Recep Tayyip Erdoğan became prime minister of Turkey a week before the 2003 Iraq War. Three years after the war ended he switched from powerful prime minister to even more powerful president. On May 28th Turkey will hold a runoff election that will determine whether he wins another five year term. By that time Erdoğan will have ruled Turkey for nearly a quarter of its existence and he has already reshaped its politics, economy, foreign relations, and society. His legacy will include reshaping Turkey’s energy future by bringing nuclear power to the republic for the first time. “Our country has risen to the league of nations with nuclear power,” Erdoğan declared. Unfortunately, Erdoğan’s nuclear achievement may prove to be as fraught as the rest of his rule.

Two decades before the end of the six-century-old Ottoman Empire, the Ottomans decided that the nation’s first electric power plant would use clean, renewable energy – a small hydropower plant in remote Tarsus. After Turkey’s first president, Kemal Atatürk, swept away the remnants of the Empire and founded the Republic of Türkiye in 1923, hydropower plans were washed away and diesel-powered plants proliferated across the country. Despite a century of modernisation that has completely changed Turkey’s language, culture, laws, and socioeconomics, nearly two-thirds of its electricity and over four-fifths of its total energy come from fossil fuels, with roughly equal shares from coal, natural gas, and oil. Between ever-growing energy demands and the overwhelming majority of its fossil fuels being imported, Turkey has long sought to move towards energy independence, including nuclear power.   

For almost half a century Turkey made fitful starts towards nuclear energy, aborted after economic or political disruptions. Only in 2017 did Turkey give Russia’s main nuclear firm, Rosatom, final approval to build a $20 billion, four-reactor plant in Akkuyu. Upon completion the plant may provide a tenth of the nation’s electricity. The deal between Turkey and Russia was really a deal between Erdoğan and President Vladimir Putin, who has ruled Russia three years longer than Erdoğan has ruled Turkey. No mere reactor purchase, the deal was only the latest intertwining between the two strongmen’s countries that further signaled their rebukes of reliable cooperation with the West.

In early 2015 Turkey, a NATO member, signaled that it was seriously considering purchasing a Russian-made S-400 missile defense system, despite strenuous objections from NATO and America, which offered to sell Turkey Patriot systems instead. Not only did NATO worry that the system might covertly obtain secret data on NATO weapons systems, but the Russian S-400 is incompatible with NATO command-and-control functionality. The US threatened to expel Turkey from the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, a fifth-generation fighter program that mostly includes NATO members, along with other US allies including South Korean and Japan. In 2017 Turkey signed the $2.5 billion S-400 deal and was kicked out of the F-35 club, and in 2020 the US sanctioned Turkey with weapons restrictions, including software updates for its F-16s. The reactor and missile deals both reflect how Erdoğan and Putin need each other, but also how Russia makes nuclear deals designed to ensure both profitability and long-term influence in nations, whether or not they are American allies.

After improving economic growth and stability during his early rule, Erdoğan has for years driven Turkey’s economy towards a disastrous cliff, saved only by one-off patches and policies that will worsen the final catastrophe. The Turkish lira has lost over 90% of its value against the dollar since 2003, inflation remains stuck above 40% after hitting 85% in the autumn, and because Erdoğan believes (or claims to believe) that higher interest rates cause inflation, the central bank has sold perhaps a billion dollars a day recently and its foreign reserves may now be negative $70 billion. Into this fiscal black hole Russia has poured billions of dollars. Half of the deal price of Turkey’s nuclear reactor and missile system came from Russian loans. Turkey has refused to sanction Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, leading vast numbers of Russians who find themselves unwelcome elsewhere to travel to Turkey as tourists, to make business deals, or to purchase homes. As US and EU sanctions have narrowed Russia’s hydrocarbon exports to the West, Turkey has ramped up its already massive purchases of Russian oil and gas – at a discount.

Putin not only sees Turkey as a valuable purchaser of Russian energy goods and services, but also as a valuable partner to counter EU and US influence. The EU is Turkey’s largest trading partner, but it wants Turkey’s help to stop migrants from reaching European shores and thus has long been unwilling to pressure Erdoğan. Sweden and Finland recently agreed to Erdoğan’s demands to allow the two nations to join NATO (and the US updated the F-16 software), although Turkey has yet to allow Sweden to join. Erdoğan has blocked additional Russian navy ships from entering its Black Sea waters and has sold numerous weapons systems to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion, but refuses to give the S-400 to Ukraine, despite US pleas. Yet it is the Akkuya plant that may come to represent Putin’s longest-term investment in Turkey, one that will probably outlast Erdoğan and the war in Ukraine, and continue to generate dividends for Russia for decades. 

Engineers globally continue to extend the working life of nuclear power plants, and many existing plants may be safely operable for a century. If the Akkuya plant remains operational for 80 years – as Rosatom has proposed – it will still be running in the 22nd century. Not only is Rosatom building Turkey’s first nuclear plant, but it will own, operate, maintain, fuel, and decommission the plant, and Russia is training – in effect, creating – all of Turkey’s nuclear regulators. Instead of making Turkey more energy independent, Erdoğan is ensuring that Turkey will be dependent not only on Russian fossil fuels but also Russian-controlled nuclear energy for the rest of the century. The Akkuya plant is the first nuclear plant anywhere that will be foreign built, owned, and operated, and it may be a model that Putin is eager to replicate elsewhere, especially in Africa.

Africa has no shortage of nations with high debts, great energy needs, and weak democracies. With sub-Saharan African nations’ average debt as a share of GDP exceeding 50% and interest payments above 17% of government revenue, few African nations are in any position to purchase a nuclear power plant outright. Egypt, itself dealing with a weak economy exacerbated by a strongman ruler, accepted a $25 billion loan from Russia to finance its first nuclear plant. Having demonstrated that another African customer has bought Russian reactors on credit and another customer has bought Russian reactors on a build-own-operate model, Rosatom may well try to peddle this model elsewhere in Africa, providing a boost to embattled leaders of straitened nations while ensuring future revenues or political favors from those nations. Whether or not the Akkuya plant generates a profit during the next decade may be irrelevant to Putin if it and other plants like it generate political influence and potential profits.

During the 15 years that Atatürk reigned over the country he created he changed Turkish to Latin script, emancipated women, embraced the Swiss civil code, Italian penal code, and German commercial code, and enforced secularism, all of which strengthened the economy over decades. On nuclear power Putin emulates Atatürk more than Erdoğan, making deals with everyone and setting in motion plans that pay off over decades. Perhaps someday Turkey will rise to the league of nations with craftiness as high as Russia’s.