:43]
B
And that's it for today's show. Cory War produces the Gist. Kathleen Sykes runs the Gist list. Ben Astaire is our booking producer, and Jeff Craig runs our socials. Michelle Pesca oversees it all. Benevolently improve and thanks for listening.