Deniz Göktaş, one of Turkey’s most popular stand-up comedians, was arrested at Istanbul airport this week after returning from holiday. A court had issued a pre-trial detention order following 185 complaints to the Istanbul chief public prosecutor over a performance video that has accumulated 9.4 million views on YouTube. The charges: inciting hatred and hostility, and insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The performance had been running in various Turkish cities for nearly three years without incident. The arrest comes as Ankara prepares to host NATO leaders for a summit on July 7-8, at which Secretary General Mark Rutte has said members will demonstrate their commitment to meeting defence spending targets. Over 200 people were detained in the days preceding the summit; demonstrations in Ankara have been banned until July 10; independent Turkish media have been denied summit accreditation.
The received wisdom
The liberal critique of Göktaş’s arrest writes itself and is broadly correct as far as it goes. Turkey has been moving in an authoritarian direction for over a decade. Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoğlu — the most credible opposition figure in the country — has been jailed for over a year and is on trial for corruption charges that his supporters regard as politically motivated. In May, a court removed the entire leadership of the opposition CHP party. The use of the state apparatus to silence a comedian for jokes about the president is consistent with a wider pattern that Human Rights Watch has described as “far-reaching restrictions on the main political opposition party, the media, and freedom of expression.” The arrest of Göktaş is not an aberration; it is a data point in a trend line that runs from 2013 to today.
There is also a genuine constitutional argument: Turkey’s own courts have previously held that satire is protected speech, and the European Convention on Human Rights — to which Turkey remains a signatory — is clear on the matter. The Media and Law Studies Association stated bluntly that Göktaş faces prison “for telling jokes.” That is the plain description of what is happening.
A different read
The more uncomfortable question is what NATO’s hosting choice reveals about the alliance’s own priorities and self-understanding.
NATO is not, and has never been, an alliance of democracies in any rigorous sense. It is an alliance of states that share a security interest against a common adversary. Turkey’s strategic position — controlling the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits, hosting Incirlik Air Base, fielding the second-largest military in the alliance — means it has been accommodated through authoritarianism since long before Erdoğan. The Cold War alliance included Portugal under Salazar and Greece under military junta. Realpolitik is not a new invention. The liberal critique, however morally sound, tends to miss that NATO was never designed to be a democracy-promotion organisation; it was designed to defend Western Europe from Soviet invasion. That it succeeded in this purpose — even with authoritarian members — is a credit to its coherence as a security arrangement.
But there is a longer-term strategic argument against complacency, and it is not primarily a liberal one. Erdoğan’s Turkey has, in recent years, purchased Russian S-400 air defence systems (which led to its expulsion from the F-35 programme), blocked Sweden and Finland’s NATO accession for eighteen months while extracting political concessions, and repeatedly threatened to veto alliance decisions as leverage over bilateral disputes. This is not the behaviour of a reliable ally; it is the behaviour of a state that treats alliance membership as a menu of benefits from which it can selectively order while avoiding the reciprocal obligations. The arrest of a comedian on the eve of a NATO summit — combined with the denial of accreditation to independent media covering that summit — is not merely a human rights matter. It is a statement of contempt for the norms of democratic governance that the alliance’s credibility ultimately depends upon in the eyes of member populations.
The NATO summit at Ankara is also context-specific in a way that the received wisdom tends to elide. It convenes as the aftermath of the Iran-US war reshapes the Middle Eastern order, as Russia is threatening provocations on Polish soil, and as Ukraine’s air defences are being overwhelmed by record-scale attacks. Erdoğan’s Turkey, historically positioned to play mediator between Russia and Ukraine (as it did in the 2022 grain deal), is simultaneously hosting a summit that is supposed to project Western resolve. The comedian’s arrest, the media blackout, the mass pre-summit detentions — these are not incidental to the summit’s political meaning. They are its political meaning.
The deeper structural problem is one that conservatives who take alliance solidarity seriously should be able to articulate more clearly than the progressive left: the Turkish state’s domestic authoritarianism is beginning to corrode the alliance’s operational effectiveness, not merely its moral standing. Allies who cannot trust each other’s intelligence services, who cannot coordinate in real time without worrying about information leaking to adversaries, who cannot deploy through each other’s territory without political ransom demands, are not allies in any meaningful military sense. Turkey under Erdoğan is approaching that threshold. The joke being told is not Göktaş’s. It is the one about calling an organisation a mutual defence alliance while one of its most powerful members treats the forum as a platform for domestic legitimation.
What to watch
- Whether any NATO member raises Göktaş’s arrest or the broader press freedom context at the Ankara summit, or whether the detention of a comedian is simply absorbed into the background noise of alliance management.
- The text of any communiqué language on democratic norms and rule of law — or the absence thereof.
- The Imamoğlu trial outcome; if he is convicted and disqualified from political life before the next Turkish election, the opposition’s ability to contest Erdoğan’s consolidation collapses.
- Whether Turkey uses the NATO summit to extract further concessions on the Kurdish issue or arms transfers in exchange for its continued cooperation on Ukraine.
— J