From Istanbul With Love: Kaya Genç on How Turkey is Watching Trump's America

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody, it's Saturday, July 11th. It's been quite a week, certainly, in Ankara, Turkey. Donald Trump went to NATO. NATO meeting, met Erdogan, the Turkish strongman, promised him all sorts of things, including new F-35 fighter jets, and lift the sanctions on Turkey that Trump himself imposed. Classic Trump, I guess, in a way. And we're lucky enough today to have a man in Ankara, but a man, our man, at least for this show, in Istanbul, the great city in Turkey, straddling Asia and Europe. Kaya Genç is a very well-known Turkish novelist, commentator. He's also a contributor to an excellent anthology of essays about how America is viewed overseas. We interviewed Madeleine Schwartz, the editor of it, called How We See It, The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump.
And Kaya is joining us, as I said, from Istanbul. Kaya, what's the view from Istanbul, at least on these meetings between Donald Trump and your strongman leader Erdogan? Did they appear similar? Did one look stronger than the other? Weak than the other?

**Kaya Genç** (1:59)
Hello, Andrew. Very good to be here.
And very good to speak to you today from Istanbul.
Well, before the NATO summit, there were some arrests made in Ankara and lots of activists were rounded up one night because they were seen as a threat to NATO security for some reason. And those activists were LGBTQ right defenders and labor unionists, journalists. So when it comes to NATO, there's a sense in the Turkish civil society that it is a club of the right wing. You know, you read the 1960s, Turkish writers like Sevgi Soysal, for example, and you see this big antipathy toward NATO. So if you think that NATO represents the global world order institutions in Turkey, you're wrong. In Turkey, it represents the mighty. And so it wasn't a surprise that our president Erdogan and your president Trump got along so well. And this was such a kind of military fashion show. We saw lots of jets flying in the air and revolvers being gifted among the attendees and lots of talk about the war industry, guns and fighter jets and F-35s and S-400s, defense systems and all that. So to be fair, Ankara has been very successful in building in its defense industries. It built a model where it can support independent arms manufacturers in the country who produce drones that were used in the Ukraine-Russia war very successfully by Ukrainians. And so these exports, these military exports have been very good for Turkish economy, but it increasingly feels that we have a kind of war economy here, very increasingly built on arms exports.
So, there's a sense that, I mean, and the Turkish ruling politicians don't hide it. You know, Turkey is here to produce arms. That's the mission of Turkey at the moment. It's based on...

**Andrew Keen** (4:54)
And you've got enough wars around you to supply all sorts of people. Erdogan also apparently gave all the NATO leaders pistols. I wonder if, when they left the summit, I wonder if he gave Donald Trump a pistol. I don't know if you quite know what to do with it.

**Kaya Genç** (5:13)
Well, some leaders couldn't return to their home countries with the pistols like Keir Starmer, because Starmer said...

**Andrew Keen** (5:21)
Classic Starmer, right? It's pathetic.

**Kaya Genç** (5:23)
Yeah. Yes. And he was like, they won't allow me inside with this gun, so I have to leave it.
But it's kind of a powerful message. It's very also like kind of Ottoman Sultan style messaging, like, you know, we represent might and we know how to deal with you.

**Andrew Keen** (5:46)
We'll do a show maybe in the future, Kaya, on Erdogan himself. But I'm curious as how our man in Ankara, Donald Trump, was seen.
Looking up close, what did the Turkish people see in this old American character, an 80-year-old man coming to Turkey and living it up with your old man? Did he look like an old man? Was he useful? Was he fun? Was he charismatic?

**Kaya Genç** (6:21)
Yes, I think Trump is a star among right-wing voters everywhere. I went to India a few years ago and with my hair very rough and stuff and I was a bit chubbier I guess and someone said, oh, you look like Steve Bannon and I love you for that. We are big fans of Steve Bannon.

**Andrew Keen** (6:41)
Oh my God. I hope you smack them in the mat. Did you shoot them with your pistol?

**Kaya Genç** (6:46)