Donald Trump’s tendency to bend history to flatter authoritarian strongmen took another theatrical turn when he told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had achieved in Syria “what no one had done in 2,000 years.” The statement was not only absurd but disturbingly revealing of Trump’s enduring need to inflate foreign power at the expense of truth. The idea that Erdoğan embodies a triumph unseen since antiquity isn’t just historically illiterate; it is politically toxic. The myth of “Turkish success in Syria” serves to whitewash a decade of destruction, diplomatic failure, and regional instability—much of which Trump himself catalyzed.
Let’s start with the obvious: Erdoğan hasn’t conquered Syria. Turkish troops control a volatile corridor in the north, maintained through proxy militias, fragile truces, and periodic shelling. Syria, post-2024, is a fragmented ruin. Bashar al-Assad’s regime collapsed not because Erdoğan orchestrated a brilliant campaign but because his enablers fell apart. Russia, overstretched in Ukraine, and Iran, reeling from Israeli operations, left Damascus exposed. No Turkish general marched victoriously into the capital. No Ottoman banner flies in Homs.
Trump’s invocation of 2,000 years isn’t just numerically ridiculous; it misrepresents the very notion of statehood in the region. Syria has been many things over millennia: a Seleucid stronghold after Alexander’s campaigns, a Roman province, a Byzantine territory, a prize of the early Arab Caliphates, a battleground for Crusaders and Seljuk Turks, an Ottoman vilayet, and eventually a French mandate. Control over Syria has never been static or uncontested. Even under the Ottomans, Turkish rule was more administrative than absolute, and it ended over a century ago in the wake of World War I. What followed was European supervision, nationalist struggle, and then decades of domestic tyranny and foreign entanglement. To credit Erdoğan with some unparalleled conquest ignores all nuance and all precedent.
Turkish success in Syria, as Trump imagines it, stems largely from a vacuum the former president helped create. When Trump ordered the withdrawal of U.S. forces from northeast Syria in 2019, he greenlit a Turkish incursion that displaced tens of thousands and abandoned Kurdish allies who had led the fight against ISIS. This wasn’t a masterstroke of strategy. It was an act of betrayal, cloaked in isolationist bravado and executed with reckless speed. Türkiye didn’t so much gain Syria as stumble into a mess it helped worsen. Since then, Ankara’s position has weakened. Kurdish resistance persists, jihadist groups remain active, and Turkish forces are stretched thin across multiple conflict zones.
The fantasy of Turkish success in Syria allows Trump to reframe a catastrophic sequence of decisions as a bold reshaping of the Middle East. It’s revisionism with geopolitical consequences. By lauding Erdoğan as a victorious figure, Trump legitimizes cross-border aggression, glosses over the humanitarian fallout, and rewrites a timeline littered with U.S. failures. He empowers Ankara at a time when its domestic politics are under strain, its economy faltering, and its military adventures increasingly unpopular at home.
Worse, this distortion erases the suffering of Syrians themselves. Over 400,000 people are dead. More than 14 million have fled or been internally displaced. Cities lie in rubble, and entire generations have known nothing but war. To describe this chaos as evidence of Turkish success in Syria is not only false but grotesque. The consequences of foreign intervention, civil war, and authoritarian persistence can’t be swept away by lazy hyperbole.
There is no Turkish success in Syria—at least not by any metric that reflects stability, sovereignty, or security. There is presence, yes. There is influence. There is interference. But success implies resolution, and nothing in Syria has been resolved. The Assad regime may be gone, but no coherent authority has replaced it. Erdoğan holds parts of the north, Iran has proxies in the east, and remnants of jihadist factions still contest swathes of territory. Russia lurks from afar, unable to reassert itself. The United States, for its part, has retreated into irrelevance.
Trump, true to form, has taken this confusion and declared it victory—not for the Syrian people, not even for American interests, but for Erdoğan. His remark wasn’t just inaccurate; it was ideologically revealing. It showcased his admiration for strongmen, his disdain for allies like the Kurds, and his utter disregard for the historical record. In the end, this is the real danger of Trump’s rhetoric. It doesn’t merely confuse the public. It provides cover for aggression, undermines democratic alliances, and turns complex tragedies into slogans. Turkish success in Syria is a mirage. What remains is devastation, disorder, and a cautionary tale—one that Trump has neither the curiosity nor the integrity to tell.