While the world was distracted, Turkey swallowed a piece of Syria. This is not a creeping occupation; it is annexation in plain sight, a brazen 21st-century conquest. Following the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, Ankara has seized effective control of approximately 9,000 square kilometers of northeastern Syria—a territory larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined. This is no mere buffer zone patrolled by a nervous neighbor; it is a new, unofficially declared Turkish province.
The evidence of this de facto annexation is overwhelming and irrefutable. The Turkish lira, not the Syrian pound, is the official currency. Turkish-language schools, funded and staffed by Ankara, are educating Syrian children. Turkish-built hospitals, post offices, and infrastructure projects have replaced the functions of the Syrian state. Most strategically, plans are advancing for a railroad that will directly connect this resource-rich territory to the Turkish heartland, cementing its economic and strategic absorption for decades to come. All the while, Turkish troops patrol the region, enforcing Turkish rule and effectuating a brutal clampdown on the Kurdish populations, once America’s most effective partners against ISIS.
Watching this bold territorial seizure was an admiring Donald Trump. Having precipitously pulled American troops out of the way, Trump stood beside Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at a White House press conference and gave his explicit blessing. In a stunning abdication of American influence and a betrayal of its allies, Trump confirmed Turkey’s new dominion, telling Erdoğan in an Oval Office meeting, “For 2,000 years, you’ve been trying to take over Syria. He took over Syria, and he doesn’t want to take the credit.”
Trump’s policy was not formed in a vacuum of strategic analysis. It has been actively encouraged and facilitated by his Ambassador to Turkey, Tom Barrack. The appointment of Barrack—a longtime friend with deep business ties in the region—signaled a shift in which American foreign policy would be guided less by national interest and more by personal rapport. Operating as a kind of personal viceroy in Ankara, Barrack consistently champions Erdoğan’s positions, providing a friendly conduit that allows Trump to applaud Turkey’s expansionism while turning a blind eye to its geostrategic costs. With such a key post occupied by a loyalist sympathetic to Erdoğan’s project, Trump was free to lavish praise on the result: He saw a strongman take what he wanted. Trump seems to be consumed with envy.
Conquest envy is the central, driving force of his worldview. Trump does not admire Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Erdoğan for their ideologies; he covets their unchecked power and flouting of the rules-based order. He outright lusts after their authority to redraw maps and absorb sovereign lands without the troublesome constitutional interference of legislatures, courts, a free press, or even international law. Trump’s territorial ambitions, often dismissed as bizarre ramblings, reveal this deep-seated desire. (Any strategic advantage gained would be offset by the strategic loss of friends and allies and their force-multiplier effects.) His attempt to purchase Greenland, his musings about America’s “ownership” of Panama, and his reported questions about why the U.S. couldn’t simply take over Canada and Mexico were all expressions of a transactional, imperial mindset, thwarted only by the frustrating constraints of the American system.
Trump sees what authoritarians achieve. He watched Vladimir Putin perfect the grammar of hybrid warfare, using deniable “little green men” and armed proxy forces to carve off pieces of his neighbors. This strategy placed a Russian-backed statelet in Moldova’s Transnistria, dismembered Georgia by recognizing the “independence” of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and allowed him to annex Crimea and foment war in Ukraine’s Donbas long before the full-scale 2022 invasion.
Across Asia, he saw Xi Jinping provide a masterclass in clinical, autocratic consolidation. Under the cover of the global pandemic, Xi shattered Beijing’s promise of “one country, two systems” by imposing a draconian National Security Law on Hong Kong, extinguishing dissent, and arresting pro-democracy advocates. This mirrors the slow, methodical Sinicization of Tibet—a decades-long project of cultural erasure, demographic replacement, and infrastructure initiatives designed to bind the region inextricably to Beijing.
But now, well into his second and final term, which began on January 20, 2025, Trump’s conquest envy is haunted by the political reality he sought to deny: he is a lame duck. The 22nd Amendment’s clock is not just ticking; its alarm is ringing in the West Wing. The decay of his authority is palpable. Congressional Republicans, their eyes fixed on a future beyond him, openly defy him on crucial national issues like immigration and budget policy and crucial personal issues like the Jeffrey Epstein documents. Ambitious figures, including his own Vice President, are running transparent shadow campaigns for the 2028 election, signaling that the party is moving on. For a man obsessed with unwavering loyalty and a need for constant attention, this natural diffusion of power is a personal and intolerable affront.
It is a weakness that his authoritarian heroes have ruthlessly engineered their systems to prevent. The contrast is stark. Xi Jinping, in power since 2012, abolished presidential term limits in 2018, positioning himself to rule for life. Vladimir Putin has been Russia’s paramount leader since 1999—a rule spanning nearly a quarter-century—and has rewritten his country’s constitution to potentially remain in office until 2036. Erdoğan has dominated Turkey as Prime Minister or President for over two decades, systematically dismantling the secular, democratic checks on his power.
These tyrants never face the dilution of authority that comes with a final term. They will never be lame ducks. Their power is not on a constitutional timer, but on a biological one. ‘Til death do they part from power.
Trump’s twilight makes him unpredictable and dangerous. He doubles down on outrageous pronouncements and policy threats, trying to project unassailable strength and furtively avoiding any admission of aging. He repeatedly raises the specter of a third term. While often couched as a “joke” to trigger his opponents, the fantasy exposes his frustration. It is a verbal assault on the constitutional limits that cage him.
The danger of Trump’s final years in office is not merely erratic policy, but the spectacle of a wannabe strongman cornered by America’s democratic system. The developer-in-chief has seen the blueprint for permanent power, and his greatest frustration is that the Constitution will not let him build it. That frustration boils over as his power wanes and the authoritarian cabal he admires rules indefinitely, taking whatever and whoever they please.
