President Donald Trump and Middle Eastern leaders are scrambling to respond to the Houthi conquest of Mokha, a small port and town that sits astride the Bab el-Mandeb, a strategic chokepoint that controls access to the Red Sea.
Egypt is in play. After spending billions of dollars keeping Egypt afloat, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman seeks a return on his investment. This could mean an Egyptian military base near Yanbu, the main export terminal on the Red Sea. Cairo, of course, has much at stake beyond Riyadh’s largesse.
While there has been some discussion of a Turkish base in northern Saudi Arabia, this will not assist Saudi Arabia against the Houthis.
Bin Salman’s Mecca Pact, a mutual defense agreement with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey finalized just last month, is also on the agenda. While bin Salman sought to embarrass the United States and signal the end to the primacy of the 80-year U.S.-Saudi defense umbrella, it remains unclear whether Pakistan and Turkey will come to Saudi Arabia’s defense.
While there has been some discussion of a Turkish base in northern Saudi Arabia, this will not assist Saudi Arabia against the Houthis. Bin Salman recognizes Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan cares little about Saudi Arabia beyond his desire to internationalize Mecca and Medina and consolidate Turkey’s encirclement of Israel.
While Saudi Arabia is in the Houthis’ immediate crosshairs, the crisis also exposes the myth of Turkish military power. On paper, Turkey is strong. NATO leaders resist holding Turkey to account for its occupation of Cyprus and its provocations against Greece in the Aegean Sea and Eastern Mediterranean since, on paper, it has the second-largest military in NATO.
Beyond his ground forces, Erdoğan has long promoted “Blue Homeland,” an irredentist maritime policy accompanied by a broad expansion of the Turkish Navy in the Black, Mediterranean, and Aegean Seas. Turkey has also expanded its broader military footprint, building bases and, in some cases, stationing aircraft in occupied Cyprus, Syria, Qatar, and Somalia. Turkey’s drone fleet is formidable.
Bin Salman reportedly has sought U.S. assistance and, while the announcement of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter sale is important, it is meaningless against the Houthis since it will be years before training and delivery, even if Congress does not block it.
Turkey’s largest military deployment abroad is now in Somalia. Turkey is building a space base in the country, maintains a large naval base, and controls Mogadishu’s international airport. Over the past decade, Turkey has trained thousands of special forces operatives in Somalia.
Why, then, does Erdoğan not come to bin Salman’s defense by leveraging Turkey’s navy, drones, and special forces to help keep the Bab el-Mandeb open? For much of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire governed the Tihama coast of Yemen, which is now under siege. While Erdoğan cites the Ottoman precedent to justify Turkey’s presence in Somalia, he got history wrong: The Ottomans never reached Somalia proper; instead, they had colonized Somaliland’s northwestern Awdal region.
Erdoğan’s generals can strut like peacocks, but there is no indication they have retained the ability to fight.
The likely reason that Erdoğan does not meaningfully assist is that Turkey’s power is in the uncertainty of its military prowess. Yes, Turkey can claim to be a superpower when it is bombing unarmed Kurdish farmers, but if the Turkish army really was powerful, it would have achieved something other than stalemate in a 40-plus-year insurgency with the Kurds.
Political purges—with one-in-five trained F-16 pilots imprisoned, and most of the top brass replaced—mean that the Turkish army is an empty shell. Erdoğan’s generals can strut like peacocks, but there is no indication they have retained the ability to fight. The Turkish navy is in worse shape. It can harass unarmed seismic oil exploration ships, but it cannot fight. Turkey’s power comes from its ability to avoid exposing the emptiness of its military.
Just as Erwin Schrödinger famously created the thought experiment Schrödinger’s cat, in which a cat existing in a box was neither alive nor dead until an observer confirmed its status, today Erdoğan presides over Schrödinger’s Turkey. Its claim to military prowess rests upon failure to test that prowess. Erdoğan will not deploy Turkish forces to the Bab el-Mandeb because he fears failure and international recognition that his bluster is little more than empty rhetoric.
