ANKARA, Turkey -- President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has started talking about Turkey's borders, hinting that they should be shifted outward a bit. In Syria and Iraq, his army is involved in wars over territory once ruled from Istanbul. Maps of a greater Turkey have circulated.
That has led to speculation that Erdogan, fresh from surviving an attempted coup, wants to crown his 14-year rule in Turkey by annexing chunks of his neighbors. But analysts see a more mundane domestic calculation behind the rhetoric: They say the president is really trying to expand his own powers, not his country's frontiers.
Erdogan hankers for more after making his office the focus of all power in Turkey, instead of the largely ceremonial post it was before he took over -- and, on paper, still is. But he doesn't have support in the parliament to make that constitutional change -- and maybe not in the country, either, if it went to a referendum. In both cases, the likeliest bloc of voters to be won over is nationalists who aren't at all averse to talk of Turkey's historic claims on nearby lands, or military attacks on Kurdish groups who live there.
"Erdogan is seeking to expand his support base among nationalists by talking tough over regional matters," said Nihat Ali Ozcan, an analyst at the Economic Policy Research Foundation in Ankara. It's "part of his political calculations for a presidential system," Ozcan said.
Last week's domestic crackdown on Kurdish politicians, which triggered sharp falls in financial markets, may be part of the same calculus. Likewise Erdogan's recent support for reinstating the death penalty, which could be applied to Kurdish militants as well as members of the Islamist secret society said to be behind the failed coup attempt in July. That idea won backing from the Nationalist Movement Party, whose lawmakers would be swing voters when plans for constitutional change reach the parliament.
Requests for comment for this story to the Turkish presidency's press office went unanswered. Ilnur Cevik, a chief adviser to Erdogan, also didn't respond to calls seeking comment.
Erdogan's foreign policy has become more assertive since the coup attempt. In August, he sent troops into Syria, where they're pursuing Islamic State militants but also clashing with fighters linked to the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party -- the group that's a main target of Erdogan's crackdown at home. Its Syrian affiliates have established control over much of that country's north during five years of civil war, and in doing so, emerged as a favored U.S. fighting force in the ground war against Islamic State.
In recent days, Turkey has been sending tanks and troops to its Iraqi border too, ready to bolster a 2,000-strong force that's already inside the country -- despite loud protests from Iraq.
Erdogan insists that Turkey will join in the ongoing liberation of Mosul, the biggest Iraqi city in Islamic State's self-proclaimed caliphate. Justifying that stance, which has dismayed many allies, he's repeatedly referred to Turkey's past rule over the region.
Pro-government media dug up the history of oil-rich Mosul and Kirkuk, provinces of the Ottoman Empire that almost became part of the Turkish republic created after World War I. Instead they went to another new state, Iraq, which was then under a British mandate, and Turkey formally dropped its claim over them in the late 1920s.
Still, "Mosul maintains a position of unique historical relevance in Turkey's collective memory," the Soufan Group, a security analyst, said in an emailed report. It said Erdogan's deployment of troops nearby is part of "Turkey's effort to strategically position itself and the forces it supports to prevail in the aftermath of the battle."
A Section on 11/09/2016