Laced with intrigue: What did Tom Barrack’s shoes reveal about US-Turkey ties?

Just what was in the shoes? A political message? A secret tape recorder? A stock market tip? These were some of the questions flooding social media after the US ambassador to Turkey, Tom Barrack, showed up at a Dec. 16 meeting with Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan sporting a pair of black Nike trainers with thick white soles.

Veteran journalist Hilal Koylu noted on X that Barrack, who also serves as the US Syria envoy, had worn the same shoes to a meeting with Syria’s interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa. Nike’s promotional tagline is “Just do it!” “So, what was the message then?” Koylu mused. 

Coming a day after Barrack’s meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, the orders to Ankara from Washington were clear: “Fix your relations with Israel!” Or perhaps Barrack was telling Ankara to stop dithering and return the Russian S-400 missile batteries that had sent US-Turkish ties into a tailspin back home. This is one of the ideas being floated to secure Turkey’s re-entry into the F-35 program, from which it was ejected for buying the missiles in the face of repeated US admonishments. 

Arif Nacaroglu, a prolific poster whose comments are often mired in conspiracy theories, was having none of it. He told his more than 162,000 X followers, “No ambassador would turn up at a diplomatic meeting wearing sports shoes. There’s a listening device in those shoes.”

For many Turks, the ambassador’s choice of footwear was above all a sign of disrespect.

“Everyone in the Turkish government was glad to see the Trump team abandon long-standing norms around democracy, but footwear is proving more controversial,” Nicholas Danforth, deputy editor at Foreign Policy magazine and a leading American expert on Turkey, told Al-Monitor. 

“As foreign policy becomes more opaque and personal under Trump, it makes sense Barrack would emerge as a figure of media fascination. But this is getting silly,” Danforth added, before coming up with a theory of his own: “Nike is the Greek goddess of victory.”

Since taking up his post as ambassador in May this year, Barrack, a billionaire businessman with close personal ties to President Donald Trump, has excited interest in Turkey and Middle Eastern capitals alike. The 78-year-old’s penchant for lofty pronouncements about the region’s history and where it ought to be heading has raised eyebrows. He most recently opined that the Middle East would be best governed by “benevolent monarchies.”

In Turkey, his praise for the millet system that gave the Ottoman Empire’s non-Muslim subjects latitude to govern themselves under their own laws was “proof” that Barrack wished the collapse of Ataturk’s secular republic, growled members of the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), established by modern Turkey’s founder. 

“Conspiracy theories are appealing because they provide compelling and alluring explanations for problems that place blame on foreign saboteurs and internal collaborators,” Lisel Hintz, an assistant professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins University and another top Turkey scholar, told Al-Monitor. “Curated themes of imperial collapse, territorial loss and betrayal by allies become internalized as common knowledge through history textbooks and TV series,” she explained.

On Wednesday, Namik Tan, a prominent CHP lawmaker who served as ambassador to Washington, suggested in a speech to the parliament that Barrack ought to be declared persona non grata for remarks about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that he had aired a day before the Turkish leader’s Sept. 25 meeting with Trump at the White House. 

Barrack said that Trump had decided to end multiple controversies engulfing US-Turkish ties, be they Ankara’s support for Hamas or Halkbank, the Turkish state lender charged by a New York federal court with laundering money for Iran. “Trump said, ‘Let’s take a bold step and give Erdogan what he needs,’ and what he needs is not weapons or trade, but legitimacy,” Barrack told the Concordia forum in New York. Tan characterized the comments as an “overt insult” to Erdogan.

Others chafe at Barrack’s apparent lack of interest in Turkey. He spends substantial chunks of his time meeting with Middle Eastern royalty, with trips to Damascus and Beirut squeezed in between. When in Turkey he is rarely seen in the capital Ankara. Barrack prefers the buzz of Istanbul, where he has reportedly appropriated the US consul general’s residence overlooking the Bosporus for himself. 

Still, Erdogan and his lieutenants express satisfaction with Barrack, who is a fierce and vocal advocate of the Turkish leader and, most critically, has unfettered access to Trump. “He can pick up the phone and speak directly with the president. We can get instant answers,” said an unnamed Turkish official quoted by the local Yetkin Report news site. In person Barrack can be extremely disarming and is much beloved by his staff. Many say the envoy played a pivotal role in persuading Congress to repeal Caesar Act sanctions on Syria.

And as one X user concluded, “Sometimes a shoe is just a shoe.”