Welcome to the President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States.

I'm Jim Lindsay, Director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

This week's topic is Erdogan's victory.

With me to discuss what the re-election of Recep Tayyib Erdogan as president of Turkey means for U.S. Turkish relations and the future of NATO is Stephen A. Cook.

Stephen is the E.N. I. Enrico Matei Senior Fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies at the Council. He has written extensively

on the Middle East. He is the author of False Dawn, Protest Democracy and Violence in the New

Middle East, and a columnist for Foreign Policy Magazine. His most recent piece is titled

Why Turkey Experts Got the Election All Wrong.

Stephen, thanks for joining me.

Pleasure to be back with you, Jim.

Always good to have you, Stephen.

Now, for months, I have been reading that President Erwan's two-decade dominance of Turkish

politics was about to end.

The economy is in the worst shape in 20 years. Employment is

hitting 10%. Inflation is topping 70%. Many Turks are fearful that he is dismantling Turkey's

democracy. And by all accounts, Erdogan's government mishandled the response to the horrific earthquake that hit

southeastern Turkey in February and left tens of thousands of Turks dead, many of whom died

because Erdogan's government turned a blind eye to shoddy construction practices.

Yet Erdogan dominated the first round in voting and then achieved the

not right majority in the second round. What happened? You know, I was hearing those things as well.

I think that there was a problem, which was the reason for writing the piece, there was a problem

in the analysis ahead of the election. Certainly everything that you enumerated were problems, the economy,

...