TURKEY’S

NEW FOREIGN POLICY

Ankara’s Ambitions, Regional Responses,
and Implications for the United States

NICHOLAS DANFORTH
AARON STEIN
This page was left blank for printing purposes
 TuTURKEY’S
r key ’s
NEW FOREIGN POLICY
Ne w Forei g n P ol i cy
Ankara’s Ambitions, Regional Responses,
Ankara’s Ambitions, Regional Responses, and
and Implications for the United States
Implications for the United States
This page was left blank for printing purposes
 TuTURKEY’S
r key ’s
NEW FOREIGN POLICY
Ne w Forei g n P ol i cy
Ankara’s Ambitions, Regional Responses,
Ankara’s Ambitions, Regional Responses, and
and Implications for the United States
Implications for the United States

NICHOLAS DANFORTH
AARON STEIN
Published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute

123 S. Broad Street, Suite 1920, Philadelphia, PA 19109

www.fpri.org

Copyright©2023 Foreign Policy Research Institute

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic
or mechanical means, including inofmration storage and retrieval systems, without written
permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Danforth, Nicholas, author. | Stein, Aaron, author

Title: Turkey’s New Foreign Policy: Ankara’s Ambitions, Regional Responses, and
Implications for the United States

Identifiers: ISBN 978-0-91091-18-0 (electronic) | ISBN 978-0-910191-19-7 (print)

Subjects: Political Science

Editing: Shane Mason

Printed by Creative Print Group

Design: Natalia Kopytnik

 Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: Defending Lausanne 5

Chapter 2: Turkish Revisionism Today and the 27

Threat to U.S. Interests
Chapter 3: Regional Repercussions 57

Chapter 4: US Response and Recommendations 83

 Introduction

F or the past century, Turkey’s foreign policy has been driven by

the need to preserve the achievements of the Lausanne Treaty in
the face of often serious threats from major powers. As a result,
Turkey was a predominantly status quo country, and its relations
with neighboring states were largely shaped by its place in broader
geopolitical struggles. With the end of the Cold War, however, and
the subsequent growth of Turkey’s economic, military and diplomatic
strength, this has changed. Turkish foreign policy has begun to focus
on reshaping the regional order in accordance with its growing
desire for influence. Going forward, the nature of Ankara’s efforts,
and the response they provoke from Turkey’s neighbors, will be an
increasingly crucial factor in determining Turkey’s relations with
the United States and Europe. Turkey’s new dynamics will remain
a source of tension under any future Turkish government, but they
need not, if managed well by all sides, lead to a lasting rift between
Turkey and the West. The more deeply embroiled Turkey becomes
in disputes with key US allies from Western Europe to the Persian
Gulf, the more difficult it will be for Washington and Ankara to
have a cooperative, mutually beneficial relationship. And the more
Turkey views itself as a revisionist power, the more it will come into
conflict with America’s allies. As a result, it is more important than
ever for US policymakers to understand the historic trajectory of
Turkey’s place in its region.

1
Turkey emerged from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire as a
status quo power, an orientation that it maintained for the better
part of the last hundred years. Though the new country had been
shorn of its former territories in Southeastern Europe and the
Middle East, it had also forcefully defeated foreign efforts to occupy
the territory of Anatolia itself. For modern Turkey’s founders, the
success in avoiding complete colonization far outweighed the failure
to preserve the full geographic scope of the Ottoman Empire. As a
result, they forged a pragmatic foreign policy tradition that prioritized
preserving their achievement: a Turkish state sovereign and secure
within its current borders. This goal remained constant over a long
and turbulent 20th century, even as its implications changed, and
allowed for Ankara to be flexible about which countries to work
with to maximize its self-declared interests. In the inter-war period,
when threats came largely from powerful European empires like
France, Italy, and Britain, the defense of Turkish sovereignty called
for a policy of neutrality and non-alignment.1 In the immediate
aftermath of World War II, however, Turkey’s geopolitical position
changed dramatically. Suddenly, the Soviet Union emerged as the
most direct and dangerous threat to Turkey’s territorial integrity.2 In
this new strategic context, seeking the support of the United States
and NATO became the only feasible way to preserve the imperiled
status quo, equip the country’s armed forces, and ultimately defend
its borders. The result was a strong and mutually beneficial alliance
with the United States and much of Europe.

2
The success of this alliance, however, sometimes obscured the
complex, constantly evolving and often paradoxical relationship
between Turkey’s status quo orientation and its historically-
grounded relationships with regional states. The circumstances
surrounding the collapse of the Ottoman Empire created a bitter
legacy, giving almost all of Turkey’s neighbors both emotional and
practical reasons to feel hostility towards it. With other countries
that shared a commitment to the status quo, however, Ankara had
equally good reason to overcome this animosity. For countries
that found themselves on the wrong side of Turkey’s geopolitical
alignment, by contrast, these resentments and unresolved problems
were consistently exacerbated.

The history of Turkey’s regional relationships can be read through

the ever-shifting dynamics of power politics and unsettled history.
In the case of Greece, for example, Ankara and Athens began an
ambitious rapprochement in the 1930s when they both felt their
security was threatened by Italian irredentism in the Eastern
Mediterranean. When this shared threat was supplanted by the
Soviet Union, the two countries were brought into an even closer
alignment under the NATO umbrella. Soon though, the growing
rebellion against British rule on Cyprus rendered the status quo
unsustainable, leaving Athens and Ankara with radically divergent
views on what should come next. Only in this context were a number
of longstanding questions re-opened, such as maritime borders and
the status of historic minorities in both countries. Crucially, even as
tensions over Cyprus worsened, both sides still had Washington to
help remind them of their shared security interests. Throughout the
Cold War, the United States was in a position to manage Turkish-

3
Greek tensions in order to pre-empt the risk of an intra-NATO war
between two allies that would benefit the Soviets. In other words,
by acting as a forceful advocate for the status quo, Washington
helped ensure that both Greece and Turkey maintained their shared
commitment to it.

With the end of the Cold War and the rise of Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party, Turkey embraced not just
a new foreign policy but a new foreign policy orientation. Ankara is
no longer interested in maintaining the status quo—it now wants to
transform it. Just as Turkey’s status quo orientation led to different
policies as circumstances change, Turkey’s new anti-status quo
orientation has also led Erdoğan’s government to pursue different
strategies. But to make sense of these shifts, and the reaction they
have provoked in the region, it is crucial to appreciate that, no less
than in the previous century, Turkey’s neighbors have responded in
light of their history but also, more importantly, their own orientation
toward the regional status quo.

4
 Chapter 1:
Defending Lausanne

T he 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which established Turkey’s

modern borders, has long held pride of place in accounts of the
country’s history. Often called the “title deed” of the Turkish
republic, Lausanne even had its own national holiday, Lausanne Day,
celebrated on July 24. In traditional nationalist history, the treaty
was the diplomatic culmination of Turkey’s War of Independence,
and the formal ratification of the sovereignty that Turkey won on
the battlefield. Where Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was the hero of the
war, Ismet Inönü, who negotiated the treaty, became “the Hero of
Lausanne.”

While the veneration of Lausanne could be exaggerated, it

both reflected and reinforced an appreciation for the political
independence and territorial borders that Turkey had established
following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I.
After several centuries in which European powers had consistently
chipped away at Ottoman territory, culminating in the attempted
colonization of Istanbul and Anatolia, Turkey’s new leadership had
good reason to be proud of their accomplishment. Most had begun
their careers as military officers who feared the destruction of their
state. Then, with the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, they had seen these fears
briefly realized. In this light, it was not without some justification
that they referred to the country’s independence struggle as the

5
“War of Salvation.”

Of course, Turkish leaders still worked to adjust some of the terms

of the post-war settlement to their advantage. During the 1920s
and 1930s, they sought to incorporate the territories of Mosul
and Hatay. With the 1936 signing of the Montreux Convention,
they also re-established control of the Bosporus and Dardanelles,
which had been demilitarized after the war. Yet even in modifying
the southern border and rewriting the regime governing the
straights, Ankara consistently presented its actions as fulfilling the
Lausanne settlement rather than revising it. Where some members
of the republic’s political and military elite still nursed dreams of
retaking further territories—in the Balkans, the Aegean, or the
Middle East—their leaders consistently rejected these ambitions.
As a result, the Lausanne Treaty came to embody the new Turkish
republic’s understanding of its foreign policy: a commitment to
preserving hard-won sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face
of continuing threats.

The Interwar Period

In 1926, Turkey would concede its claim to the Ottoman province

of Mosul while in 1939 it would eventually succeed in annexing the
smaller Sanjak of Alexandretta (now Hatay) on the Mediterranean
coast. In both contests, Ankara was forced to weigh its interests in
territorial acquisition—Mosul, of course, had oil, Hatay a strategically
important port—with its desire to maintain smooth relations with
Britain and France and with the international community at large.
In the case of Mosul, Ankara provided semi-covert support for pro-

6
Turkish guerillas in the territory as a way of maintaining pressure
on the British prior the League of Nation’s arbitration in 1925.3 But
when the League ruled in Britain’s favor, awarding Mosul to Iraq
while providing Turkey with a percentage of its oil revenues, Ankara
accepted the outcome and abandoned any irredentist aspirations
toward the territory.4

Similarly, in the case of Alexandretta, Ankara’s ultimately successful

territorial ambitions were tempered by a pragmatic assessment
of Turkey’s broader geopolitical position in relation to France.
Alexandretta was less important than Mosul (although it reportedly
carried a personal significance for Ataturk, who had been in
command of the Ottoman forces there at the end of World War
I). As a result, Ankara did not press the issue during the 1920s and
early 1930s, conserving its diplomatic and political energy for the
more pressing matter of building a new state. But in the late 1930s,
with Syria potentially moving toward independence and France
desperate for international support in the facing of a rising Germany,
Atatürk seized the opportunity. Again applying pressure by arming
and infiltrating nationalist guerillas into the territory, Ankara also
engaged in some calculated saber-rattling with its military forces at
the border.5 At the same time, it made its commitment to a mutual
friendship treaty, which France sought to shore up its position in
the Mediterranean in a coming war, contingent on a favorable
resolution of the Alexandretta issue. In 1939, Turkey’s careful use
of both carrots and sticks paid off. France, eager to curry Turkish
favor and avoid a fight essentially ceded the province to Turkey, and
Alexandretta became the new province of Hatay.

7
Beyond these immediate issues, Turkish policy in the Middle East
remained a delicate balancing act with the imperial powers ruling or
threatening the region. In 1925, for example, a widespread uprising
challenged French rule in mandate Syria. While some of the revolt’s
leaders sought out Turkish support, Ankara declined to get involved.
Yet while Ankara would not challenge French and British rule
in the region, it still sought to work with the region’s other semi-
independent states to prevent new imperial threats. Turkey’s one
formal diplomatic commitment in the Middle East during this
period was a 1937 treaty with Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran called the
Saadabad Pact. After the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and amidst
fears of Italian designs on Anatolia, it was partly intended as “a
signal to the rest of the world that the four independent Middle
Eastern states would oppose any attempts by one of the European
powers to pick them off individually.”6

Turkey’s interwar balancing act was profoundly pragmatic, but it also

resonated with the ambivalent attitudes of Turkish statesmen at the
time. Turkey’s new leaders emerged from World War I feeling bitterly
betrayed that some Arabs had cooperated with the United Kingdom
in revolting against Ottoman rule. But they also maintained a sincere
sympathy for the Arabs who fell under European rule. In the case of
the Syrian revolt, for example, many of the leading participants were
former Ottoman army officers who had served loyally till the war’s
end.7 In fact, the tension between these two attitudes would only
fully emerge after World War II, when Arab states moved toward
independence in a radically transformed strategic environment.

8
The Early Cold War Years

With Soviet forces occupying Eastern Europe and Joseph Stalin

proposing modifications to the country’s northeastern border,
Turkey in 1945 found itself facing a far more dramatic threat than
Italian imperial ambitions. In these circumstances, securing Western
support against the Soviet Union became Turkey’s over-riding
foreign policy concern, and Turkey’s involvement in the Middle
East, as a result, became a facet of a broader anti-Soviet struggle.

In the early years of the Cold War, both Washington and Ankara
agreed that Turkey could play an important role in helping to
organize the defense of the Middle East (both the formerly
Ottoman Arab world and Iran) against Soviet penetration.8 Yet this
effort put both countries in an untenable position, forced to balance
the competing demands of the British and French, whose continued
military dominance in the region was seen as crucial to its defense,
and those of Arab nationalists, who saw European imperialism, and
in time Israel, as a far greater threat than the Soviet Union.

The story of Turkey’s involvement in the Middle East during the

1950s follows the failure of a number of mutual defense pacts to
overcome these differences in the name of common defense.9
Initially, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when the
Turkish government under Ismet Inönü initially sought Western
support against the Soviet Union, Ankara presented its capacity to
take the lead in organizing the defense of the Middle East as a key
benefit for the US and Britain. Yet in the subsequent debate over
Turkey’s NATO accession, it became clear that London wanted to

9
make Turkey’s support for a British-led Middle East defense plan a
pre-requisite, and perhaps alternative, to full Turkish membership in
the emerging Western alliance. Correctly sensing that NATO would
be the main focus of US diplomatic and military commitments in
the region, however, Turkey pushed for membership, and to this end
made its support for any such planning dependent on first securing
admission.10

After this effort proved successful, in 1952, Turkey, now under the
leadership of the enthusiastically pro-American and anti-Soviet
government of Adnan Menderes, became an active supporter of
bolstering Western defense efforts in the Middle East. This initially
took the form of a proposed Middle East Defense Organization
under British leadership and focused on the Arab world. Yet with
Syrian anger over the loss of Hatay still raw, British-Egyptian
tensions mounting and other Arab states still primarily focused on
Israel, the Middle East Defense Organization proved a non-starter.
Two years later, however, Turkey, with US and British support,
renewed these efforts through a more modest but ultimately
successful effort leading to the 1955 Baghdad Pact. Focusing on
the countries that appeared most amenable to cooperation (while
holding out hope that others might join later), the Baghdad Pact
brought together Turkey, Britain, and Iraq with Pakistan and Iran,
two other “northern tier” states that, on account of their location, felt
the Soviet threat more directly than other Arab states farther south.

In the following years, Menderes’s eagerness to respond aggressively

to perceived Soviet threats in the Arab world repeatedly went
beyond what his Western partners were comfortable with. After

10
coups in Syria and Iraq threatened to bring more pro-Soviet
governments to power in 1957 and 1958, for example, Menderes
pushed for direct intervention to restore the status quo, but was
dissuaded from taking action by Washington and London, both of
which shared his concerns but worried armed intervention would
be counter-productive.11 After Iraq’s 1958 coup, Baghdad withdrew
from its eponymous pact, which was then reformed as Central
Treaty Organization, or CENTO. Under this new guise, it lasted
until 1979, when another political upheaval in Iran led to its final
disillusion.

In short, from the late 1950s on, the broad contours of Turkey’s Cold
War policy toward the Middle East remained consistent. Iraq and
Syria, Turkey’s two Arab neighbors, fell, to varying degrees into the
rival camp, ensuring an extended period of frosty relations but no
direct conflict. As Cyprus became increasingly central in the 1960s
and 1970s, Turkish policymakers, somewhat taken aback that so
many Arab states seemed to be siding with Greece, sought to patch
up their relations with the Middle East (downgrading relations
with Israel in the process). Yet this soft thaw, also motivated by the
rise in oil prices during the 1970s, did little to change the regional
alignments. Indeed, with the re-emergence of Turkey’s Kurdish
conflict in the 1980s, the interaction of Turkey’s internal politics with
its strained regional relationships set the stage for these alignments
to persist even after the Cold War concluded.

11
Ideological and Historical Roots of Turkey’s
Cold War Policy

In the context of the Cold War, where Soviet imperialism had

replaced British imperialism as Ankara’s prime concern, Turkey
ultimately closed ranks behind the United States and its NATO
allies.12 But this was not always a natural outgrowth of Turkey’s
historical or ideological sympathies. The possibility of a British
general, for example, commanding Arab, American, and Turkish
troops in battle against the Soviets met with stiff resistance. The
Arabs would never agree to it, Turkish diplomats said, nor would the
Turkish people. George Wadsworth, the US ambassador in Ankara,
drew up a handwritten memo in 1951 outlining why Turks “disliked”
the British. British behavior in World War I was “not forgotten,”
he wrote, while Turks believed the British “still have imperialist
ambitions in the Middle East” and think of Turkey and others as
“colonials.”13 Similarly, throughout this period, US diplomats took
Turkey’s support for Palestine for granted. Turkey’s foreign minister
at the time later told the US ambassador that Israel’s creation had
been a “mistake.” And in 1948, the embassy thought rumors that
Turkish military officers might be resigning to go fight as volunteers
with the Arabs were plausible enough to report back to Washington.

Tellingly, American and Turkish diplomats all eagerly discussed

Turkey’s role as a “bridge between East and West.” But there were
differences in the way each invoked the cliché.14 When Anglo-Arab
tensions emerged, such as in the years before the 1956 Suez crisis,
the United States (which had its own anti-imperial tradition) and
Turkey both, to some extent, found themselves caught in the middle,

12
eager to smooth things over and focus on the Soviets again. Turkish
diplomats felt they could bridge the gap by pushing the United
States toward accommodating Arab concerns, whereas the United
States hoped Ankara would instead help Arabs see the regrettable
necessity of cooperating with the United Kingdom. From the US
perspective, Turkey sometimes seemed to be building its bridge
from the wrong side, as when Ankara failed in trying to convince
Washington to accommodate Mohammad Mossedegh during the
early stages of the Anglo-Persian oil dispute.

Ironically, amidst all these disagreements, Turkey tried to

simultaneously capitalize on its Ottoman past as evidence of its
cultural, religious, and historic bond with the Arab world but also as
proof that it, no less than France and Britain, had relevant experience
successfully managing the Middle East.15 Thus, in negotiations over
Middle East defense, Ankara forcefully insisted that it participate
alongside Paris and London, engaging the region’s leaders from the
position of a NATO ally and Western power. Yet at the same time,
in bilateral relations with Middle Eastern leaders Ankara was eager
to play up their shared history. This included efforts to capitalize
on a narrative of joint anti-imperial struggle, for example, when the
Ottomans and Libyans fought together against Italy, as well as more
personal examples of shared culture and history, particularly when
dealing with regional leaders who had lived or studied in Istanbul
themselves.

Ultimately, political dynamics triumphed over shared history.

Indeed, history was to some extent rewritten to match the new
political dynamics. As Syria, Egypt, and Iraq appeared to cast their

13
lot with the Soviet Union against the West, Turkey’s stab in the
back narrative took on a new prominence, with the Soviet Union
replacing Britain as the sponsor of Arab treachery. The sometimes-
considerable sympathy that existed between World War I comrades
took a back seat to Cold War rivalry. And yet as circumstances
pushed Turkey to slowly improve its relations with the Arab world
after the 1950s, Ankara sought to again recalibrate, however slightly,
the balance between support for the Western alliance and respect
for Arab nationalism.16 Whether by recognizing the Palestinian
Liberation Organization in 1976 or intensifying engagement with
the Organization of the Islamic Conference in the early 1980s,
Turkish policymakers took a series of steps reflecting the belief that
they had erred too far in the direction of uncritical support for their
NATO allies at the outset of the Cold War. It would, however, take
some time before the impact of these policies could make themselves
felt amongst a host of more pressing geopolitical and domestic
concerns.

Enter the 1990s

While the end of the Cold War seemed to offer the promise of peace
for many in the West, it brought Turkey little respite. After four
decades on the front lines against the Soviet Union and a decade of
military tutelage and counter-insurgency, Turkey entered the 1990s
with a continuing sense of paranoia and besiegement undercutting
the optimism of the era. Amidst politicians’ fitful attempts to
capitalize on the country’s growing economy, emerge from the
shadow of the 1980 coup, and end the country’s Kurdish conflict,

14
the military establishment continued to see the Kurdistan Workers'
Party (PKK) as the country’s over-riding national security challenge.
In the absence of the Soviet Union, this threat came to dominate
Turkish foreign policy in the Middle East. At the same time, the
end of the Cold War gave Turkey’s military and political leadership
alike a renewed interest in demonstrating the continued value of the
Western alliance as well as Turkey’s role in it. Especially as the war
against the PKK generated ongoing criticism among many in the
West, close cooperation with the US military, in the Middle East
and Balkans, served as a way to secure Turkey’s relationship with
Washington.

During the 1980s, Turkey’s transition to a market economy under

Prime Minister Turgut Özal accelerated an effort to improve trade
ties with the Middle East that began as a response to the 1970s oil
crisis. By 1985, Turkey’s exports to the Middle East had reached
$3 billion a year and Turkish construction firms had secured
$15.5 billion worth of contracts.17 Yet at the same time, Turkey’s
intensifying conflict with the PKK emerged as a dominant factor
in Turkey’s regional policy. Ankara’s already strained relations with
Syria were not improved when Damascus welcomed left-wing
activists fleeing Turkey after the 1980 coup, and only worsened when
the Assad regime began actively supporting the PKK. With PKK
guerillas training alongside Hezbollah and Palestinian Liberation
Organization fighters in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, the conflict
also served as a driving force behind Turkey’s increasingly close
relationship with Israel during the decade.18 Meanwhile, the outbreak
of the Iran-Iraq war also created changing economic incentives and
security threats further east along Turkey’s border. For Ankara, a

15
policy of firm neutrality in the conflict facilitated profitable trade
relations with both increasingly isolated belligerents. And as Iran
and Iraq tried to mobilize their rival’s Kurdish population against
it, both countries had, as a result, a shared interest with Turkey in
containing Kurdish separatism within their own borders.

This was the backdrop when, quickly following on the end of the
Cold War, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait triggered a new
conflict that would reshape Western interests and local dynamics
in the region. In retrospect, the first Gulf war and its aftermath
revealed both the potential for new strategic divergence between
the United States and Turkey in the aftermath of the Cold War,
as well as Turkey’s capacity to overcome it so long as it prioritized
maintaining strong ties to the United States.19 In the lead-up to
the war, Özal promoted an active Turkish role, even suggesting that
Turkish forces could attack Iraq from the north. Özal appeared to
believe that active cooperation in the Middle East could help secure
Ankara’s relationship with Washington, just as Inönü and Menderes
had envisioned in very different circumstances at the Cold War’s
outset. Yet set against Özal’s eagerness to cooperate were Turkish
concerns over the Kurdish issue. These not only limited Ankara’s
participation in the initial conflict but created a potential impasse
after the war, when Baghdad’s crackdown on a Kurdish uprising sent
hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming over the border into
Turkey. In response, Ankara ultimately supported the creation of a
no-fly zone in northern Iraq that allowed refugees to return but,
in doing so, facilitated the creation of a quasi-independent Kurdish
political entity. This was by no means an ideal outcome from Turkey’s
perspective, but it was seen as being the most pragmatic response

16
compatible with maintaining Turkey’s international relationships.

Throughout much of the 1990s, however, the impact of the Kurdish

issue on Turkey’s regional policies as often as not complemented
US interests in the region. Along with the economic cost of Iraq-
sanctions on Turkey, US support for what emerged into the Kurdistan
Regional Government (KRG) caused tension with Ankara. But as
long as both Washington and the KRG leadership turned a blind
eye to Turkish military operations against the PKK in northern
Iraq, these tensions never created a major bilateral issue. Similarly,
Western human rights concerns over Turkey’s conduct of its
domestic counter-insurgency campaign against the PKK continued
to dog the US-Turkish relationship during this period. Yet ironically
this helped contribute to Turkey’s growing relationship with Israel,
a country which Ankara hoped would have fewer qualms about
providing both military and diplomatic support for its counter-
terror efforts. Additionally, Syria’s ongoing support for the PKK,
most notably its willingness to host PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan in
Damascus, provided a common enemy to further bring Turkey and
Israel together. And in this case Washington was eager to support
Turkey’s efforts. Indeed, the end of the decade saw Turkey effectively
leverage its relationships with both Israel and the United States to
achieve an unprecedented success in its fight against the PKK. By
convincingly threatening a military attack on Syria—a threat made
possible, in turn, by Israel’s implicit support—Ankara eventually
forced Damascus to expel Öcalan in 1999. Then, with US and Israeli
covert assistance, Turkish special forces succeeded in capturing
Öcalan in Kenya, dealing a major blow to the PKK.20 Ironically, the
joint effort that led to Öcalan’s arrest represented a high point in the

17
US-Turkish relationship, but also indirectly made possible some of
the policies that would cause tension between the two countries in
the coming decade.

Getting to Zero: 2002 to 2010

On the eve of the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) rise

to power in 2002, Turkey seemed poised to achieve a degree of
security and prosperity that had consistently eluded it over the past
decade, if not half century. Initially, many observers hoped that
an economically dynamic and culturally confident Turcongkey, at
peace with its Kurdish population and firmly under civilian rule,
might simultaneously succeed in improving ties with once-hostile
regional neighbors while simultaneously taking its place within
the European Union. And yet the political pathologies that had
hindered the country’s progress remained very much alive. Amidst
renewed instability in the Middle East and ongoing fears over the
Turkey’s territorial integrity, as well as the country’s deep political
divisions and intensified anti-Western attitudes, the possibility of a
radical transformation in Turkish foreign policy was never realized.
Indeed, it now appears that if a transformation occurs it will be a
dramatic break in Turkey’s ties with the West rather than a dramatic
improvement in its ties to the Middle East.

If Ahmet Davutoğlu, as foreign policy advisor and later foreign

minister, was central to the formation of Turkey’s foreign policy
under the AKP, his rhetoric was even more central to the way the
way this policy was understood.21 Between the vaguely profound
sounding “strategic depth” and the awkwardly direct “zero problems

18
with neighbors,” Davutoğlu’s various doctrines came to define what
others called “neo-Ottomanism”—a historically informed attempt to
increase Turkey’s geopolitical influence by improving diplomatic and
economic relations with and between its largely Muslim neighbors.22
In retrospect, Davutoğlu’s ambitions have often appeared naïve and
grandiose, but at the time they were widely applauded as a welcome
alternative to what had come before. In the 1990s, the role of the
past in Turkish foreign policy had been described in terms of the
“Sevres Syndrome,” a nationalist paranoia inspired by the proposed
post-World War I imperial carve up of Anatolia. Against this
backdrop, a degree of romanticism seemed a healthy replacement
for historically-fueled rivalries with neighbors like Greece and
Armenia.23 And indeed, when the AKP in its first years in power
moved to mend relations with these two countries, not to mention
supporting a UN peace plan for Cyprus, Davutoğlu’s foreign policy
won considerable support in the West.

More controversial, however, were Turkey’s moves in the Middle

East, in particular its efforts to improve relations with the anti-
Western governments of Syria and Iran. These steps initially drew
some criticism in Washington, and raised concerns about the Islamist
character of Davutoğlu’s foreign policy vision.24 Yet there were
certainly sound pragmatic reasons for Turkey to seek out better ties
with both of these governments. Iran provided Turkey with much
needed natural gas and Syria offered a potentially lucrative market
for Turkey’s growing export-oriented economy. The rapprochement
with Syria, moreover, had been made possible by Turkey’s success in
forcing Damascus to end support for the PKK, while Iran, on account
of its own domestic politics, had also become more cooperative

19
in working with Turkey against the threat of Kurdish separatism.
Moreover, from a traditional Islamist perspective, neither Iran,
on account of its Shiism, nor the Assad regime, on account of its
distinctly violent history with the Muslim Brotherhood, represented
an ideal partner.

At the same time, if the motivations for improving Turkey’s ties

with new Middle Eastern partners were not purely Islamist, the
manner in which Ankara went about it was nonetheless indicative
of the problems to come. As often as not, for Erdoğan in particular,
the discomfort his visits to Tehran and Damascus created in the
West seemed to be a benefit. Asked about the AKP’s handlings of
relations with Syria in 2005, for example, former President Suleiman
Demirel offered a telling assessment, endorsing the substance of the
rapprochement but not the manner in which it was done: “No one
asked Turkey to become Syria’s enemy on behalf of America. But
Turkey could have avoided acts that blatantly disturbed the US …
Relations with both the US and with Syria could have been managed
without creating problems.”25

During this period, Davutoğlu, at least, realized that Turkey could

best expand its role in the region as a power on good terms with all
parties if those parties, in turn, were on good terms with each other.
In serving as a mediator between Syria and Israel, for example, or
trying to negotiate a deal to end Iran’s nuclear program, Davutoğlu
was not only trying to enhance Turkey’s prestige but also create the
conditions in which a “zero-problems” policy would be possible.
And yet when existing regional rifts proved insurmountable and
these efforts failed, the AKP’s response gave voice to a distinctly

20
anti-Western anger that contrasted with previous governments’
willingness to prioritize strong relations with the West. In the case
of Israel, for example, the breakdown of Syrian-Israeli negotiations
in 2009 as a result of Operation Cast Lead was quickly followed by
Erdoğan’s infamous “one minute” moment, followed in turn by the
Mavi Marmara flotilla. Similarly, in the case of Iran, Davutoğlu’s
eagerness to find a formula that would end Western sanctions was,
if somewhat rash in execution, entirely in keeping with a pragmatic
understanding of Turkish interests. Yet when that effort failed, the
AKP did not ultimately close ranks behind its NATO partners but
instead went along with a massive and corrupt effort to help Iran
subvert the sanctions regime.26

For all the challenges Davutoğlu’s foreign policy ambitions faced

from the outset, it could still be described as largely successful up
until 2010. The AKP’s efforts to make peace with Armenia, or on
Cyprus, or between Israel and Syria may have all failed, but Turkey
was nonetheless more secure in its neighborhood than it had arguably
been at any point in the previous century. Turkish companies were
expanding their business from the Balkans to the Persian Gulf and
from Iraqi Kurdistan to North Africa. If some of Turkey’s new
relationships were met with displeasure in Washington, others, such
as Ankara’s rapprochement with Erbil and Athens, were seen as
dramatic evidence of Turkey’s progress in overcoming its historical
and nationalist liabilities. American policymakers continued to
see Turkey as a valuable partner in the Middle East, as did many
European champions of Turkey’s EU accession. Yet much of this
progress was soon to flounder amidst the contradictions introduced
by the Arab Spring.

21
The Arab Spring Turns Sour: 2010 to 2015

Ironically, when the AKP first came to power, those critics who
worried about the party’s Islamist foreign policy focused on the
prospect of Turkey “turning East.” The fear was that the AKP would
shift27 Turkey’s orientation from West to East28, with new allies like
Iran and Syria replacing America and Europe. What happened
instead was that Turkey turned against the West without necessarily
having anywhere else to turn. Today, as Turkey threatens29 the US
military in northern Syria, relations with Tehran and Damascus, not
to mention Moscow, remain tense. Strained ties with Washington,
in other words, have not resulted from, or been accompanied by,
improved relations between Turkey and any of its Eastern neighbors.
If anything, it was the failure of Turkey’s sequential turns East, both
before and after the Arab Spring, that set the stage for its current
rift with the West.

When the so-called Arab Spring began30, it forced a recalibration

of Turkish policy by disrupting Turkey’s profitable relationships
with a number of regional strongmen. Ankara initially opposed31
the NATO intervention in Libya in 2011, where Turkish businesses
had $15 billion dollars’ worth of outstanding contracts. And after
protests broke out in Syria, Davutoğlu first went to Damascus32,
where he encouraged Assad to pursue a more moderate path.
Quickly, though, with uprisings gaining momentum across the
region, Ankara concluded that they were likely to succeed and that
supporting them could be a source of expanded regional influence.

22
As a result, in the early years of the Arab Spring the United States
and Turkey were, broadly speaking, on the same side. If Ankara
was considerably more enthusiastic33 about the Islamist character
of these popular uprisings, there was nonetheless a shared hope in
Washington and Ankara that in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria
some form of self-government would replace autocracy. When these
hopes were dashed, however, the differences between American and
Turkish goals came to the fore.

In 2013, for example, when the Egyptian military ousted an elected

Muslim Brotherhood government, Washington took it in stride34.
Whatever reservations the Obama administration may have had, it
was prepared to work with Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, to this end
even maintaining the official fiction35 that he had not come to power
in a coup. Erdoğan, by contrast, stood by the Brotherhood, adopting
the movement’s Rabia symbol as his own36 while relations with Sisi
soured. Whether principled, obstinate, or a mix of the two, Erdoğan’s
approach put him at odds not only with Washington but also Saudi
Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, setting the stage for Turkey’s
isolation in the region.

At the same time, setbacks in Syria’s civil war were also exacerbating
the same fissures. While both Washington and Ankara supported
the anti-Assad opposition, they differed considerably in the lengths
they were prepared to go in that support. Turkey became frustrated37
after coming to expect, rightly or wrongly, that the United States
would intervene directly in the summer of 2013. US policymakers,
for their part, became alarmed at Turkey’s willingness to back the
most radical elements of the opposition, with Turkish support for

23
al-Nusra—an arm of al-Qaeda —becoming a festering wound in
the bilateral relationship.

These tensions ultimately grew into the strategic rift38 tearing the
United States and Turkey apart today. In 2014, the Islamic State
emerged as Washington’s primary concern in Syria, pushing the
goal of toppling Assad further into the background. For Erdoğan,
by contrast, the focus was still Assad (and, increasingly, the Kurdish
nationalist movement). As a result, when the United States proposed
a series of joint operations narrowly targeting the Islamic State in
northern Syria, Turkey countered with more sweeping proposals,
arguing that a lasting solution to the threat posed by the Islamic
State required regime change in Damascus.

The consequences of this impasse quickly became clear. Like its

predecessor, the Trump administration embraced39 a Syrian Kurdish
force called the People’s Protection Units (YPG) as its preferred
partner against the Islamic State. Ankara, by contrast, following four
decades of conflict with Kurdish separatists, identified the YPG—an
arm of the PKK—as its primary security threat. As a result, Erdoğan
reoriented Turkey’s Syria policy toward countering the YPG, leaving
the United States and Turkey engaged in a dangerous game of
chicken in northern Syria. Erdoğan, for his part, demanded that US
soldiers evacuate the YPG-held territory of Manbij in anticipation
of a Turkish attack. American officials, in turn, refused, saying that
the special operation forces there “will be able to defend themselves.”
40

And yet while Syria drove the United States and Turkey apart,
it has also stubbornly prevented improved relations with other

24
regional powers. Since 2014, Erdoğan has repeatedly signaled41 his
willingness, however grudging, to accept Assad’s victory. But despite
pictures of Erdoğan, Putin and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani
smiling together at Sochi, a negotiated settlement remains out of
reach. Neither Russia nor Iran—both of whom Turkish politicians
sometimes touted as potential replacements for the United States—
seemed terribly eager to accommodate Turkish interests. In early
2018, a de-escalation agreement covering the territory of Idlib broke
down42, pitting Turkey and its proxies and the regime and its backers.

Meanwhile, with Syria dominating Turkish foreign policy, many

other Middle Eastern states remained skeptical of Turkish influence
in the region. Turkish policymakers once used “Neo-Ottomanism”
as a positive term43 for their attempt to capitalize on historic and
religious ties with the Muslim world. Now, it appears more often in
the rhetoric of Middle Eastern writers and politicians condemning
what they see as Turkish imperial interference44. In a 2017 spat
between Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, the Emirati Foreign
Minister accused the Ottomans of plundering sacred relics from
Medina during World War I. Erdoğan, in response, accused the
Arabs of betrayal for siding with the British against their Ottoman
co-religionists. Egypt for its part renamed a street in Cairo named
after Ottoman sultan Yavuz Selim and Saudi prince Mohammed
bin Salman accused Erdoğan of trying to rebuild an “Ottoman
caliphate.” More substantially, Turkey’s support for Qatar, as well
as Islamist factions in Libya45, inflamed tensions with Saudi Arabia,
Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates. In Iraq, by turn, Ankara
improved its strained relations with Baghdad by firmly opposing a
Kurdish bid for independence46 in the fall of 2017.

25
In short, with the collapse of the Arab Spring, Turkey became
isolated in the Middle East, at odds with all the major local and
external players in the region. This in part reflected the tumultuous
changes in the region, including a number of rapid re-orientations
that would have made a pragmatic policy difficult to follow for
any government. And yet Turkey’s isolation was also the product
of a number of politically or ideologically driven choices. The re-
emergence of the Kurdish conflict reflects, in part, Erdoğan’s own
political needs, coupled with the prevalence of nationalist sentiment
among key segments of the Turkish military and voting population.
Similarly, the intensity and commitment with which Ankara backed
Islamist actors in Egypt and Syria had a clear ideological component
as well.

Anti-Westernism, too, must be understood as a force in and of itself.

Indeed, what makes the current situation alarming is that anti-
Western hostility, which extends far beyond Erdoğan’s base, now
appears to be driving policy independent of pragmatic or specifically
Islamist concerns. Erdoğan, for example, decided to court47 US
sanctions by purchasing S-400 air defense missiles from Moscow48.
His decision was motivated in part by a genuine belief that he needed
them for self-protection following a 2016 coup attempt that he, like
a majority of his citizens, believes was orchestrated by the United
States.49 By comparison, if Ankara’s anger over US support for the
YPG makes much more sense, it has nonetheless been dangerously
inflamed by a climate of rampant nationalism.50

26
 Chapter 2:

Turkish Revisionism Today

and the Threat to US Interests

T he AKP’s rise to power in Turkey coincided with significant

changes to global security. The end of the Cold War led to debates
amongst Turkish national security elites about Ankara’s place in a
unipolar world, absent a peer competitor to the United States. From
the outset of the founding of the Turkish republic, Turkish elites
viewed regional states as the main threat to the country’s security.
Specifically, for the entirety of the Cold War, Ankara viewed the
Soviet Union as its main threat. This concern dated back Russian
irredentist claims to Kars, Ardahan, and Artvin, and Jospeh Stalin’s
efforts to control the Turkish straits. The American decision to
include Turkey in the NATO alliance was not without controversy
in Washington, but by 1952 the United States had extended its
security umbrella to Ankara. As part of this move, Turkey eagerly
took advantage of American military assistance, hosted a slew of
intelligence and military assets at military facilities across the
country, and eagerly agreed to host US nuclear weapons in 1959.
The collapse of the Soviet Union left Turkey without a regional peer
capable of threatening the country’s borders.

The rise of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in the 1980s, however, meant
that Ankara now faced an internal, ethnic nationalist separative

27
movement that many in the capital feared could divide the country
in two.51 The PKK enjoyed safe-have in Syria up until Ankara’s
threatened invasion in 1998. The Turkish pressure eventually led
Syrian leader Hafez al Assad to kick Abdullah Öcalan out of the
country, which then led to the PKK leader's eventual capture in
Kenya. The United States assisted Turkey, as Öcalan hopped from
one European capital to the next, and was critical for his eventual
apprehension.52 In retrospect, this close cooperation on the PKK
threat was the high-point in US-Turkish, post-Cold War security
relations. In the half decade that followed, the two countries would
diverge over how they conceptualized the threats posed by non-state
actors. The 1991 invasion in Iraq upended Turkish security. Özal was
eager to work with the United States, but Turkish elite concern that
the war could empower Iraqi Kurdish nationalists proved prophetic.
The end of Gulf War led to the creation of two American and British
enforced no-fly-zones. The northern no-fly-zone extended across
the entirety of the Iraqi Kurdistan, allowing for the Iraqi Kurds to
form an autonomous governing structure, protected by the United
States.

The American decision to protect the Iraqi Kurds in 1991 was not
intended to create a proto-Kurdish state, but the outcome of the use
of force turned out to be a net negative for Turkish national security.
The American relationship with the Iraqi Kurds is complicated and,
for much of the Cold War, a relatively minor point of contention
with the Soviet Union for influence in the Middle East.53 Yet this
relationship represented the first warning signs that the United
States and Turkey had divergent interests in the Middle East. For
much of the 1990s, this divergence was of little consequence for the

28
two countries. The United States had little to lose from providing
support to Turkey in its war against the PKK. This support included
intelligence sharing and political and military support for Ankara.
Washington declared the PKK a terrorist group in 1997 and would
later provide intelligence assistance to Turkey to support airstrikes
in Iraq.

The al-Qaeda attacks on September 11 set in motion a series of

changes that would exacerbate the divergences in Turkish and
American regional policy. The American decision to expand its war
from Afghanistan to Iraq challenged the US-Turkish relationship
and forced uncomfortable shifts in Turkey’s regional policies. The
management of the American war was left to Erdoğan and the
recently elected Justice and Development Party. The AKP came to
power on a platform of deepening Turkish democracy, strengthening
Ankara’s relationship with Brussels, and joining the European Union.
This project had widespread support in Turkey, even if Turkish elites
and society viewed the party’s overt and incontrovertible links to
Turkish Islamists as unwelcome and a threat to Turkish secularism.

The evolution of the AKP from pro-European and relatively liberal

party to an authoritarian vehicle for Erdoğan to retain absolute
control over Turkish policymaking has led to remarkable shifts in
the country’s foreign policy. This evolution began with the American
invasion of Iraq, a war that Ankara did not support and the party’s
leadership tried to stop. However, in a nod to the party’s deference
to the country’s historical deference to the United States, Erdoğan’s
criticism was restrained. This deference would not last and, by 2019,
the Turkish leader was willing to order his troops into Syria, in close

29
proximity to US forces and with no coordination. As Erdoğan and
the AKP settled into power, the country’s foreign policy began to
reflect the party’s Islamist past, and in response to regional upheavals
Turkey found itself supporting political Islamist groups the national
elites viewed as critical to advancing Turkish interests.

The War on Terror: America’s Use of Power in the Middle East

Turkey’s relationships with its traditional Western allies has

crumbled over the past decade, with grievances and animosity
now dominating any bilateral or multilateral meeting Ankara now
attends with Brussels or Washington. This deterioration in ties stems
from a stark divergence in how each side views broader security
challenges and, when faced with crisis, chooses to respond. Turkey’s
actions have also inspired animosity in the Arab world, leading
states to bandwagon against Ankara, and at times joining with
Eastern Mediterranean states to project power to signal to Turkey
that irredentist action will not be tolerated. The stalemate has not
precluded times of rapprochement and reset, but the broader Middle
East and Mediterranean regions now view Turkey as a threat—and
this hostility about Turkey’s broader foreign policy is shared in
many western capitals. Ankara, too, has its share of irritation with
its traditional allies, underscoring how tensions now plague what
has always been a tension-filled relationship between Turkey and its
allies, but without much hope that these tensions can be put aside in
favor of a common enemy or set of shared interests.

The Turkish-American relationship was founded on a shared interest

in containing Soviet military power. The United States and Turkey

30
reached agreement on the use of Incirlik Force Base shortly after
Ankara joined NATO. The Turkish position on Cyprus, however,
was the first concrete example of divergent interests over niche,
nationalist issues important to Ankara and how they impacted
broader American concerns about global security. The Turkish
invasion of Cyprus in 1974 was a decade in the making. Ankara
had sought to invade the island in 1964, but President Lyndon
Johnson warned that any Turkish action would lead to sanctions
on American-origin military equipment Ankara was completely
dependent on.

The United States was legitimately concerned about the Soviet

reaction and took seriously Russian threats to escalate the situation
on the island. From Ankara’s perspective, the ethnic violence on
the island and the nationalist ambitions to reunite the island with
Greece fueled deep concerns for the Turkish minority. In 1974, those
concerns boiled over, and Turkish leaders ignored warnings from
both the United States and the Soviet Union about an invasion and
landed troops on Cyprus, moving quickly west across the island, and
taking control over approximately half of its territory. In response to
the invasion, the US Congress imposed an arms embargo on Turkey,
which went against the wishes of the Nixon administration. The
embargo was not complete and Ankara was able to source spare parts
from European sources, but it nevertheless still had a deleterious
effect on Turkish operational readiness.

The American decision spurred Turkish investment in its own

defense industry and pushed the country to embrace a nationalist
model of domestic replacement for Western defense equipment.

31
This policy began with the terms of rapprochement with the United
States. In 1980, after the arms embargo was lifted, Turkey and the
United States agreed to a new bilateral defense agreement. This
agreement, which Ankara insisted be called a Defense Economic
Cooperation Agreement, in reference to demands that the United
States increase the use of offsets in future military sales and help
to build-up private industry. The arrangement reset US-Turkish
relationship, but still anchored ties to a shared security concerns.54

The United States has had access to bases in Turkey since 1952. The
Defense Economic Cooperation Agreement, however, formalized a
new arrangement, wherein bases in Turkey would be under Turkish
command, and reiterated that for non-NATO military missions, the
Turkish parliament has to approve any use of Turkish bases. Ankara
has historically shied away from supporting non-NATO American
military operations in the Middle East.55 The Özal government’s
policy in 1990 was an exception and was very controversial in
Turkey and emerged from the government’s decision to remain
neutral during the Iran-Iraq war.56 In response to Özal’s push to
allow the United States to fly from Incirlik Air Force and have
access to other Turkish bases, three of Turkey’s most senior military
officers resigned.57 After the war, the American presence in Turkey
shifted from one of offensive combat operations to the continued
enforcement of a no-fly-zone over northern Iraq. The American
decision to protect the Kurdish areas of Iraq, at first, had Turkish
support because it created a safe haven for refugees that had fled to
Turkey to return to home. However, as the Kurds began to establish a
quasi-independent proto-state within Iraq, Ankara’s views hardened
and concerns about potential Kurdish nationalist spill over into

32
Turkey grew.

The 1990s was a particularly bloody decade in the now forty-year-

old Kurdish-led insurgency inside Turkey. The PKK emerged,
for Ankara, as the country’s primary threat and many in Ankara
viewed American actions in the Middle East as a primary factor in
helping to sustain the insurgency. Ankara’s support for non-NATO
operations in the Middle East diminished and Ankara was unwilling
to sanction US action in Iraq during Operation Desert Fox in 1998.58
In contrast, Ankara supported the collective NATO response after
the al-Qaeda-planned attacks on September 11, 2001. The Turkish
government supported NATO’s triggering of Article 5, which
obligates each member of the alliance to assist in the defense of the
others, and opened airbases and airspace to America overflight, and
deployed troops to Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban.59
This response differed considerably from the Turkish handling of the
American invasion of Iraq in 2003 and, again, following American
requests to use Turkish territory to support the war against Islamic
State.

The Justice and Development Party is rooted in Turkey’s political

Islamist movement. The party broke away from Necmettin Erbakan’s
Welfare Party following the Turkish military’s intervention in
Turkish politics in 1997. The military’s threat to launch a coup led
to the resignation of Turkey’s coalition government, which included
the center-right True Path Party and the Islamist Welfare Party. The
military’s intervention forced the government to resign, leading to
the appointment of a new governing coalition, and a crackdown on
Turkish Islamists. The post-modern coup had a considerable impact

33
on the evolution of the Turkish Islamist movement, as well as on
the outlook of its most popular leader, Erdoğan. In 1999, just two
years after the 1997 coup, Erdoğan was imprisoned after reciting
an Islamist poem, amidst increased concerns inside Turkey about
the growing potency of the political Islam. The AKP emerged
from this tumultuous period, with Erdoğan and a small cadre of
younger Welfare Party elites breaking away from Erbakan and
softening the party’s platform and signaling that the main focus of
the party’s foreign policy will be on hastening Turkey’s accession to
the European Union.60

Turkish Islamists focused much of their political efforts on domestic

services and improving life for the country’s lower classes. Erbakan’s
foreign policy platform was of secondary concern, but tended to
revolve around the need for greater intra-Muslim solidarity, the
creation of Muslim-majority institutions similar to those in Europe,
and extreme suspicion—and outright hostility—towards the West
and its role in global affairs. The AKP, in contrast, at first sought
to distance itself from these types of ideas, and instead linked its
domestic messaging to its foreign policy. This approach made the
case that Turkish democratization and liberalization would increase
freedoms for all Turkish citizens, including Turkish women that
wore the headscarf and religiously conservative members of society
that had typically been oppressed by the secular state. This focus on
democratization, in turn, could help Turkey more closely integrate
with Europe and improve its global standing with the Western
democracies.

34
As the United States began its preparation to invade Iraq in 2003,
then Prime Minister Abdullah Gül—who soon vacated the position
for Erdoğan—sought to ameliorate American concerns about Iraqi
weapons of mass destruction, and thereby prevent the invasion. The
Bush administration was intent on invading Iraq from the south
and opening a second front from the north. This war plan required
parliamentary permission to stage US forces on Turkish territory for
air, ground, and naval forces needed to sustain the second front of
the war. Ankara was hesitant to support the war from the outset, but
did acquiesce to US intelligence agencies entering Iraqi Kurdistan
from Turkish territory.61 The American-Turkish-Kurdish dynamics
during this period before the invasion were fraught and Ankara
used many of the same tactics that it did during the American
enforcement of the northern no-fly-zone to hamper these initial
activities in Iraq.62 For the overt war request, the AKP was left to
balance between its own, internal factions that were hostile to the
United States, a cross-partisan consensus in Turkey that Ankara’s
security situation deteriorated considerably after the Gulf War, and
that the Turkish economy would suffer from the war’s fall out (just
as it did during the 1991 Gulf War).

The United States sought to offset these Turkish concerns with

the promise of a $26 billion aid package, comprised of $20 billion
in loan guarantees and $6 billion in direct grants. Ankara, in turn,
demanded $32 billion in aid, just one month before the invasion
began.63 The Turkish public was adamantly opposed to the war,
with opinion polls showing that 80 percent of the country opposed
Ankara’s involvement in the conflict.64 The AKP chose to hide
behind the parliament, leaving the fate of the US demand to Bülent

35
Arınç, the then speaker of the parliament, and core member of this
initial iteration of the party. The AKP did not whip its members
for the vote and, as a result, the vote fell three shy of passage (with
19 abstentions). The vote against the invasion made perfect sense
for Turkish interests. However, it completely upended American
war plans and forced American Special Forces, based temporarily
in Romania, to fly a dangerous flight path to insert US forces at
airbases in Iraqi Kurdistan. The flight, dubbed Operation Ugly Baby,
required flying for an extended period of time over Iraq, exposing
the crews to ground fire. One aircraft was badly damaged and had
to divert to Turkey, while the others landed at pre-prepared airstrips
in northern Iraq.65 These initial cadre of Special Forces would later
lead the fight against a numerically superior force of Iraqi troops, in
coordination with different factions of the Kurdish Peshmerga.

“Turkey really screwed up all of the logistical planning,” according

to a US Special Forces member interviewed by an author, “and the
guys who were going in wanted to make it right after leaving in
1996.”66 Nevertheless, the American invasion proceeded, prompting
Turkey to make its own calculations about how to hedge against
is broader concerns about Kurdish nationalism. Three weeks after
the parliament rejected the US request to use Turkish territory for
strikes in Iraq, it voted to approve American overflight of Turkey.
During that same vote, the Turkish parliament also voted to allow
cross-border Turkish military operations and signaled that the
military would be used to establish a buffer zone in northern Iraq,
as a hedge against expected refugee flows and to wall off PKK
infiltration routes into southeastern Turkey.67 Ankara demanded
that the United States limit its materiel and weapons support for

36
the Peshmerga and ensure that the Kurds did not occupy Mosul
and Kirkuk. After the invasion ended and the American occupation
began, Ankara did offer to deploy troops to Anbar.68 However, both
the Kurdish and Shia factions within Iraq objected to any Turkish
deployments and the proposal was deemed a “non-starter.”

Ankara did, however, almost immediately begin to use military force

in Iraq following the invasion. In the Kurdistan Region, the Turkish
military threatened a large-scale invasion to build out a buffer
against the PKK and to protect the Turkmen minority based in Tel
Afar. As one soldier recounts, “there was one event where the Turks
threatened to cross the border en masse and they had all these tanks
poised on the border. It was classic Turkish theater with an armored
division on the border and claiming instances of Turkmen cleansing
and saying ‘fix it or we are going across the border.’”69 While Ankara
threatened large-scale action, its initial forays into Iraq were limited
to special forces. As James Dobbins writes, “US military forces came
across ‘Turkish flying roadblocks inside Iraq aimed at interdicting
PKK movements,’ and received reports that ‘Turkish [Special
Forces] have worn US Army uniforms when ambushing PKK units,
apparently to try to provoke PKK attacks on Coalition Forces.’”70
For Ankara, the use of military coercion served two purposes. First,
it put pressure on the United States to take its concerns about the
Kurds seriously. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the Turkish
military was able to increase its presence in Iraqi Kurdistan. This
allowed for Turkish security forces to take preventive measures
against any PKK infiltration from certain places inside Iraq.

37
The Turkish government’s presence in Iraq also led to bilateral
problems, linked to divergences over how to manage the PKK issue
after the US invasion. In July 2003, for example, the US Army
detained and placed hoods over the heads of Turkish soldiers at a
Turkish facility in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya. The details
of the arrest remain murky, with Kurdish officials claiming that the
Turkish team was tasked with assassinating the Kurdish governor
of Kirkuk, Abdulrahman Mustafa.71 But, for Turkey, the images of
hooded soldiers in US custody stirred a nationalist backlash. Months
earlier, the US military had intercepted a Turkish arms shipment,
purportedly en route to allied Sunni Turkmen groups in Kirkuk.
The two sides remained at odds for three more years over the “green
line” separating Arab Iraq from the Kurdish region in the north and
the extent of Kurdish control, before the United States appointed a
special envoy for countering PKK, Joseph W. Ralston, a retired Air
Force general.72

The United States and Turkey never did resolve the asymmetry of
interests over the PKK during the occupation. Ankara demanded
that the United States treat the PKK as a threat on par with al-Qaeda
in Iraq, the insurgent group that would later morph into the Islamic
State, and which was destabilizing Iraq with its attacks on Shia and
coalition forces. The United States, in contrast, believed that the
PKK was a terrorist group, but argued that a Turkish intervention
would further destabilizing Iraq. This critical divergence would later
haunt the United States and Turkey in 2014, after Islamic State
rampaged through Iraq and took over eastern Syria.

38
The AKP Finds it Footing:
The Roots of Modern Turkish Foreign Policy

The AKP’s Iraq policy is a microcosm for how it approached the

region under the AKP government. The AKP’s initial reaction to
the invasion was to try and facilitate a regional approach to prevent
the conflict. In the aftermath of the invasion, Ankara turned towards
a hard security focused approach, built around coercing the United
States to do more to combat the PKK and deploying forces to
pressure the group militarily.

However, understanding this political evolution also requires a

deeper look into the thinking of Ahmet Davutoğlu. Davutoğlu’s
work represents an effort to graft traditional realist concepts of
geopolitics to Turkey’s own evolution as a state following the collapse
of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of non-Muslim powers
dominating the Middle Eastern region. At its core, Davutoğlu’s
theory on foreign policy is rooted in the belief that the Eurasian
landmass, and the areas that surround it, are of crucial importance
to global geopolitics. As such, Turkey, which sits at the center of
this vital piece of land, is deemed to have a unique opportunity to
expand its influence and create strategic depth. In doing so, it is held,
it can establish itself as a global power and thereby play a significant
role in creating new global institutions that are more in keeping
with the world’s different “‘civilizations’ or ‘cultures.””73 Davutoğlu
argued that post-Ottoman instability in the Middle East stemmed
from the import of European nationalism and self-determination.
This import of a foreign weltanschauung is asynchronous with the
region’s religious history, which had previously revolved around

39
the adoption of religious law as a means to govern society and to
derive governing legitimacy.74 This arrangement, Davutoğlu argued,
naturally placed Turkey at the center of a large land mass spanning
from the Balkans to Central Asia. This policy, dubbed strategic depth
in Turkey, suggested that Ankara could expand its influence abroad
by focusing on Muslim-majority neighbors that have historic ties to
Istanbul—the former seat of the Ottoman caliph.75

Turkey’s divergence from the Middle East, Davutoğlu argued,

stemmed from false, European-origin nationalism that led to
the break up the Ottoman Empire following World War I. This
same nationalism, he implies, also impacted Turkish politics and
permeated throughout the nationalist and secular oriented political
parties and the military that dominated Turkish politics for decades.
This argument was also tinged with an overt criticism of the United
States. Davutoğlu believed that the United States perpetuated
regional instability because of its role as a regional guarantor of the
region’s Gulf Arab states. This role, he maintained, was premised on
a pact that elevated the threat, during the Cold War, of the Soviet
Union and global communism and, post-1991, of Islamism and
terrorism. The region’s leadership, therefore, used fear and security
concerns to retain its vital relationship with Washington, which
in turn excused the repressive tactics used to suppress dissent back
home. This dissent, often times, expressed itself through political
Islamist parties, which created an obvious overlap in how the AKP
and its predecessor parties viewed their own internal struggle in
Turkey to retain political power.

40
Davutoğlu’s ideas have had a clear impact on AKP foreign policy.
These key themes gave Erdoğan and those that remain in the party a
key set of ideas that Ankara now uses to frame its regional interests.
During the mid-2000s, the first manifestation of Ankara’s updated
Middle East policy played out in Iraq. The American invasion of Iraq
upended the Iraqi central government, which Ankara had depended
on to keep pressure on the Iraqi Kurds to ensure that the state did
not break up. This relationship with Baghdad was also dependent
on Turkey’s relationship with Washington, which enforced a “no-fly
and no-radiate” zone over the Kurdish areas. Turkey’s support for this
policy allowed for Ankara to have a seat at the table and observe US
operations so as to ensure that the Iraqi Kurds would not unilaterally
break away from the Iraqi state. Davutoğlu had a different approach
to the Kurdish issue. The AKP had considerable electoral success in
Turkey’s Kurdish-majority southeast and could compete with the
country’s largest and most popular Kurdish political party, which
has overt links to the PKK. For this reason, AKP sought to appeal to
religiously pious Kurds and downplay the nationalist aspect of each
bloc’s politics, in favor of a shared religious identity, and a broader
commitment to greater democratic freedom.

The AKP was wary of the American occupation in Iraq. The security
apparatus constantly badgered the United States to do more to fight
the PKK, which exploited the loss of central government control to
expand its reach in northern Iraq and across the border into Turkey.
Ankara also opposed the 2005 Iraqi constitution. Davutoğlu argued
that Turkey governed Iraq for 400 years and that specific mention of
“different sects and ethnicities” risked “creating another Yugoslavia
in the Middle East.”76 Despite the official aversion to sectarianism,

41
Ankara established significant inroads with elements of Iraq’s Sunni-
majority political establishment. In 2005, the AKP hosted Tariq Al
Hashimi, the leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party—the Iraqi branch
of the Muslim Brotherhood—at a major conference in Istanbul to
convince the Sunni bloc to vote in favor of the constitution at the
upcoming referendum.77

Turkey’s flirtation with the Muslim Brotherhood foreshadowed its

future foreign policy in the Middle East. However, there was a very
practical and interest-based reason to support a Sunni-majority party
to counterbalance the Kurdish bloc in Mosul. This policy was initially
unsuccessful. The Sunni boycott of the 2005 Iraqi election allowed
for the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union
of Kurdistan (PUK) to gain political control over Nineveh Province.
Ankara’s response to the jousting for control of Mosul would shape
a series of subsequent policy choices that directly impacted local
perspectives about the Turkish role in Iraq—and the region, more
broadly. The AKP did make an effort to cultivate close ties with
dominant Shia political actors in Baghdad, hosting Muqtada al Sadr
at the Cankaya Presidential Palace in Ankara in 2009.78 However,
Turkey began to, in practice, move away from its historic support for
a strong centralized government. Faced with continuing hostility,
the AKP drifted towards the KDP and the Iraqqiya, Sunni-majority
political bloc.

This change in policy would haunt Turkey after the rise of Islamic
State. The economic incentives to support the KDP were manifest.
Ankara allowed for two small energy firms to work from Turkey
to drill for oil in Iraqi Kurdistan and suggested that it would

42
independently export this oil “when it has become convinced that
the situation in Arab Iraq has become so unstable that it threatens
its strategic interests,” according to the International Crisis Group.79
In parallel, Iraqqiya won ninety-one out of 325 seats in Iraq’s
Council of Representatives, compared to the eighty-nine won by
the then Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki’s State of Law coalition. The
more numerous Iraqqiya, however, did not have a logical political
partner for form a coalition, all but ensuring the government would
remain dominated by Maliki and his close confidantes. In the
wake of Maliki’s government formation, Ankara began to facilitate
independent oil exports. The KRG began to export crude oil to
Turkey by truck in 2012, before the two sides finished construction
of an independent oil pipeline from Iraqi Kurdistan to the Turkish
port of Ceyhan in 2014.

On the political side, the Iraqqiya coalition collapsed and Ankara

chose to back Omar and Atheel Nujaifi. Omar was a national
politician leading a parliamentary bloc. His brother, Atheel, was
the governor of Ninewah and controlled Mosul. The partnership,
however, was soon marred by the Nujaifi brothers’ calls to establish a
“Sunni” autonomous region, similar to the KRG, and complete with
its own security forces. This call had little support, but the Nujaifi
connection to Ankara—combined with the Turkish selling of
Kurdish oil independent of the central government gave credence—
to narrative that the AKP was keen on breaking up the Iraqi state for
its own interests. The Nujaifis’ proposal had little credibility inside
Iraq, but the two men were in positions of power and continued to
advocate for a radical altering of the government's structure.

43
As centralized control began to break down in Sunni-majority areas
in Iraq in 2012, the rise of the Islamic State proved problematic for
regional perceptions of Turkey. The rejuvenated Sunni Insurgency
began in December 2012, following the arrest of the Iraqi Finance
Minister Rafia al-Isawi, a native of the former extremist stronghold
of Anbar. The arrest prompted a series of protests in the Sunni-
majority cities of Ramadi and Fallujah. Maliki handled these protests
poorly, alternating between handing out piecemeal concessions
and authorizing violence. The protesters were sub-divided into
two groups, with one linked to Iraq’s mainstream Sunni clerical
establishment and politicians within the broader Sunni political
movement and a second, more sinister, group tied to the Jaysh Rijal
al-Taraqa al-Naqshbandia, a neo-Ba’athist insurgent group that
would later ally with Islamic State. The calls, at least at the outset
of these protests, for more devolved, Sunni-specific federal powers
reinforced central government skepticism about the nature of the
insurgency. It also reinforced the political ambitions of Turkey’s two
chief allies in Iraq.

As the security situation throughout Iraq continued to deteriorate,

politicians began to preen for the cameras. In one absurd moment,
Atheel al Nujaifi was filmed on a street patrol with a handful
of guys, who would later flee the city with Atheel for Erbil. “I
remember watching that clip,” a journalist based in Erbil explained,
“and thinking to myself, what the hell is about to happen here.”80
Ankara refused to evacuate its consulate in Mosul, despite receiving
warnings that Islamic State was poised to attack the city’s outer
neighborhoods. The group, according to Reuters, hoped to take
control of a few neighborhoods for a few hours, before they would

44
retreat under fire.81 They did not expect the city to fall. The security
forces in the city, at least on paper, outnumbered Islamic State, with
a series of brigades deployed in the city.

The Islamic State’s rise was the bookend to the American War on
Terror and prompted intervention in Iraq and Syria. The Turkish
border became the main hub for the Islamic State to recruit
foreign fighters and receive materiel from abroad. The Turkish-
American disconnect, that had begun following the 1991 Gulf
War and continued during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq,
remained unresolved. And, with the war against the Islamic State,
the disconnect got worse. The United States chose to go to war in
Syria with a PKK-linked militia, the YPG, after it became clear that
forces Ankara had cultivated were not up to the task to fight Islamic
State throughout Syria. This decision nearly severed relations.
Ankara, however, was viewed in Washington and the region as a
key enabler of the group the United States and much of the region
was working to defeat. The suspicions about Turkey, at least in the
Arab world, were linked back to its support for political Islamists
in the region, its support for politicians that pushed for the break
up of the Iraqi state along ethnic lines, and its hindrance of US war
efforts. On three occasions between 2016 and 2019, Ankara invaded
Syrian territory. These invasions, while tethered to broader counter-
terrorism goals, seriously threatened the US-led campaign.

The end of the war against the Islamic State in Syria eased this
pressure on Ankara, but it would be a serious change in Turkish
policy, prompted in part by the collapse of the local economy, to
challenge regional perceptions of the AKP’s foreign policy. Ankara,

45
as has often been the case, used Israel as a means to try and signal its
intentions to recalibrate its half-decade pursuit of irredentist foreign
policy decisions.

Israel and Palestine

Turkey’s history with Israel is complicated and relations are tethered

to core national security interests. The AKP’s now two-decade
old handling of relations with Jerusalem have been fraught and
marred by frequent diplomatic disputes and periods of sustained
animosity that has seen both sides accuse the other of supporting
terrorist groups. The two sides have mended relations in recent years,
following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s electoral loss in
June 2021.82

Prime Minister Erdoğan and much of the AKP argued that the
United States and Israel presided over an “axis” in the Middle East.
As one current AKP member of parliament has argued, the Israeli-
American axis is the “Camp David order,” which he defined as the
West’s unwavering support for the Arab leaders who have dominated
Middle Eastern affairs for the last three decades. According to Taha
Ozhan, “This status quo positioned Israel at the center of regional
relations, and in subsequent years has enabled regional dictators to
rule with an iron fist.” 83 The AKP, therefore, viewed the Palestine
issue through their own understanding of regional democracy, self
interest, and broader relations with the region’s most dominant
external power—the United States. For Davutoğlu and the AKP,
the resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict would have three direct
positive impacts for Turkey in the region: First, Ankara genuinely

46
views Palestinian self-determination as a national priority and is eager
to help facilitate Israeli recognition of Palestinian independence.
Second, the current status quo, in turn, is indicative of the broader
issues the current Turkish leadership is seeking to overturn. These
issues are the perceived Western backing for authoritarian regimes
and irredentist nationalist identities that oppress conservative
Muslim actors. Third, the Turkish leadership views these changes as
necessary to hasten Turkey’s own rise as an international power, and
broader transition to a multi-polar world where the United States—
and the West—is no longer the dominant actor.

The 2006 Palestinian elections were a watershed moment for the

AKP’s foreign policy and has framed how Ankara has handled
relations with Israel ever since. In 2005, the United States in
particular pushed the Palestinian Authority, led by Fatah, to organize
parliamentary elections, which were held in the following January.
The resulting electoral victory by Hamas—which gained a clear
majority—came as a surprise to the Bush administration, prompting
it to threaten to withhold aid to the Palestinian Authority unless
Hamas renounced its anti-Israel positions. The standoff opened the
door for Ankara to shift its own narrative on the Israel-Palestine
issue, and to wrap it support for Hamas as a broader support for
regional democracy. Ankara’s policy also included continued outreach
to Israel, and in particular support for Israeli-Syrian peace talks.

The AKP viewed Israeli-Syrian normalization as an obtainable goal

and sought to facilitate an end to this aspect of the decades old Arab-
Israeli conflict. While Ankara did not specifically tie its support for
Palestine to its mediation efforts, the two goals were interlinked.

47
The AKP elite viewed the securitization of the Middle East as the
systemic driver of regional instability. In 2012, Davutoğlu criticized
the Western response to the Hamas electoral victory, arguing that
the refusal to engage with Hamas helped to fuel tensions and
contributed to the intra-Palestinian violence that led to the de-facto
partition of the West Bank and Gaza. Turkish policy bent towards
Hamas, thereafter, but its official position was to push Hamas to
renounce violence, push the parties to agree to a two-state solution,
and to solve political differences through negotiations.84

Thus, if Ankara were to facilitate an end to two festering conflicts

involving Israel, it would benefit the Middle East, and thereby
benefit Turkish equities along its border in Syria and further afield
in the Levant. Israeli politics are fickle, but Erdoğan had sought
to maintain close ties with former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
The two men, however, had a falling out over the 2008 Hamas-
Israel war, which Jerusalem dubbed Operation Cast Lead. Despite
the growing tensions between Israel and Hamas—and Ankara’s
treatment of Hamas as the de-facto government of Palestine—
Ankara and Jerusalem retained a functional relationship. The Turkish
government, at this time, felt that its diplomatic efforts had led Israel
and Syria to the precipice of signing a peace agreement. However,
as elections approached in Israel—and Syrian intransigence on key
issues remained—Ankara believed that any breakthrough would
take a few months to resolve. Olmert had visited Ankara and met
with Erdoğan in December 2008, where the two men reportedly
signaled support for peace. Yet, after returning to Israel, the
campaign in Gaza began. Erdoğan viewed the operation as a slight
and, in response, progress on the Israeli-Syrian peace process was

48
permanently frozen. To this day, there is no consensus on how close
Ankara was to actually winning agreement from Damascus, but at
the time, Erdoğan viewed the Israeli actions as a slap in the face of
all his efforts.

The tensions led to two incidents that, along with the election of
Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, derailed Israeli-Turkish ties for well
over a decade. The downturn began with conflict in Gaza, which
manifested itself at a joint event between Erdoğan and Israeli
President Shimon Peres. During a moderated panel, Erdoğan
famously asked for “one minute” to rebut Peres’ defense of Israeli
military actions in Gaza and suggested the Israeli government was
an expert in killing children on beaches. In the aftermath of Cast
Lead, the Turkish government adopted a harsher policy, although
it sought to work through like-minded surrogates to punish Tel
Aviv. In 2010, an Islamist aid group (the IHH Humanitarian Relief
Foundation, or simply IHH) organized a flotilla of aid ships to sail
from Turkey to Gaza to break Israel’s naval blockade. Officially, the
Turkish government disavowed the flotilla, but claimed that they
lacked the legal mechanisms to stop the ships from sailing.85 The
Israeli government, however, chose to interdict the ship, and during
a raid at sea near Gaza killed nine Turks onboard. The raid took
place in international waters, prompting outrage around the world,
and sparking protests in Turkey. The fallout poisoned Turkish-Israeli
relations, leading to the removal of ambassadors from each capital,
the severing of defense ties, and Ankara becoming more overt in its
hosting of Hamas representatives in Turkey. The United States has
long sought to mediate a solution to the tensions between Israel
and Turkey, with President Barack Obama overseeing a phone call

49
where Prime Minister Netanyahu apologized to Erdoğan in 2010.
The phone call eased the tension, but did not resolve the underlying
issues that chilled relations. Still, this allowed for Ankara and
Jerusalem to compartmentalize relations, focus on trade relations,
but also create space to disagree over Gaza without it leading to a
rupture in ties.86

The rapprochement also stemmed from broader factors, linked to

Turkish challenges after the 2011 Arab uprisings, the collapse of the
Turkish economy later in the decade, and broader concerns about
an emergent tripartite partnership between Israel, Greece, and
Cyprus (with support from the United Arab Emirates and Saudi
Arabia). Looking back at the collapse of relations, Ankara’s turn
to a quasi-government linked entity—IHH—to use as a carve out
to asymmetrically pressure an adversarial nation. Ankara repeated
this model in Syria, where IHH provided aid to opposition fighters
Ankara gave safe haven to inside its borders, and again in its handling
of migrants fleeing the civil war for Turkey to transit on to Europe.
For years, Ankara simply allowed these migratory networks to exist,
as part of a broader effort to pressure Europe and to gain leverage
with Brussels in negotiations. Turkey followed a similar model with
opposition, Arabic-language media based in Istanbul and beaming
channels to the Middle East via satellite.

Political Islam and the Arab Spring:

Ankara’s Revisionist Rhetoric

The wave of anti-regime, democratically-focused protests in the

Middle East after 2010 appeared to affirm many of the thoughts

50
former Prime Minister Davutoğlu had about the region’s political
future. The AKP elite also viewed the uprising as an opportunity
to reshape the regional order in ways that were advantageous
to Turkish national security and economic interests. Ankara’s
subsequent support for the Muslim Brotherhood, and in particular,
Mohammed Morsi in Egypt, placed Turkey at odds with the status
quo powers in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. Ankara increasingly found
common cause with Qatar, the small natural gas rich country in the
Persian Gulf. The two countries shared similar points of view about
the role of political Islam and had natural, geopolitical synergies that
drove the two together. Turkey is a large country with considerable
military resources, but often times needs foreign support to prop up
its economy. Qatar is a rich country, but with no military capacity
to speak of. The Qatari leadership has long viewed Saudi Arabia
as a threat and has sought to use external powers to guarantee its
security.

The Turkish-Qatari defense agreement was signed in 2014, amidst

regional tensions over the role Ankara and Doha were playing in
supporting Islamist movements in Egypt, Libya, and Syria.87 The
defense agreement essentially obligated Turkey to help defend Doha
from attack by Saudi Arabia, while giving Ankara financial assistance
at a time that its economy was struggling. The defense relationship
solidified an airtight political relationship, fortified during the
aftermath of the Arab revolts. Both Ankara and Doha worked
closely to support various Muslim Brotherhood related groups. The
Turkish-Qatari support for Mohamed Morsi in Egypt prompted a
counter bloc, led by the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
The two sides jostled for influence in Libya and within the broader

51
anti-Assad opposition in Syria.

The July 2013 coup that toppled Morsi deepened the fissures
between the two blocs. The bloody coup led to Morsi’s minister of
defense, Abdel Fattah al Sisi, to take control and crack down on
the Brotherhood. This included the arrest of Morsi and his eventual
death during a sham trial.88 The United Arab Emirates and Saudi
Arabia provided significant financial support for Sisi following the
coup,89 whereas Turkey and Qatar refused to acknowledge Sisi as
legitimate and sought to isolate Egypt on the world stage.90 Erdoğan
also reacted to the violent events on Rabaa square, where Egyptian
security forces killed 900 peaceful protesters, and imprisoned
hundreds of others. Erdoğan used a four finger Rabia sign to recall
this event, turning the symbol into a populist electoral theme to
galvanize his supporters at political rallies, and as a potent political
symbol for Morsi and the Brotherhood movement.91

The intra-Arab disagreements exploded in June 2017, when Saudi

Arabia and the United Arab Emirates orchestrated a diplomatic
and economic blockade of Qatar.92 As part of the blockade, Saudi
Arabia demanded that Turkey remove its troops from the country.93
During the crisis, there was concern that Saudi Arabia would
invade its small neighbor to topple the regime, which Ankara
would have been obligated to defend. This outcome never came
to fruition. The tensions deepened further in October 2018, when
the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered and his body
dismembered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Saudi Crown
Prince Mohamed bin Salman ordered the killing, according to a
CIA intelligence assessment.94 The Turkish government had the

52
same assessment and through a series of coordinated leaks sought
to increase pressure, presumably so that the Saudi King Salman
would take action to sideline the young prince. The Turkish policy,
therefore, was a de facto attempt to overthrow an Arab ruler that
Ankara was at loggerheads with over political Islam and the post-
Arab revolt regional order. This effort at regime change did not work
and, in retaliation for this policy, Saudi Arabia imposed a complete
embargo of Turkish products.95

The tit-for-tat continued up until May 2022. The tensions came

amid a deleterious economic downturn in Turkey. The downturn
stemmed almost solely from Erdoğan’s economic mismanagement
and his absurd insistence that the best tool to tame inflation is to
lower interest rates.96 The accepted tool to tackle high inflation is
to raise interest rates, but any such action in Turkey would lead
to decline in economic growth and increase borrowing costs for
Erdoğan-linked firms, thereby undermining core pillars of AKP
electoral power. Thus, for reasons ranging from Erdoğan personal
piety to authoritarianism, the Turkish leader has an incentive to keep
borrowing costs low and to artificially stimulate the economy, even
at the cost of rampant inflation. The Turkish Central Bank which
has been completely defanged in the twenty-plus years of Erdoğan
rule, are then left to try and craft policy within the acceptable
bounds Erdoğan demands. On the financial side, this led his son-
in-law, former Finance Minister Berat Albayrak, to use Turkey’s
small amount of dollar reserves to try and stabilize the lira during a
currency crisis in 2021.97 Albayrak’s own economic mismanagement
and his unpopularity led him to resign, but the tools that he used to
stabilize the lira remain the preferred policy in Ankara. As a result,

53
Turkey has spent down its currency reserves, and has to borrow
domestically to maintain a positive number of dollars.

This currency crisis prompted Turkish leaders to arrange for a series

of dollar infusions in a currency swap arrangement. Ankara turned,
first, to Qatar. Later, as the situation grew more dire, and outreach to
Washington was met with skepticism, Turkey had to consider other
dollar rich countries. This led Ankara back to the Gulf and the United
Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Ankara’s need for dollars, then,
prompted a reassessment of its regional policies, built in opposition
to Abu Dhabi and Riyadh.98 In early 2022, Turkey reached agreement
with the United Arab Emirates for a small currency swap (matching
agreements made with Qatar, South Korea, and China) and an
end to the total Saudi embargo of Turkish goods. A Turkish about
face came in 2022, amidst domestic, pro-government fanfare about
a reset in Ankara’s regional policies.99 The reality, however, is that
Ankara’s dire economic situation undermined Turkish policy and
enabled regional adversaries—and eager global powers—to “buy off ”
Turkey and ensure at least a few years of benign relations. Ankara’s
relationship with China, for example, is one where minimal Chinese
investment in Turkey and a concurrent currency swap has ensured
Ankara will not make a fuss about the genocide of Turkic Uyghurs
in Xinjiang. The UAE and Saudi Arabia bought a similarity pliant
Turkey and shunted thorny issues to the side. Ankara has carried
this reset to Israel, which has been open to Ankara’s outreach.

However, in all of these cases, the public commentary lauding a

return to functional bilateral relations does not match the deep,
internal skepticism about Turkish revanchism in the region. The

54
wave of regional resets has not led to a deep feelings of gratitude for
Erdoğan, but is instead a reflection of the perceived need to manage
Turkey and its frequent outbursts. In this sense, Turkey’s regional
antagonists are buying Turkish foreign policy on the cheap, and
essentially winning concessions from a hostile actor in exchange for
relatively small amounts of money. For Ankara, the reset has helped
to frame a weak Turkey’s management of a self-induced economic
crisis as part of a coherent, regional strategy, and has sought to
convince the public that the net sum of Turkey’s irredentist policy
produced real meaningful changes.

Conclusion

In reality, the challenges Ankara has posed to the regional order

in the Middle East and the Mediterranean for at least the past
decade has led sates hostile to Turkey to bandwagon together. The
reasons for the anti-Turkey bandwagon will be discussed in the
next chapter. However, the anti-Turkey action taken by the UAE
and Saudi Arabia, in concert with Israel, Greece, and Cyprus have
not prevented individual efforts to improve relations with Turkey.
The strength of this bandwagon bloc should not be underestimated,
despite Turkey’s general effort to end its regional isolation. The
region remains deeply suspicious of Erdoğan and the broader trends
in Turkish foreign policy. The issue is, perhaps, most acute for EU
members Greece and Cyprus, which have sought assistance from
France and the United States for external protection from further
Turkish provocations. Ankara’s irredentism tanked relations with the
United States, much of the West, and isolated Turkey in the Middle
East (with the exception of Qatar). Turkey’s economic weakness did

55
spur changes in how it approached the cash-rich Arab states, but the
resentment in Egypt and Israel continues, as does hostility and fear
in Athens and Nicosia.

Turkey’s relationship with the United States, which began to

fracture over starkly different regional security concerns in Iraq in
2003 and then Syria in 2012, has reached a nadir. The two countries
remain formal allies, but the relationship is now mired in a series
of normalized meetings designed to air grievances, where the
prospect for some large compromise remains remote. This situation
also reflects Turkey’s relationship with the EU, so while Ankara’s
economic weakness helped catalyze changes to its relations with the
Arab world and Israel, the same cannot also be said for Turkey’s
traditional allies in the West.

56
 Chapter 3:
Regional Repercussions

T he events of the past decade have profoundly shaped and

reshaped regional attitudes toward Turkey. Beyond day-to-day
developments in bilateral relations between Turkey and its neighbors,
the impact of these attitudes will continue to determine how
Turkey’s role in the region evolves. Specifically, fears that have been
triggered or reinforced by Turkish policies during this period risk
taking on a life of their own, curtailing prospects for rapprochement
and realignment under Erdoğan or any future Turkish government.

As Turkey’s 2021 rapprochement campaign revealed, current

divisions need not become the defining feature of regional
geopolitics over the coming decade. Yet this remains a real risk. For
Washington, the challenge will lie in effectively managing regional
concerns so that they do not deepen into irreversible fault lines that
ensure Turkey’s permanent alienation in the region. This involves
recognizing and addressing them without taking steps that will
ultimately consolidate them.

In order to understand what an effective balancing act will require,

this chapter surveys perceptions of Turkish foreign policy in selected
regional states. Drawing on conversations with officials and opinion
leaders in these countries, it seeks to offer insight into how current

57
views have developed, and how they might evolve in the coming
years.

Greece

Needless to say, Greek perceptions of Turkish foreign policy have

always differed considerably from perceptions in the United States.
Connoisseurs of neo-Ottomanism quickly noticed a striking
difference in the way the term was used to criticize to Turkish foreign
policy in Athens and Washington.100 Among many US critics,
neo-Ottomanism referred to aggressive, Islamist policies Turkey
adopted when it ceased being a stalwart, dependable NATO ally
under Erdoğan’s leadership. In Greek discourse, by contrast, it often
seemed to be just another way to refer to the aggressive nationalist
policies that the Turkish republic had supposedly followed ever
since it stopped being Ottoman. From one perspective, Turkey’s
traditional Kemalist foreign policy had always foresworn irredentism
and aggression in pursuit of peace at home and peace in the world.
From the other perspective, Turkey’s 1974 invasion of Cyprus made
a mockery of these claims.

Longstanding Greek fears about Turkish regional ambitions have

sometimes led to a backhanded gratitude for Erdoğan’s leadership.
This viewpoint takes for granted Turkey’s desire to undermine
Greek interests, whether in a nakedly irredentist matter or simply
in pursuit of more modest maritime and economic interests. In
either case, Erdoğan’s Islamist inclinations, anti-Western posturing,
and aggressive rhetoric have been a net benefit for Athens, because
they have alienated Turkey’s NATO allies and alarmed regional

58
actors like Israel and Egypt. As a result, Erdoğan has left Turkey
more isolated and made it more difficult for Ankara to pursue its
traditional, that is anti-Greek, interests. The natural corollary to this
view is that Greece might ultimately face a greater long-term threat
if a new government comes to power in Ankara that proves willing
to abandon Erdoğan’s Islamist causes in order to restore relations
with Israel and Egypt while also returning, prodigal son style, to
the warm embrace of the Western alliance. By ending Turkey’s
isolation and capitalizing on the enthusiasm of Western leaders to
see Turkey’s traditional foreign policy restored, Ankara would gain
significant leverage that it could then use to pressure Athens into
concessions.

This view is not necessarily at odds with more widespread concerns

about how Erdoğan’s policies and rhetoric have inflamed nationalist
demands and irredentist ambitions across the Turkish political
spectrum in ways that will be difficult for any future government
to tame. Indeed, recent years have seen an escalation in subtly or
not so subtly irredentist language from Turkish officials and pro-
government papers.101 Maps claiming portions of neighboring
countries have appeared with greater frequency on Turkish
television, and even been shared by AKP parliamentarians. In a 2020
interview, Turkey’s vice president described the feelings of anguish
and injustice aroused in Turkish citizens at seeing Greek islands
only miles from their shores. Newspapers have described the ease
with which neighboring islands could be seized, while the Turkish
foreign ministry has suggested that Greece’s failure to demilitarize
them could call their sovereignty into question.

59
Against this backdrop, Erdoğan’s official endorsement of the Mavi
Vatan maritime claims, formalized in Turkey’s 2019 memorandum of
understanding with Libya, have appeared in a particularly aggressive
light. While some pro-Ankara analysts have tried to present this
agreement as an opening bid in a broader bargaining strategy, the
official nature of the claim, coupled with the widespread support it
received among diverse sectors of Turkish society, raises concerns
that it will be difficult for this or any future Turkish government to
walk it back.102 If nothing else, popularity of the Mavi Vatan map
in itself has helped shift Turkish public opinion about what a just
maritime delimitation would be in ways that will complicate any
future attempts at a negotiated settlement.

Taken together, Turkish rhetoric and policies have created a more

pronounced threat perception in Athens than is often appreciated
in either Ankara or Washington. For example, while Turkey’s 2020
refugee policy or its overflight of Greek islands are often viewed
from Washington as unhelpful or even provocative moves, some
Greek observers have presented them both as part of a concerted
and systematic effort to test Greek defenses. Indeed, while European
observers were highly critical of Turkey’s effort to manufacture
a refugee crisis at the Greek border in early 2020, they failed to
appreciate the degree to which some in Greece saw it in quasi-
military terms as a direct assault on Greek sovereignty. The result is
a situation where many people in Western capitals still see a direct
military confrontation between Greece and Turkey as unrealistic
whereas many in Athens have come to see it as unlikely but possible.

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These trends have both fed and exacerbated existing doubts about
the degree of support Greece would receive from its Western allies in
the case of a more serious crisis with Turkey. The fear, as summarized
by one Greek analyst, is that if Ankara deliberately provoked a crisis,
or perhaps even attacked, NATO would express concern and urge
deconfliction, while Germany would blame Greece for not being more
accommodating and offer to host negotiations. Whether these fears
are justified or not, they provide the necessary context to understand
developments such as Athens’ defense agreement with France and
its ongoing efforts to cultivate Washington. Not surprisingly, where
Turkish commentators presented these moves, in particularly with
France, as provocations in themselves, Greek commentators saw
them as insurance against Turkish aggression. More telling, even
those in Greece who also worried about the potential of such steps
to antagonize Ankara still ultimately supported them as regrettable
but necessary defensive steps.

In this light, a number of Greek observers have also stressed the

importance of remaining pragmatic while trying to address the
security threat posed by Turkey. Greece, they emphasize, remains
the smaller power and remains dependent on the support of its
NATO and EU partners in case of a conflict. This, in turn, requires
that Greece resist giving in to nationalist rhetoric, avoid provocative
actions and, more broadly, conduct its relations with Turkey so that
Athens does not appear to be in the position of the aggressor. This
also requires Greece to keep channels of dialogue open across the
Aegean, and preserve hope for a negotiated solution to its bilateral
problems no matter how difficult this appears.

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Successive Greek governments have also operated from the position
that Greece will ultimately remain more secure so long as Turkey
maintains its Western orientation and its membership in key
institutions like NATO. This approach was reflected in Athens’ 1999
shift toward supporting Turkey’s EU accession, and is something
that continues to be emphasized by Greek officials. Thus while there
are constant concerns that Turkey’s strategic importance to the West
results in Western states being too sympathetic to Turkey on key
issues, the assumption remains that Turkey’s integration in Western
defense architecture ultimately constrains Turkish aggression and
gives the West crucial leverage over Ankara if only it would use it.

This has led to a multi-track strategy of trying to strengthen ties with

Washington and push Washington to take a firmer line with Turkey,
but also maintaining ongoing engagement with Ankara. In his May
2020 visit to Washington, for example, Prime Minister Kyriakos
Mitsotakis pointed out to the press that he had met with Erdoğan
four times.103 He was not in Washington, he insisted, simply to seek
US support against Turkey. Rather if he had issues with Turkey he
would take them up with Erdoğan in person. Yet in a subsequent
speech to Congress, he also made a thinly veiled case against further
US military aid to Turkey.104 Taken together, these statements reflect
a hope that Western support will create the conditions in which
Greece can engage with Turkey on more equal footing, and Ankara
will be compelled to engage constructively in response.

As the triangular relationship linking the US, Greece, and Turkey

continues to evolve, Washington will likely continue its slow pivot
toward Greece. Washington will remain hesitant to irreversibly

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alienate Turkey, and the executive branch, if not Congress, will remain
scrupulously proper in its rhetorical neutrality toward America’s
two NATO allies. Despite this, though, US policy could well shift
toward something that resembles a soft containment of Turkey,
reinforced by stronger Congressional action. However, there is not a
guarantee that this shift will prompt a more accommodating stance
from Ankara, particularly in its relations with Athens. Thus, going
forward, Washington will almost certainly remain one step behind
what Greece wants. Athens will continue its efforts to consolidate ties
in order to secure greater support, while also remaining suspicious
that Washington is still being too accommodating of Turkey.

Cyprus

Dynamics in the Republic of Cyprus resemble those in Greece

in certain key regards, although with key differences reflecting
the unique circumstances on the island. Like Athens, Nicosia has
made a concerted effort over the past decade to improve ties with
Washington, as well as US partners in the region. In some ways,
this pivot has been even more dramatic.105 If a certain non-aligned
impulse was always present in Greek policy discourse, Cyprus was
historically more firmly in the non-aligned camp. It maintained
ties with the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War and was not
a NATO member. Indeed, at one point it was Cyprus that created
concerns by purchasing a Russian air defense system. More recently,
Washington remained critical of the Cypriot government for its
role in facilitating Russian money-laundering and its willingness to
host ships from the Russian fleet. Yet if Cyprus forges ahead with
concerted steps to address both of these issues in the aftermath of

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the invasion of Ukraine, it will represent a significant reorientation
toward Washington.

Cyprus’s shift has gone hand in hand with a shift in US policy.

Following the failure of the Crans-Montana talks in 2017,
Washington appears to have rethought it its approach to Cyprus.
Instead of prioritizing the re-unification of the island as part of
a broader strategy for minimizing destabilizing intra-alliance
tension between Turkey and Greece, policymakers instead focused
on strengthening relations with the Republic of Cyprus. From
Washington’s perspective, if a resolution to the island’s division
was unlikely in the near future, it made sense to secure more
concrete benefits from closer cooperation with the one recognized
government on it.

The fact that the stance of the Greek Cypriot leadership was largely
seen as the main factor in the collapse of the 2017 negotiations has
led to concerns that Washington’s policy shift is rewarding Nicosia
for its obstinacy. However, Turkey’s response to the impasse has
inevitably made this criticism harder to sustain. Ankara has now
doubled down on its support for a “two state solution” in Cyprus. In
2020, Ankara manipulated the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus
presidential election to secure the victory over the pro-Erdoğan
Ersin Tatar over Mustafa Akinci, an outspoken critic and supporter
of reunification. More recently, Erdoğan and Tatar jointly re-opened
the abandoned Greek Cypriot city of Varosha, which was widely
expected to be returned to the Greek side as part of a confidence
building measure or eventual settlement. Thus there is good reason
to fear that the current dynamics will only strengthen both sides’

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resistance to reunification and deepen the island’s division.

In the meantime, Cyprus, like Greece, has rapidly improved ties

with US partners and allies in the region who share its concerns
about Turkey. Though these relationships first came together
under the rubric of the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum, they
have evolved considerably. Cyprus’s partnership with Israel is now
embedded in the US-backed 3+1 format, while its ties with Egypt
have developed on a bilateral basis as well. The Abraham Accords
have also contributed to an environment in which these relationships
have facilitated closer Greek and Cypriot ties to the Gulf as well.
As a result, while many discussions of Cyprus’s regional policy have
been in relation to the economically implausible East Med Gas
pipeline, this has now become secondary to a broader and deeper set
of relationships. Even after the US formally withdrew its support for
the pipeline project, Cypriot officials remain more optimistic about
the potential of the pipeline than others. And yet they are quick to
point out that this is not the centerpiece of the new regional order
they have helped create.

Starting in 2022, Turkey made a concerted effort to repair its relations

with Israel, seemingly with the aim of wooing Jerusalem away from
its nascent alliance with Greece and Cyprus. As part of this effort,
the Turkish government formally promoted the possibility of an
Israel-Turkey gas pipeline as an alternative to the East Med route,
while, less plausibly, some even suggested that a Turkish-Israeli
maritime delimitation agreement could enable Israel to expand its
exclusive economic zone at Cyprus’s expense. In response to this
outreach, Cypriot officials have emphasized that they do not feel

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their relationship with Israel is threatened. They insist that they have
no objection to reinvigorated Israeli-Turkish ties, and are confident
that Israel will not take any steps to improve relations with Turkey
that would come at the expense of existing ties with Nicosia. A gas
pipeline from Israel to Turkey, for example, would realistically have
to run through Cyprus’s exclusive economic zone, and it is difficult
to imagine how this could be concluded while Ankara still refuses to
recognize the Cypriot government.

Yet, as in Athens, this confidence belies a certain lingering concern

about how quickly Turkey’s former allies could pivot back to their
earlier relationships with Ankara if circumstances change. There is a
certain resonance between Greek concerns and Turkish confidence
in this regard. Bullish commentators in Ankara continue to insist
that Washington and other Western capitals will ultimately come to
appreciate the strategic importance of Turkey and recalibrate their
current policies to secure Turkish cooperation on Ankara’s terms.
If their confidence currently seems misplaced when viewed from
Washington, it fits well with an abiding cynicism about Western
intentions that can be heard in Nicosia. Similarly, one Cypriot
official noted that Israeli policymaking circles still entertained a
certain “romanticism” regarding Ankara, and continued to hold out
hope that the two countries could one day return to the good old
days of their 1990’s era partnership.

For Cyprus, of course, the long-term course of its relations with

Turkey will also be determined by the resolution or non-resolution
of the island’s division. There now appears to be a comfortable
complacency about the status quo in the Republic of Cyprus and

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Washington. In both 2004 and 2017, the Greek Cypriot leadership
appears to have concluded that the drawbacks of a settlement
outweighed the risks of continued division, and opted to hold out
for a better deal at some point in the future. The unrecognized
Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, meanwhile, remains stuck in
legal limbo, denied the opportunity to develop ties with the outside
world and dependent on Turkey. The risk is that following the failure
of two peace processes in as many decades, Ankara will double down
on efforts to disrupt the status quo. Turkey has already sought to
forcibly prevent the Republic of Cyprus from exploiting its maritime
energy resources, folding these efforts into its confrontation with
Greece over exclusive economic zones. Re-opening Varosha
represented another step to shift the status quo in Turkey’s favor. If
Ankara continues down this route, it risks rendering the divisions
on the island permanent and creating further obstacles to any future
efforts to reconcile Turkey with its erstwhile allies in the West.
While it seems like a remote possibility, several informed observers
in Northern Cyprus speculated that Erdoğan might even move to
formally annex the territory ahead of his next election.

Some in Northern Cyprus who hope to avoid both the island’s

permanent division and its eventual incorporation into Cyprus have
expressed hope that Europe’s newfound push for energy security
after the invasion of Ukraine can create the necessary pressure for
a political solution. Specifically, this would entail Western powers
recognizing that the East Med gas route is infeasible and that the
alternate Israel-Turkey route was only possible with a solution to the
Cyprus problem. They would then use their leverage on both Turkey
and Cyprus to make a solution happen, aided by the fact that all

67
parties could profit in concrete financial terms from the outcome.
And yet these hopes appear to hinge on an overly optimistic reading
of both Western leverage and desire to use it. To date, Washington
appears to be applying all its leverage with both Cyprus and Turkey
to pressure them, with varying degrees of success, to sever ties with
Moscow.

While Cypriot leaders hoped that the invasion of Ukraine will enhance
the appeal of the East Med pipeline and Turkish leaders hoped it will
increase the appeal of the Israel-Turkey route, it ultimately seems
unlikely to unlock either one. This means that Cyprus will likely
continue to cooperate with Israel and Egypt to export its natural
gas through Egypt’s LNG terminal, or perhaps eventually build an
additional one in Cyprus. If the Cypriot government’s response to
the invasion brings it closer to Washington by reducing concerns
over Russian influence, this is likely to have a bigger impact than
changing energy politics. For example, by clamping down on illicit
Russian money and ending Russian port visits, Nicosia recently meet
the criteria under current Congressional legislation to begin buying
weapons from the United States. One way or another, the status quo
on the island is likely to confront new challenges.

Israel

It is a tribute to how effectively Erdoğan has alienated Israel that

despite some very real nostalgia there, he still cannot overcome the
suspicion he faces in order to fully restore relations. In response to
Ankara’s outreach, Jerusalem appears eager to see what concrete
benefits it can obtain, minimizing challenges from Turkey and

68
restoring a degree of normalcy to the relationship. But Israeli
policymakers have been hesitant to take any steps that require
putting lasting faith in the Turkish government, or alienating new
partners in the Eastern Mediterranean or the Gulf.

From Israel’s perspective, the broader threat perception from

Turkey has increased substantially over the past decade while the
benefits of Turkey as an ally have diminished with the Abraham
Accords. While Israeli observers do not perceive this threat in the
same immediate terms as their colleagues in Greece, Cyprus, or
even Egypt, they have nonetheless concluded that the expansion of
Turkish influence in the region will, on balance, undermine Israel’s
security. Likewise, they remain convinced that there are significant
benefits that better relations with Turkey could bring, particularly in
terms of economic and counter-terror cooperation. But with Israel
expanding its relationships in the Eastern Mediterranean and the
Arab world, these now appear more like perks than necessities.

To the extent some Israeli commentators perceive a direct threat

from Turkey, it is associated with the specific enthusiasm that
Erdoğan has displayed for playing a role in the Palestinian issue.
By hosting Hamas members in Turkey and amplifying the Turkish
presence on the ground in East Jerusalem, Erdoğan has tried to
give concrete form to his desire for leadership in the Islamic world
and his rhetoric about liberating the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.
Inevitably, Erdoğan’s impulses and efforts on such a sensitive issue
are bound to generate a strong and negative reaction, and yet there
is some debate over just how much of an impact these efforts have.
On one side, some analysts have claimed that Erdoğan’s support

69
for Hamas has led directly to the death of Israeli citizens. Other
analysts, however, have dismissed the ability of Hamas members
living in Turkey to contribute in any meaningful way to the
group’s violent activities, and suggested this concern was largely
fearmongering on the part of Israeli nationalist media. Similarly,
Turkish activities in East Jerusalem have received mixed reviews.
Some assessments suggest that they are part of plan for eventually
asserting some sort of physical sovereignty in the city. Others argue
that Erdoğan can only achieve so much by renovating buildings and
sending Turkish tourists to wave flags and deface Armenian signs.
While no one believes Erdoğan is playing a constructive role in this
delicate situation, the most cynical perspective is that he has also
come to function as something of a convenient scapegoat, providing
an explanation for Palestinian anger that would likely exist without
any foreign instigator.

Yet however one assesses the concrete impact of Erdoğan’s moves,

they have certainly contributed to the deep trust deficit that will
remain an obstacle to rebuilding a more functional Turkish-Israeli
relationship. It is telling that in trying to articulate the benefits of
rebuilding ties to a Turkish audience, Israeli officials once stressed
the possibility that Turkey could serve as an interlocutor between
Israel and the Palestinians, serving essentially as their sponsor but in
a constructive way. Whether this plan was ever realistic or desirable,
it is now difficult to imagine. Both Egypt and Qatar have succeeded
in filling this role more effectively, enjoying both more trust in
Jerusalem and more influence over the relevant Palestinian actors.
Trust is also an abstract but inescapable challenge to reviving plans
for an Israel-Turkey gas pipeline. Even if the other economic and

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geopolitical challenges could be solved, Israeli officials would still
have to be willing to put their faith in Erdoğan’s government. His
policies to date have made it more difficult to argue Israel could do
with confidence.

Another complicating factor is that Turkey’s enthusiasm for restoring

ties with Israel often seems to be premised on an exaggerated, not
to say conspiratorial, assessment of the benefits this can secure them
in Washington. Turkey certainly enjoyed the support of pro-Israel
lobbying groups when relations were at their height in the 1990s,
and there are certainly some in Washington who would be more
favorably disposed to Ankara if Jerusalem was. But even if Israel threw
its full weight behind improving Turkey’s standing in Washington, it
would be hard pressed to do much in the face of Ankara’s concerted
efforts to undermine it. Further complicating this is the fact that
Israel’s improved relations with Greece and Cyprus have been
reflected in greater cooperation between the pro-Israel and Hellenic
lobbies in Washington. While much of this cooperation remains
behind the scenes, and some pro-Israel groups remain hesitant to
be seen as lobbying directly against Turkey, this new configuration
will continue to complicate Turkey’s hope to leverage a moderate
rebound in relations with Israel for greater sympathy with the US
government.

Despite all this, the potential for Israel and Turkey to return to a
functional relationship in the post-Erdoğan future remains high.
Erdoğan’s sympathy for the Palestinian cause, and general anti-
Israeli sentiment, is prevalent across the Turkish political spectrum.
But Erdoğan’s particular activism on the subject, and his eagerness

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to position it as part of a broader Islamist cause, is unlikely to be
shared by future governments. While nurturing private hostility and
suspicion, future coalitions will likely be eager to put relations back
on a proper footing. If the level of trust that existed in the 1990s is
unlikely to re-emerge, new leadership in Turkey could undoubtedly
begin slowly rebuilding some measure of it. At the same time,
relations will to some extent remain indexed to the status of the
Palestinian issue. Any government in Turkey that is dependent on
public support will be attuned to domestic sensitivities. As a result,
escalating violence or further moves to annex the West Bank would
place limits on how far Ankara can go, at least publicly, in embracing
Israel.

Egypt

​​Turkey’s attempts at rapprochement with Egypt have been met with

a distinct lack of enthusiasm on Egypt’s side. Following reports of
initial intelligence contacts in the fall of 2020, officials from Turkey
and Egypt met in May 2021. Neither side appeared particularly
positive about the outcome. Two days of meetings focused on
bilateral and regional issues resulted in a statement that characterized
the discussions as “frank and in depth.”106 Both sides agreed on the
“need to achieve peace and security in the Eastern Mediterranean
region” while promising to “evaluate the outcome of this round of
consultations and agree on the next steps.”

The most tangible sign of Erdoğan’s commitment to the process

came when, in advance of the meeting, Muslim Brotherhood TV
stations based in Turkey reported that they had been instructed by

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the Turkish government to tone down their criticism of the Sisi
regime. An anonymous source at El-Sharq TV told a reporter from
Al-Monitor, “Until noon on March 19, we have been preparing for
programs with the same editorial policy and same issues we had been
working on. There was no problem at all—until 6 p.m. that day.”107
He said that in response to requests from a “high level Turkish
party” their station “announced the postponement of the programs
that were scheduled for that day, including the show of Egyptian
actor-turned-TV presenter Hisham Abdullah, whose program was
canceled just 40 minutes before going live.” The director of the Watan
TV channel confirmed reports of government pressure, but also
tried to play them down: “They only asked us to reduce the number
of political programs and broadcast more diverse social programs.
[The Turkish authorities] said their request was because of a current
understanding between the two Egyptian and Turkish sides, and we
completely understand this.” Egypt’s information minister described
Turkey’s moves as “a good sign to create a suitable atmosphere to
discuss disputed cases between the two countries.”108 But they still
fell short of Egypt’s expectations, which include the extradition of
several Muslim Brotherhood members involved in the 2015 killing
of Egypt’s chief prosecutor.

Developments in Libya both facilitated and were facilitated by

lowered Turkish-Egyptian tensions. In Libya itself, a number of
actors proved willing to seize on the stalemate that emerged in
the summer of 2020 to pursue reconciliation. On both sides of
the country’s frontlines, the UN led political process appeared to
offer concrete benefits, including renewed access to oil profits and a
chance to minimize the growing influence of outside powers. Once

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local participants in the conflict had decided to participate in the
formation of a new government, their foreign backers risked being
marginalized if they rejected the process completely. Moreover,
the interplay of interests in the current unity government has been
complex enough and the eventual outcome of the process as a whole
uncertain enough that both Ankara and its rivals could envision a
scenario in which they emerge as the winner.

Indeed, the details and implementation of Libya’s political

reconciliation were carefully calibrated to protect the interests of both
local factions and their foreign backers. When Abdulhamid Dabaiba
was elected to be head of the new unity government on March 15
this represented a significant victory for Turkey, with which he has
close ties. As importantly for Ankara, the negotiations that created
the transitional government stipulated that it could not modify the
country’s existing international agreements, meaning that the status
of the Turkey-Libya Memorandum of Understanding would remain
technically unchanged. At the same time, while Khalifa Haftar and
his forces are now nominally under the authority of the country’s
Presidential Council, the ratification of this provision has been left
vague, facilitating an intentional ambiguity beneficial to Haftar’s
backers. Finally, despite a great deal of discussion about the need
to withdraw all foreign troops from the country, both Turkey and
Russia have largely maintained their mercenary forces.

Observers in Egypt appear divided on whether the steps Erdoğan

has taken so far against the Muslim Brotherhood and in Libya will
be enough to generate a substantial response from Cairo. On the
Muslim Brotherhood, some suggest that simply limiting their ability

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to conduct critical broadcasts and encouraging the movement to
relocate will satisfy Sisi’s basic demands. Others maintain that Cairo
is still hoping to press Erdoğan for more concessions, and feels that
it has the time and leverage to do so. On Libya, several Egyptian
observers stressed that Turkey did not fully appreciate the depth of
Egyptian security concerns. Egypt, they suggested, hoped to see a
full withdrawal of Turkish troops from the country, a step which
Ankara still seems highly unlikely to take. As indicative of this
impasse, one person with knowledge of the negotiations noted that
the Turkish foreign ministry delegation which attended the 2020
talks claimed it did not have the authority to discuss the Libya file,
as it was under the purview of Turkish intelligence.

Yet observers on the Egyptian side also offered several reasons to

think normalization, if not full rapprochement, between the two
countries would be possible. First, they discussed Turkey in terms
that fit well with Ankara’s own self-image: a strong and serious
country capable of causing a lot of problems for rivals if it wanted
to. From this perspective, they suggested that Cairo would benefit
from improving relations to the point where Turkey was not an
active adversary. Several Egyptian observers also stressed that the
breakdown of relations had been driven by Erdoğan. While Erdoğan
had called Sisi a dictator, for example, they noted that Sisi had
never directly questioned Erdoğan’s legitimacy. In a similar vein,
Cairo had consciously declined to respond to Erdoğan’s attacks by
taking steps such as recognizing the Armenian genocide that could
be interpreted as directed at Turkey itself. As a result, they argued
that if Sisi and Erdoğan were to meet, this rapprochement would
ultimately represent a concession from Erdoğan, not Sisi.

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Iraq

Turkey’s relationship with Iraq has stabilized in recent years,

following the fracturing of the political movements that Ankara had
once supported, and Ankara’s efforts to narrow down its ambitions
in the country. The Turkish offensive against the PKK frames the
relations with both Baghdad and Erbil, and Ankara has managed
to win tacit support for its military operations. Yet, despite this
tacit agreement, tensions often flare up when Turkish air strikes
kill civilians, or the strikes are so visible that Iraqi citizens demand
answers from their government as to why they are allowing Ankara
to wage its shadow war with near impunity.

For politicians in Baghdad, Turkey is a large neighbor that it has no

choice but to engage with. The same is true for the ruling Barzani
family in Erbil, which has sought to use tight trade ties with Ankara
to perpetuate its rule, and to economically support the Kurdistan
region. The main fissure in this trilateral relationship is Ankara’s
role in Iraq’s oil policy, and the Erdoğan government’s willingness
to facilitate the independent export petroleum pumped in the
Kurdistan region. Ankara’s partnership with the Barzani family,
and its associated political party, the Kurdistan Democratic Party
(KDP), deepened in the mid-2000s. This partnership was driven by
Turkey’s efforts to hedge against Shia governance in Iraq, and to
cultivate a reliable partner to crack down on the PKK. The Kurdistan
government and Iraq’s federal government have long-differed over
how to interpret the 2005 Iraqi constitution. According to the
International Monetary Fund:

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 According to Baghdad, the federal government
has the exclusive right to develop and export oil
and sign contracts covering the Iraqi territory and
the KRG is not allowed to adopt unilateral and
permanent measures over the management of oil
and gas fields. Erbil’s interpretation, however, is that
it also is entitled to enter into contracts and export
oil independently of Baghdad.109

For Ankara, the status of Kirkuk weighed heavily on its Iraq policy.
In the years that followed the American invasion, Turkey sought to
ensure that Kirkuk remained a part of federal Iraq, so as to deny the
Iraqi Kurds control over the region’s oil reserves. In this part of Iraq,
the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the political party tied to
the Talabani family, is the dominant actor. The PUK has friendlier
ties with the PKK and its offshoots then the KDP, which is overtly
hostile to the group. In the earlier part of this decade, Ankara’s
view was that if either the KDP or the PUK gained control over
oil, either party could use the revenue to underpin an independent
Kurdish state.110 By 2007, Ankara’s policy had shifted, and Turkey
sought to take advantage the infighting inside Iraq to bolster the
KDP, make money from the oil trade, and to win security-related
concession from the Barzani family. The sale of Iraqi oil requires
that the revenue collected be deposited in the centrally controlled
Development Fund, which then disperses 17 percent of the revenue
to the Kurdistan region, while keeping 83 percent for the rest of
Iraq.111
Ankara’s eventual embrace of Kurdish oil exports stemmed, in part,
from the actions of the American oil and gas giant Exxon. In late

77
2012, Exxon negotiated directly with the KRG for the purchase of
six blocks. This move bypassed the Iraqi central government and de
facto endorsed the Kurdish interpretation of Iraqi law. Following
this agreement, Ankara established the Turkish Energy Company
(TEC), which purchased 20 percent equity in the project. To
facilitate payment for this oil, Ankara proposed that any oil shipped
via Turkey would be to collect monies in a Turkish controlled escrow
account.112 This arrangement would have, in theory, allowed for the
KRG to access oil revenue without it being allocated from the Iraqi
central government. For years, Baghdad and Erbil have disagreed
over the allocation of Erbil’s 17 percent of oil revenues.

The oil disagreement reinforced broader perceptions about Turkey in

Iraq. Ankara’s support for the Nujaifi brothers and elements of Iraq’s
Sunni political movement that had called for an ethnic enclave,
based on the Kurdish model. Thus, for Iraq’s governing plurality,
Ankara had emerged as an irritating foreign agent, supportive of
the de facto break up of the state. This feeling about Turkey was
exacerbated during the war against the Islamic State. The Turkish
government was adamantly opposed to the American-led war effort
because of the reliance on the Syrian Kurds. Turkey emerged as the
main transit point for foreign fighters, indirectly supporting the
group, even as the Iraqi state battled it from street to street.

In the wake of the war against the Islamic State, Ankara has had
success in recalibrating its relationship with Baghdad. Turkey stood
resolutely against the Kurdish effort to declare autonomy, which
ended in disaster for the Iraqi Kurds.113 The Iraqi military, with
supporting from Iran, marched on Kirkuk and took back oil-rich

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territory that the Kurds had gained control over following the war
against the Islamic State. The area remains contested114, but the
issue has become a less acute irritant in the bilateral relationship,
despite continued disagreement between the Iraqi Kurds and the
central government over the oil law and the export of oil pumped
in the Kurdish-controlled region.115 Ankara has managed to silo its
relationship with Baghdad, shunting the oil disagreement to the side,
and focusing on the counter-terrorism aspect of the relationship.
However, during times of tension, Iraqi militias with links to Iran
have attacked Kurdish oil infrastructure and a Turkish base near the
city of Mosul with crude rockets.116

Saudi Arabia

Ankara’s regional rapprochement has proven most successful

with the Gulf monarchies of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates. Both of these countries proved happy to deal with
Erdoğan on remarkably transactional terms. Aided by their ability
to offer concrete financial support to his beleaguered regime, they
appear to have seized on an opportunity to secure foreign policy
concessions on the cheap. Yet what this success amounts to has been
highly contested, even within Turkey’s tightly constrained domestic
political sphere.

When Mohammed bin Salman visited Ankara in June 2022, two

images captured the contested nature of the occasion.117 The first,
released by Turkish government media, showed Erdoğan posing
formally with the de facto Saudi leader. The second, preferred by pro-
Saudi outlets, showed bin Salman grinning enthusiastically next to a

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downcast Erdoğan. (Turkish sources subsequently claimed Erdoğan
was “not fully ready for the picture.”) While clearly representing
some clever public relations for the Saudi side, this second image of
the meeting reflected a perspective that gained widespread currency.
Like their Egyptian counterparts, Saudi analysts were eager to
portray the visit itself as a concession from Ankara. The Turkish
opposition also sought to depict the visit as proof of Erdoğan’s
failure to defend Turkish prestige on the global stage.

Indeed, lending credence to the view that the visit represented a

defeat for Erdoğan was the fact that it followed closely on the heels of
Ankara’s decision to transfer the trial, in abstentia, of Jamal Kashoggi’s
accused murderers to a Saudi court. In 2018, Ankara launched an
initially-promising campaign to hold bin Salman accountable for
the killing in the Saudi consulate. While many observers suggested
Erdoğan’s outrage was slightly hypocritical on account of his own
penchant for jailing dissidents, the blatant and brutal nature of the
crime clearly generated real outrage, compounded by the fact that
it seemed to be an assault on Turkish sovereignty as well. Erdoğan
played his cards carefully, trying to bring other international actors
on board and stopping short of formally accusing bin Salman
himself. Yet as time passed it became increasingly clear that the
world’s outrage was not going to be matched by meaningful action,
and Ankara became isolated in its campaign for accountability.
Notably, on the eve of bin Salman’s visit to Turkey, President Joe
Biden was preparing for a visit to Saudi Arabia, which appeared to
mark a decisive end to Ankara’s search for support.

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Speculation also swirled over what exactly Turkey had received in
return for dropping the Kashoggi case. With the Turkish economy
reeling and Erdoğan, who remains deeply resistant to seeking
help from Western financial institutions, facing reelection, many
assumed he was looking for financial support from Riyadh. And yet
in the initial aftermath of the visit, there was little evidence that
Saudi Arabia was prepared to open up its coffers to help Erdoğan’s
reelection bid, even to an extent far less than Turkey would require.
Beyond this, Turkish media raised the eternal hope of selling
drones to Riyadh, although again the possibility remained distinctly
abstract. Against the backdrop of deepening ties, diplomatic as
well as military, between Saudi Arabia and Greece, Ankara also
sought to try to peel Riyadh away from Athens. Bin Salman initially
suggested that he would visit Greece on his way to Turkey, although
he subsequently abandoned this plan. In the aftermath of the visit
there does not appear to have been any major change in the tempo
of Saudi-Greek ties.

To date, Turkey’s rapprochement with Saudi Arabia has proved

even less significant than its much-hyped rapprochement with the
Untied Aram Emirates. Between the summer of 2021 and the winter
of 2022, diplomatic developments between the Ankara and Abu
Dhabi moved quickly. In August, Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan—
the crown prince’s brother and national security advisor, made an
unannounced visit to Ankara to meet with Erdoğan. Several weeks
later, Erdoğan spoke by phone with the crown prince himself, and
the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority expressed its interest in
substantial investments in Turkey. Then, in November, Crown Prince
Mohammed bin Zayed arrived in Ankara. Erdoğan subsequently

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announced that the visit “went really well” and took place in a
“family-like” atmosphere. He announced that “the agreement we
signed is a step to begin a new era in Turkey and UAE relations. God
willing, I will make a return visit to the UAE in February.” Amidst
the signing of a host of bilateral agreements spanning everything
from ports to petrochemicals, the United Arab Emirates announced
it was prepared to invest $10 billion in Turkey. Turkish officials
also reported that they were seeking a $5 billion swap agreement
to boost the Central Bank’s foreign currency reserves in the face
of a rapidly weakening lira. Many people also speculated that the
United Arab Emirates would extradite mob boss turned Erdoğan
critic Sedat Peker, who moved to Dubai after fleeing Turkey. And
yet even with the United Arab Emirates, rapprochement did not live
up to Turkish hopes. Over the ensuing year, the promised Emirati
investment did not materialize. Peker remained silent for a number
of months, then re-emerged in dramatic fashion posting a secretly-
taped pornographic video of an AKP linked media figure with two
other men.

At the same time, Erdoğan’s efforts may have proved useful when
taken on more modest terms. If nothing else, Ankara’s efforts at
regional outreach have checked the downward spiral that seemed
set to unite all of Turkey’s neighbors in a hostile alliance against it.
Preventing the intensification of this dynamic, even if it involved
making concessions on a number of fronts, may well enable Erdoğan
to live to fight another day. Yet this in itself is unlikely to radically
shift the geopolitical dynamics in the region. Barring other seismic
changes, suspicions appear too well-entrenched to be overcome
during the course of a few high-profile visits. Even if Erdoğan

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 Chapter 4:

US Response
and Recommendations

eventually comes in from the cold, relations with his estranged

neighbors are still more likely to heat up than get warm.

E rdoğan has access to a lot of large airplanes. In May 2017,

Erdoğan and his entourage were flying from Beijing to Washington
for a meeting with President Donald Trump. For policymakers in
Washington, the meeting was intended to reassure Erdoğan that
the American support for the Syrian Kurds was “temporary and
tactical,” and that Ankara was the United States’ true ally in NATO.
For Ankara, the meeting was framed much differently: Erdoğan, the
pro-AKP press argued, was pursuing Turkey’s new foreign policy, and
seeking to work with all world powers to advance Turkish interests
in a multi-polar world. The divergence in framing underscores how
the United States and Turkey each have different views about the
future of international politics and each country’s role in the world.
For Washington, the 2017 visit was designed to charm the Turkish
leader, while at the same time explain why the United States was
pushing ahead with a war plan in Syria that Ankara vehemently
opposed and promised to resist. For Ankara, the visit was intended
to reinforce Erdoğan’s emergence as a global leader, enmeshed with
the large powers, and committed to expanding Turkey’s role in the
world.

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The meeting was, at the end of the trip, overshadowed by a fight that
Erdoğan’s security detail started with a small number of protestors
outside the Turkish ambassador to the United States’ residence in
Washington’s diplomatic neighborhood. The fight reinforced the
image of Turkey's authoritarian turn in Congress, the co-equal
branch of government that has considerable influence on elements
of the US-Turkish relationship. The Turkish government has since
initiated a series of interlinked policies designed to expand its
military influence in its near abroad, while giving less consideration
to how these policy choices will impact relations with the United
States. Erdoğan and his narrow group of advisors view Turkey as
an ascendant power operating with altruistic intentions to shape its
near abroad to enhance Turkish interests. In Syria, Ankara argues,
American policy was predictive of calamity and that the catastrophe
was magnified by the West choosing not to acquiesce to Erdoğan’s
vision for opposition governance and western military intervention.
In Iraq, Ankara touts its “predictions” about the future of the country
in 2003 and 2005, and blames Washington for the sectarian strife
that has beset the country. In the Eastern Mediterranean, Ankara’s
policies toward maritime boundaries are consistent with the pre-
AKP government’s resistance to UN Convention on the Law of the
Sea and Greece’s territorial claims on islands near the Turkish coast.
However, Ankara’s irredentism has grown following the discovery of
hydrocarbons in Cypriot territorial waters and the rejection of the
Annan plan in 2004.

The Turkish government has also succumbed to paranoia about and

hostility to the West, which has allowed for Turkish partisans to
elevate long-standing ideas about how Ankara should distance itself

84
from the United States and Europe and carve out an independent
foreign policy. Ankara’s decision-making, however, remain puzzling
for many observers, who refuse to grapple with how Turkish foreign
policy has changed over the past decade. The debate about Turkish
foreign policy is prone to hyperbole and extreme polarization
between analysts that advocate abandoning US foreign policy
interests in Syria in favor of closer ties with Erdoğan and others
that advocate for a complete break in relations. The reality, of course,
is more nuanced. However, on the Turkish side, Ankara’s decision-
making process treats the United States as a de facto hostile power,
and therefore seeks to pursue policies that balance Turkish interests
in retaining favorable ties with NATO and deep-seated concerns
that Washington is committed to toppling the Erdoğan government.

The AKP has not always been overtly hostile to the United States.
In the early years of Erdoğan’s rule, he was deferential to the United
States, largely because the bureaucracy was predisposed to cooperate
and weigh heavily American opinions when making decisions about
Turkish foreign policy. As Erdoğan consolidated his control over the
Turkish government, particularly following the failed July 2016 coup
attempt, the AKP has little incentive to cooperate closely with the
United States. These events roughly coincided with the severe break
in US-Turkish relations, following Washington’s highly contingent
decision to support the Syrian Kurds in the war against Islamic State.

The downturn in US-Turkish relations does not have a single cause.

It is, instead, a culmination of a series of factors that have contributed
to an erosion of trust. In Washington, the erosion began in 2003, after
Ankara refused to allow the United States to invade Iraq from its

85
territory. This tension continued, coming up again when the United
States struggled to gain access to Turkish bases for the war against
Islamic State. The root cause of this dysfunction, of course, is that as
the Middle East became the main focal point of American security
policy, Ankara simply had divergent interests than its historic ally.
For Ankara, the invasion of Iraq upended Turkish security concerns.
The turmoil in Iraq has had a negative impact on Turkish security
and undermined elements of its economy. Ankara believes that this
turmoil, ultimately, led to the creation of Islamic State—and that, as
an outcome, Washington then partnered with the PKK to combat
ISIS. Thus, to repair relations, Ankara argues, Washington must first
acknowledge its security concerns, make amends, and then throw its
weight behind Turkey’s vision for the region.

The problem, of course, is that as the AKP solidified its power,

Erdoğan and his allies have adopted an irredentist vision for the
broader region. The Arab uprisings empowered Turkish Islamists,
committed to the idea that change would oust the West from
the region, and lead to a broader expansion of Turkish interests.
However, the backlash against the Islamists and the push-back from
countries like Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, decreased
regional enthusiasm for a more pronounced Turkish role. Instead,
Ankara and Doha quarreled with Abu Dhabi and Riyadh, which
then spilled over into a series of proxy fights ranging from Iraq to
Libya. In response, Turkey’s image began to shift, and Ankara began
to meddle relentlessly in regional politics. As part of this, Turkey’s
role as a large, relatively benevolent power has shifted. Ankara is
now viewed by its adversaries and partners are erratic, and prone to
radical swings in its foreign policy.

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This change in perception has led regional states to hedge against
Turkey, with each taking different approaches. For weaker countries
like Iraq, the options to manage Ankara are limited. However, at
the margins, Iranian-allied groups have resorted to non-state
actor attacks against Turkish facilities and interests. After years of
animosity, oil rich states in the Gulf have seized on Turkish economic
weakness to use selective dollar investments to buy “turmoil-free”
periods in their bilateral relations. In the Eastern Mediterranean,
however, tensions have spiked. This is because, rather than buy-off
Erdoğan with petro-dollars, or use non-state actors to ratchet up
the pressure when needed, Athens has sought to bandwagon with
more powerful actors. This bandwagoning has led to deeper ties
with the United States, precisely at the time when Turkish relations
with Washington have cratered. The outcome is that Greece is now
receiving more favorable treatment when purchasing weapons,
which perpetuates Turkish anxiety about falling behind their historic
rivals’ military modernization. The result has been more provocative
Turkish signaling, which has only led to an intensification of Greece’s
response. Athens, truly believing that it is under threat, has been
more inclined to bandwagon, and to purchase more weapons from
Washington. The result has been a classic arms race, wherein each
side is seeking to gain advantage over the other.

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Recommendations

Turkish foreign policy will continue to vex Washington

for the foreseeable future, but with measured policies and
conscientious alliance management policymakers can minimize
the disruption that Ankara causes to broader US interests
in the region. To do this, we offer three recommendations:

Don’t reflexively seek to improve relations with Turkey or make

engagement with Ankara a goal for its own sake. Rather, identify
where Turkey fits in the scheme of US regional interests and
prioritize securing the specific forms of cooperation that advance
broader American goals. To date, the Biden administration has
done this effectively, and likely secured the best possible results.

Work with Washington’s regional partners to help them push

back against Turkey’s provocative behavior while also minimizing,
to the extent possible, the deepening of mutual hostility. This will
require a delicate balancing act, but one that will be facilitated by
the existing preferences of Washington’s partners. Countries in
the region have already demonstrated a desire to work together
to counter the threat that they perceive from Turkey’s revisionist
policies, while also seizing opportunities to de-escalate tensions
when Ankara is amenable. By supporting both of these impulses,
Washington can help contain the short-term threat posed by
Turkish revisionism while maintaining the prospect of returning
to a more cooperative relationship with Ankara in the future.

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Ultimately, achieving these goals would benefit from Washington
developing a more proactive vision for the regional order it hopes
to achieve, as well as Turkey’s place in it. Following the collapse
of several previous iterations, policymakers need a positive but
realistic vision for a regional architecture that can accommodate the
conflicting interests of all its partners in Eastern Mediterranean and
Middle East.

1. Don’t reflexively seek to improve relations with Turkey or

make engagement with Ankara a goal for its own sake

Washington has often sought cooperation with Turkey as a goal

in and of itself, presenting opportunities to work with Ankara as
a chance to improve bilateral relations. Yet approached in these
terms, such efforts have often proved counter-productive. They
provide fuel to those in Ankara who exaggerate the extent to which
America needs Turkey and they offer Ankara leverage which it has
consistently sought to use in pursuit of its own interests. Moreover,
the proposals often fail to deliver on their promise, particularly when
the two countries’ broader agendas do not overlap.

Most recently, as the Biden administration was preparing to

withdraw US forces from Afghanistan there were hopes that
Ankara could leverage its relations with the Taliban to manage the
Kabul airport in America’s absence. The proposal was presented as
securing practical benefits, but also as an olive branch to Turkey,
demonstrating the potential for constructive engagement between
two estranged allies. But it quickly foundered. The Taliban proved
hostile to the idea of having Turkish forces stay in the country while

89
Turkey was (understandably) wary of the risks that doing so would
entail. Moreover, Turkish officials seized on Washington’s interest
in cooperation to renew their request to resolve the S-400 crisis
on Turkey’s terms by waiving US sanctions. Qatar soon emerged
as a more suitable intermediary with the Taliban, playing the role
envisioned for Ankara more effectively and with fewer problematic
demands.

Among other experiences, this failed initiative seems to have

confirmed the Biden administration’s commitment to a strategy
it has had considerable success with: playing it cool. From the
outset, the president has made a point of keeping his distance from
Erdoğan, engaging with him only to the extent it appears necessary
to advance other more pressing interests. In this vein, Biden has
resisted Erdoğan’s requests for high profile bilateral meetings. He
delayed calling him for four months after his inauguration and
has limited their personal interactions to brief conversations in
multilateral forums. On sensitive issues like the S-400s, he has not
reached out to Ankara in search of a solution, but has simply left the
ball in Erdoğan’s court while continuing to enforce the Countering
America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act.

Perhaps the highest stakes example of this approach came in response

to Turkey’s threats to block Sweden and Finland’s application for
NATO membership. Rather than rushing to engage with Ankara
over the impasse or setting Washington up as an intermediary, the
administration worked quietly behind the scenes. Ankara was left
to deal directly with Stockholm and Helsinki alongside NATO
Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. Only at the last minute did

90
Washington step in. Biden ultimately met with Erdoğan to secure
a compromise at the June 2022 NATO summit, offering him an
ambiguous degree of support in trying to secure Congressional
approval of Turkey’s bid to buy and upgrade F-16 aircraft.

Advocates of greater engagement with Ankara have long touted

the many ways Turkey is advancing US interests, whether by
selling drones to Ukraine, mediating between Ukraine and Russia,
or confronting Russia on battlefields ranging from Libya to Syria
to Nagorno-Karabagh. And yet Biden’s policy over the past two
years has revealed an important fact about these efforts: Ankara
does them to advance its own interests, and will continue to do
them even without engagement from Washington. Indeed, pro-
government policymakers in Ankara have repeatedly emphasized
this facet of Turkey’s new independent foreign policy. From the
Sahel to the Caucasus, Turkey has picked battles that it believes it
will benefit from, and, likewise, it has negotiated with Moscow on
these fronts when it thinks it will benefit as well. In response to the
invasion of Ukraine, Ankara has profited from selling drones and
from refusing to participate in Western sanctions on Moscow. To
the extent Turkey’s interests have coincided with Washington, it is
championing them of its own accord and does not need additional
inducement to do so.

With this in mind, Washington should seek to cooperate with

Ankara where it perceives a direct benefit from doing so, not in search
of elusive bilateral benefits. When interests do align, for example
in counter-terrorism or providing military aid to Ukraine, working
with Turkey to make existing Turkish efforts more effective can have

91
payoffs. Meanwhile, Washington should reserve its blandishments
for circumstances like Nordic NATO accession where cooperation
is needed to secure bigger interests in short order.

2. Work with Washington’s regional partners to help them

push back against Turkey’s provocative behavior while also
minimizing, to the extent possible, the deepening of mutual
hostility.

Much as Turkey has pursued its own interests of its own accord,
Washington’s regional partners have pursued their own efforts to
cooperate against Turkish provocations while also assuaging tensions
where possible. The challenge for Washington is to support both
facets of this approach as constructively as possible.

Striking the right balance will require different steps for different
countries.

Greece

Washington should continue current efforts to improve ties with

Athens, and take advantage of the concrete benefits this provides
in regard to basing access. As ties with Turkey have deteriorated,
Washington’s relationship with Greece has helped make Washington
less dependent on Turkey. Having expanded air and naval facilities
is valuable in this regard, while developing port facilities in
Alexandropoulos makes Washington less reliant on transit through
the Bosporus. Decreasing Turkish leverage can ultimately help ease
tensions in the US-Turkish relationship by reducing future points of

92
disagreement.

Turkey has interpreted these steps as evidence of a hostile alignment

against Turkey, and suggested that they have made Greece less
willing to negotiate in good faith on bilateral issues. Unfortunately,
the assumption of hostility will be hard to defuse, even were
Washington to dramatically curtail military cooperation with Greece.
This suspicion is deeply embedded in Turkish political thinking and
fueled by a number of other factors. While Washington should do
its best to reassure Ankara and provide transparency about its basing
in Greece, the risk of further alienating Turkey should not prevent
deepening the relationship.

Similarly, given the aggressive stance Ankara has taken through

measures like the Libya Memorandum of Understanding, there
is little likelihood of both sides reaching an agreement on any of
their outstanding issues through good faith negotiations at present.
Were such an opportunity to occur in the future, Washington should
certainly use all leverage at its disposal to take advantage of it. But
even if US-Greek relations continue to develop on their current
trajectory, there is little reason to think that it will pose an obstacle
to Washington playing this role. The balance of power in the region
will continue to favor Turkey and the United States will continue
to have an interest in maintaining its ties with Ankara, meaning
Washington is unlikely to ever throw its lot entirely in with Greece.

Until then, the most pressing challenge for the United States is
to avoid the small but real risk of a direct confrontation between
Turkish and Greek forces. Despite the mistrust from Ankara,

93
Washington still remains the necessary mediator in defusing any
future crises. By demonstrating solidarity with Athens, the United
States and the European Union can help minimize the risk of Turkey
directly provoking a confrontation while simultaneously gaining
greater leverage and credibility to urge restraint from Greece if a
confrontation does occur.

Cyprus

Washington will also face a considerable challenge preventing the

political impasse on the island of Cyprus from deepening, but it
will require a different approach. Here, the risk is that if the United
States throws its support unconditionally behind the Republic of
Cyprus, it will ultimately render a solution to the island’s division
impossible, creating serious long term challenges to stability in
the Eastern Mediterranean. Rather than embrace the status quo,
Washington should promote confidence building measures that ease
the isolation of northern Cyprus and help check Ankara’s tightening
grip on the territory.

In their response to both the Annan Plan and the Crans-Montana

negotiations, Greek Cypriot leaders revealed their belief that
maintaining the division of the island in its current form was
preferable to the political risks of reuniting it in a bizonal, bicommunal
federation. Moreover, many hoped that the continued isolation
of the north would ultimately enable them to eventually achieve
reunification on better terms. US support for the Republic of Cyprus
has the potential to confirm this belief even as developments on the
island move in the opposite direction. In this context, modest efforts

94
to engage with the northern Cypriot administration represent not a
concession to Turkey but a necessary step to change these dynamics
and maintain the prospect of a future agreement.

While many aspects of northern Cypriot isolation reflect EU

regulations and legal concerns that are beyond the scope of American
policy, Washington has a number of options for increasing contact
with officials on the north that it should be prepared to deploy in
order to pressure both sides to negotiate at least modest confidence
building measures. In addition to supporting moves that would ease
travel across the Green Line, Washington should push for the Greek
side to facilitate Turkish Cypriot exports, and for the Turkish side to
freeze any further steps to change the status of Varosha. Modulating
the degree and profile of US contact with Turkish Cypriot officials
can serve as an incentive and disincentive for both sides in pursuit
of these efforts.

At the same time, Washington should work with the European

Union to make it clear that any actions on Ankara’s part to
unilaterally change the status of the Turkish Republic of Northern
Cyprus, most dramatically in the case of annexation, will be met
with a firm and coordinated response. Until the conditions on the
island and in Ankara are conducive to a resolution, the United States
should do everything in its power to make sure they do not worsen.

The alternative is a situation where the island’s division becomes

permanent and serves as an ongoing and insurmountable obstacle to
Greek-Turkish, American-Turkish, and European-Turkish relations
well into the future. The United States and the European Union,

95
not to mention Greece and the Republic of Cyprus, will never
recognize the annexation or independence of the north. But if
Ankara concludes unification is impossible, and the north remains in
political and economic limbo, even future pro-Western governments
will be tempted to take more aggressive unilateral steps to alter the
status quo.

Israel and the Arab World

More broadly, Washington should promote closer relations among

its regional partners, while working to resolve the issues that will
leave them permanently at odds with Ankara.

In the case of Egypt, this means supporting a peaceful resolution

of Libya’s civil war. While the United States and the European
Union have limited leverage in this conflict, and ample interest in
supporting a resolution for other reasons, any steps they can take
to forge a peaceful settlement will pay dividends in stabilizing the
region. With both Ankara and Cairo positively inclined toward a
political settlement, Western powers should take an active role in
supporting the complex negotiations between rival Libyan factions.
The focus should be on securing a workable power sharing agreement
among Libyan actors on the ground, recognizing that this will likely
require abandoning Cairo’s hopes for a complete withdrawal of
Turkish forces, as well as Ankara’s hopes for an official ratification of
the 2021 Turkish-Libyan agreement.

Recognizing that a quick peace settlement in Libya may not be in

the cards, Washington should continue to quietly support Turkish-

96
Egyptian rapprochement alongside improved relations between
Egypt and Greece and Cyprus. These two goals do not have to be
mutually irreconcilable. Cairo and Ankara are unlikely to ever move
beyond a cold peace so long as Erdoğan and Sisi are in power, but
they can still take steps to normalize their relations. In the meantime,
Israeli-Cypriot-Egyptian cooperation remains the best option
for exporting Eastern Mediterranean gas to Europe, and all three
countries should be encouraged to pursue the most economically
and politically feasible means for doing so.

Israel, for its part, has already shown a willingness to both court and
balance Turkey. Washington has taken an active role in supporting
Jerusalem’s improved ties with Athens and Nicosia and should
continue these efforts. It can also, as it has in the past, support
Israeli-Turkish rapprochement, while recognizing the limits of this
process. Even if a new government comes to power in Turkey it will
take a long time for the trust that marked the previous Turkish-
Israeli relationship to be repaired, even if certain constructive forms
of intelligence and security cooperation can be restored. Finally, all
sides should acknowledge that as long as Israel’s relationship with
the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank remains violent and
unresolved, relations with Turkey will remain tempestuous.

3. Develop a more proactive vision for the regional order it

hopes to achieve, as well as Turkey’s place in it.

As the history of the past century makes clear, any successful policy
for managing US-Turkish relations and Turkey’s relations with
its neighbors must ultimately take into account the deepening

97
divergence of geopolitical perspectives between Washington and its
partners on one hand and Turkey on the other.

Throughout the Cold War, the US-Turkish alliance was solidified

by a shared threat perception focused on the Soviet Union and a
corresponding commitment to stopping the spread of potential
Soviet influence in the Middle East. This helped overcome strategic
disagreements where they did occur, and also helped consolidate
Turkey’s relations with other pro-Western status quo states in
the region (while also, of course, antagonizing a number of other
countries). During the 1990s and early 2000s, a shared commitment
to preserving stability in the broader region, demonstrated by Turkish
deployments to the Balkans and Afghanistan, helped anchor the
alliance following the collapse of the Soviet Union. When the AKP
first sought to exploit the greater opportunities for engagement
presented to Turkey in the post-Cold War Balkans and Middle
East, these efforts largely corresponded with American and EU
ambitions. In an era of liberal optimism, Turkey initially appeared
as an actor that could promote economic and political integration
in fractured and unstable region. Amidst enthusiasm about Turkey’s
EU accession, many expected Ankara could help spread Western
values and institutions eastward, with benefits for Turkey and the
West. Even at the outset of the Arab Spring, when Turkey adopted
a more explicitly Islamism approach to its foreign policy, this still
appeared complementary with the spread of democracy and free
markets throughout the region.

In the last five to ten years, however, Turkish and American visions
have become increasingly irreconcilable. Where many Turkish

98
policymakers once saw their aspirations for greater regional
influence and prestige as being broadly compatible with maintaining
strong ties with the West, they now see these as being in conflict,
and believe the West is committed to thwarting their ambitions.
This suspicion has also infected Turkey’s approach toward America’s
partners in the region.

It is unlikely that Washington and Ankara will ever again share the
same alignment in geopolitical visions they did during the Cold
War. And they will likely continue to work at cross purposes so
long as the current regime remains in power in Ankara. Eventually,
though, there may be an opportunity to try to better align US and
Turkish interests in way that also helps reconcile Turkey’s regional
ambitions with those of its neighbors. The unification of Cyprus
would greatly facilitate this, both by removing an enduring obstacle
to improved Turkish-Greek ties but also by opening the way for
Turkey to participate in the emerging Eastern Mediterranean
energy infrastructure. In Syria, either the fall of the Assad regime,
or, much more likely, its regional reintegration, would potentially
help demilitarize Turkish foreign policy and leave it better able
to cooperate with many of its Middle Eastern neighbors. The
emergence of democratic governments in Egypt and Saudi Arabia,
however unlikely that looks at the moment, would also dramatically
improve these countries relations with Turkey. In the long term, the
recovery of the Turkish economy will also help the country again
pursue a prominent regional role based on mutually-beneficial trade
rather than military adventurism.

99
In the meantime, US policymakers should be clear-eyed about
their differences with Turkey, supporting partners in pushing back
against Turkish provocations while supporting efforts to manage the
resulting tensions.

100
Endnotes

1 For the traditional account, see William Hale, Turkish Foreign Policy Since 1774
(New York: Routledge, 2013). More recently, Amit Bein has complicated this
narrative but still upheld its key points in Kemalist Turkey and the Middle East:
International Relations in the Interwar Period (London: Cambridge University
Press, 2017).

2 Similarly, George McGhee’s The US-Turkish-NATO Middle East Connection:

How the Truman Doctrine Contained the Soviets in the Middle East (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1990), offers a comprehensive overview of this subject, while Onur
İşci’s Turkey and the Soviet Union during WWII: Diplomacy, Discord and Inter-
national Relations (London: I. B. Tauris, 2019) questions the chronology while
further emphasizing the importance of Turkey’s evolving threat perception.

3 Sarah Shields, “Mosul, the Ottoman Legacy, and the League of Nations,” Inter-
national Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 3 (2009): 217-230.

4 “Question of the Frontier Between Turkey and Iraq,” League of Nations, C.

400. M. 147. 1925. VII. League of Nations enthusiasts can find the full text of the
body’s 1925 report on the Mosul Dispute online at: https://t.co/ZUNf7OEnR5

5 Sarah Shields, Fezzes in the River: Identity Politics and European Diplomacy in the
Middle East on the Eve of World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
On Atatürk’s guerilla campaign in Hatay see also Tayfur Sökmen, Hatay’ın Kurtu-
luşu İçin Harcanan Çabalar (Yeni Gün Haber Ajansı, 1999).

6 William Hale, Turkish Foreign Policy Since 1774 (New York: Routledge, 2013).

7 Michael Provence, The Last Ottoman Generation and the Making of the Modern
Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

8 George McGhee, George C. McGhee, The US-Turkish-NATO Middle East

Connection: How the Truman Doctrine Contained the Soviets in the Middle East
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990).

9 Philip Robins, Turkey and the Middle East (London: Pinter Publishers, 1991).

10 Ekavi Athanassopoulou, Turkey, Anglo-American Security Interests 1945-1952:

The First Enlargement of NATO (London: Frank Cass, 1999).

11 Onur İşçi and Barın Kayaoğlu, "Turkey and America: 1957 All Over Again?"
National Interest, April 10, 2014.

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12 Nicholas Danforth, The Remaking of Republican Turkey: Memory and Mo-
dernity since the Fall of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University,
2021).

13 Danforth, Ibid.

14 Danforth, Ibid

15 Danforth, Ibid.

16 Hale, Turkish Foreign Policy Since 1774

17 Hale, Ibid.

18 Ofra Bengio, The Turkish-Israeli Relationship Changing Ties of Middle Eastern

Outsiders (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

19 William Hale, Turkey, the US and Iraq (London: Saqi, 2007).

20 Tim Weiner, “US Helped Turkey Find and Capture Kurd Rebel,” New York
Times, February 20, 1999.

21 Aaron Stein, Turkey's New Foreign Policy: Davutoğlu, the AKP and the Pursuit of
Regional Order (New York: Routledge, 2015).

22 Nora Fisher-Onar, “Neo Ottomanism, Historical Legacies, and Turkish For-

eign Policy,” Center for Economic and Foreign Policy Studies (EDAM), Discus-
sion Paper Series, March 2009.

23 At an appearance in Washington in 2009, for example, Davutoğlu was asked

a hostile question about Turkey’s violation of Greek airspace. He responded by
saying that the question was not whether the Aegean should be a Greek sea or a
Turkish sea, but how it could become a sea of peace. As empty as the answer was,
it succeeded in giving the impression that Turkey had transcended the retrograde
Balkan nationalism in which the questioner, like previous generations of Turkish
diplomats, was stuck.

24 Ironically, within Turkey, many of the AKP’s most outspoken secular oppo-
nents were convinced that Washington was supporting the party as part of a
neoconservative/Zionist “Greater Middle East Project” that sought to use Turkey
as a moderate Muslim model to remake the region.

25 Süleyman Demirel and Nigar Göksel, “Turkey and Democratization in the

Middle East,” Turkish Policy Quarterly 4, No. 2 (Summer 2005).

26 Eric Lipton, “US Indicts Turkish Bank on Charges of Evading Iran Sanctions,”
New York Times, October 15, 2019

102
27 Soner Cagaptay, “Secularism and Foreign Policy in Turkey”, Washington Insti-
tute for Near-East Policy, Policy Focus #67, April 2007.

28 Dan Bilefsky. “Turkey and Europe: Why Strained Friendship is Fraying,” New
York Times, November 8, 2006.

29 Chantal Da Silva, “Turkey will crush US ‘Terror Army’ in Northern Syria,

President Erdoğan Vows,” Newsweek, January 15, 2018.

30 Henri Barkey, “Erdoğan’s Foreign Policy is in Ruins,” Foreign Policy, February

4, 2016.

31 Ayla Yackley, “Turkey Opposes Any NATO Operation in Libya,” Reuters,

March 14, 2011.

32 “Syria Unrest: Turkey presses Assad to end crackdown,” BBC News, August 9,
2011.

33 Aaron Stein, Turkey's New Foreign Policy .

34 Dan Roberts, “US in bind over Egypt after supporting Morsi but encouraging
protestors,” The Guardian, July 8, 2019.

35 Peter Baker, “A Coup? Or Something Else? $1.5 Billion in US Aid is On the

Line,” New York Times, July 4, 2013.

36 “Turkey’s AKP adopts Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘Rabia’ sign in its bylaws,” Birgun
Daily, May 20, 2017.

37 “Turkish PM: US Elections Hampering Syria Action,” CNN Daily, September

5, 2012.

38 Aaron Stein, “The Washington-Ankara Disconnect,” War on the Rocks, Novem-

ber 4, 2016.

39 Aaron Stein, “When it comes to Syria and the Kurds, Erdoğan will leave
Washington empty-handed,” War on the Rocks, May 16, 2017.

40 Corey Dickstein, “Pentagon won’t say if it will move US Troops as Turkish

offensive in Syria eyes Manbij,” Stripes, January 25, 2018.

41 Ari Khalidi. “Door not closed on Assad: Erdoğan to Syrian Kurds,” Kurdis-
tan24, November 4, 2017.

42 Menekse Tokyay, “Syria Peace Deal threatened as Turkey and Iran clash in
Idlib,” Arab News, February 27, 2018.

43 Omer Taspinar, “Between Kemalism and Neo-Ottomanism,” Carnegie En-

103
dowment for International Peace, 2008.

44 Karim Traboulsi, “Turkey’s ‘Neo-Ottomanism’ buoyed by Raqqa and Mosul

push,” The New Arab, October 18, 2016.

45 Svante Cornell, “Engulfed in the Gulf: Erdoğan and the Qatar Crisis,” The
Turkey Analyst, June 29, 2017.

46 Joost Hiltermann and Fantappie, Maria. “Twilight of the Kurds,” Foreign Policy,
January 16, 2018.

47 Blaise Misztal and Jessica Michek, “Is the US Finally ready to get tough on
Turkey?” Bipartisan Policy Center, Feburary 7, 2018.

48 Aaron Stein, “Ankara’s Look East: How Turkey’s warming ties with Russia
threaten its place in the transatlantic community,” War on the Rocks, December 27,
2017.

49 Boris Zilberman, “The S-400: Erdoğan’s Failsafe,” Foundation for the Defense
of Democracies, November 3, 2017.

50 John Halpin, Michael Werz, Alan Makovsky, and Max Hoffman, “Is Turkey
Experiencing a New Nationalism?” American Progress, February 11, 2018.

51 Nick Danforth, "A Short History of Turkish Threats to Invade Syria,” Foreign
Policy, July 31, 2015, https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/31/a-short-history-of-
turkish-threats-to-invade-syria-from-1937-to-1998/.

52 Miron Varouhakis, “Greek Intelligence and the Capture of PKK Leader

Abdullah Ocalan in 1999,” Studies in Intelligence 53, no. 1 (March 2009), https://
www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/volume-53-no-1/greek-intelli-
gence-and-the-capture-of-pkk-leader-abdullah-ocalan-in-1999/

53 Douglas Little, “The United States and the Kurds,” Journal of Cold War Studies
12, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 63–98.

54 The Defense Economic Cooperation Agreement — US Interests and Turkish

Needs, United States General Accounting Office, May 7, 1982, https://www.gao.
gov/assets/id-82-31.pdf.

55 Stacie L. Pettyjohn and Jennifer Kavanagh, Access Granted: Political Challenges

to the USUS Overseas Military Presence, 1945–2014 (Santa Monica: Rand, 2016),
available at: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1339.html.

56 Sam Cohen, “Turkey keeps a cautious, neutral eye on Iran-Iraq war,” Christian
Science Monitor, August 31, 1983, https://www.csmonitor.com/1983/0831/083149.
html.

104
57 “Official quits in Turkey over crisis,” The Washington Post, December 3, 1990,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1990/12/04/official-quits-in-
turkey-over-crisis/b796ccd9-12b6-4012-950f-d04c0c279dd5/.

58 Pettyjohn and Kavanagh, Access Granted, 115.

59 Douglas Frantz, “Turkey to Send Forces to Afghanistan,” The New York Times,
November 1, 2001, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/01/international/tur-
key-to-send-forces-to-afghanistan.html.

60 Jenny B. White, Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics

(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002).

61 Sam Faddis, The CIA War in Kurdistan: The Untold Story of the Northern Front in
the Iraq War (Philadelphia: Casemate, 2020).

62 Jon R. Andersen, “Supplies languish in Turkish port,” Stars and Stripes, March
3, 2003, https://www.stripes.com/news/supplies-languish-in-turkish-port-1.2525.

63 Dexter Filkins and Eric Schmitt, “Turkey Demands $32 Billion US Aid
Package if It Is to Take Part in a War on Iraq,” The New York Times, February 19,
2003, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/19/world/threats-responses-bargaining-
turkey-demands-32-billion-us-aid-package-if-it-take.html.

64 Richard Boudreaux and Amberin Zaman, “Turkey Rejects US Troop Deploy-

ment,” The Los Angeles Times, March 2, 2003, https://www.latimes.com/archives/
la-xpm-2003-mar-02-fg-iraq2-story.html.

65 Robert W. Jones Jr., "Getting there is Half the Battle: Operation Ugly Baby,”
Office of the Command Historian, ARSOF History, 2005, https://arsof-history.
org/articles/v1n1_op_ugly_baby_page_1.html; Andrew L., Mick Mulroy, and
Ken Too, "Irregular Warfare: A Case Study in CIA and US Army Special Forces
Operations in Northern Iraq, 2002-03,” Middle East Institute, August 12, 2021,
https://www.mei.edu/publications/irregular-warfare-case-study-cia-and-us-army-
special-forces-operations-northern-iraq.

66 Author Interview, US Special Operation Forces Member, June 8, 2017, Wash-

ington, D.C.

67 “Turkey opens airspace to USUS,” CNN, March 20, 2003, https://www.cnn.

com/2003/WORLD/europe/03/20/sprj.irq.turkey.vote/index.html.

68 James Dobbins, et. al, Occupying Iraq: A History of the Coalition Provincial
Authority (Santa Monica: Rand, 2009): 89–92, available at: https://www.rand.org/
content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2009/RAND_MG847.pdf.

69 Author Interview, US Special Operation Forces Member, June 8, 2017, Wash-

105
ington, D.C.

70 Dobbins, et. al, Occupying Iraq, 91.

71 Michael Howard and Suzanne Goldenberg, “US arrest of soldiers infuriates

Turkey,” The Guardian, July 7, 2003, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/
jul/08/turkey.michaelhoward.

72 Appointment of Special Envoy for Countering the PKK, United States

Department of State, August 30, 2006, https://2001-2009.state.gov/p/eur/rls/
rm/71664.htm.

73 Aaron Stein, Turkey's New Foreign Policy: Davutoglu, the AKP and the Pursuit of
Regional Order (London: Routledge, 2015), 2.

74 Ibid

75 Ibid

76 Interview with Ahmet Davutoglu, “Turkey’s Top Foreign Policy Aide Worries
about False Optimism in Iraq,” Council on Foreign Relations, September 22,
2008, https://www.cfr.org/interview/turkeys-top-foreign-policy-aide-worries-
about-false-optimism-iraq.

77 Burcu Ersekerci, “Turkey Gets USA and Sunnis of Iraq Together,” Journal of
Turkish Weekly, December 5, 2005; Ahmet Davutoglu, “Turkey’s Mediation: Criti-
cal Reflections from the Field,” Middle East Policy 20, no. 1, (Spring 2013), 84.

78 “Iraq’s al-Sadr visits Turkey,” Al Jazeera, May 2, 2009, https://www.aljazeera.

com/news/2009/5/2/iraqs-al-sadr-visits-turkey.

79 “Iraq and the Kurds: Trouble Along the Trigger Line”, Middle East Report No.
88, International Crisis Group, July 8, 2009.

80 Author Interview, Erbil-based journalist, June 2019.

81 Ned Parker, Isabel Coles, and Raheem Salman, "Special Report: How Mosul
fell - An Iraqi general disputes Baghdad's story,” Reuters, October 14, 2014,
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-gharawi-special-report/
special-report-how-mosul-fell-an-iraqi-general-disputes-baghdads-story-
idUSKCN0I30Z820141014.

82 Jennifer Heller and Maayan Lubell, “Netanyahu out, Bennett in as Is-

rael marks end of an era,” Reuters, June 13, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/
world/middle-east/israels-knesset-vote-new-government-end-netanyahus-re-
cord-reign-2021-06-13/.

106
83 Taha Ozhan, “The Arab Spring and Turkey: The Camp David Order vs. the
New Middle East,” Insight Turkey (Vol. 13, No. 4, Summer 2011), 55–64.

84 Amberin Zaman, “Hamas visits Turkey, prompting criticism,” The Baltimore

Sun, February 17, 2016, https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-2006-02-
17-0602170322-story.html.

85 Dan Bilefsky and Sebnem Arsu, “Sponsor of Flotilla Tied to Elite of Turkey,”
The New York Times, July 15, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/16/world/
middleeast/16turkey.html.

86 “Turkey suspends Israel defence ties over Gaza aid raid,” BBC News, Septem-
ber 6, 2011, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-14800305.

87 Tom Finn, “Turkey to set up Qatar military base to face 'common enemies’,”
Reuters, December 16, 2015, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-qatar-turkey-mil-
itary/turkey-to-set-up-qatar-military-base-to-face-common-enemies-idUSKB-
N0TZ17V20151216.

88 Ruth Michaelson, “Mohamed Morsi, ousted president of Egypt, dies in court,”

The Guardian, June 17, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/17/
mohamed-morsi-dead-ousted-president-egypt-collapses-after-court-session.

89 Patrick Werr, “UAE offers Egypt $3 billion support, Saudis $5 billion,” Reuters,
July 9, 2013, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-egypt-protests-loan/uae-offers-
egypt-3-billion-support-saudis-5-billion-idUSBRE9680H020130709.

90 “Turkey’s Erdoğan again declares Egypt’s Sisi ‘illegitimate’,” Hurriyet Daily

News, November 24, 2014, https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkeys-erdo-
gan-again-declares-egypts-sisi-illegitimate-74730.

91 “Rabia sign now a global sign of saying no to injustice: PM Erdogan,” Anadolu

Agency, https://www.aa.com.tr/en/archive/rabia-sign-now-a-global-sign-of-say-
ing-no-to-injustice-pm-erdogan/206982.

92 “Qatar crisis: What you need to know,” BBC News, July 19, 2017, https://www.
bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-40173757.

93 Martin Chulov, “Erdoğan rejects Saudi demand to pull Turkish troops out of
Qatar,” The Guardian, June 25, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/
jun/25/erdogan-rejects-saudi-demand-to-pull-turkish-troops-out-of-qatar.

94 Shane Harris, Greg Miller, and Josh Dawsey, "CIA concludes Saudi crown
prince ordered Jamal Khashoggi’s assassination,” The Washington Post, No-
vember 16, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/
cia-concludes-saudi-crown-prince-ordered-jamal-khashoggis-assassina-
tion/2018/11/16/98c89fe6-e9b2-11e8-a939-9469f1166f9d_story.html.

107
95 “Boycott-hit Turkish exports to Saudi Arabia drop 92% in January,” Daily
Sabah, February 4, 2021, https://www.dailysabah.com/business/economy/boycott-
hit-turkish-exports-to-saudi-arabia-drop-92-in-january.

96 Onur Ant, “The Age of Erdoganomics Has Come,” Bloomberg, December 18,
2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-18/the-age-of-erdoga-
nomics-has-come.

97 Ece Toksabay and Tuvan Gumrukcu, “Turkey's lira logs worst year in two
decades under Erdogan,” Reuters, December 31, 2021, https://www.reuters.
com/markets/europe/turkeys-lira-weakens-fifth-day-monetary-policy-wor-
ries-2021-12-31/.

98 Onur Ant, “Turkey, UAE Sign FX Swap Deal Worth $5 Billion,” Bloomberg,
January 19, 2022, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-19/turkey-
uae-sign-fx-swap-deal-worth-around-5-billion.

99 Ragip Soylu, “Turkey: Exports to Saudi Arabia increase 25 percent in the first
quarter of 2022,” Middle East Eye, April 5, 2022, https://www.middleeasteye.net/
news/turkey-saudi-arabia-exports-increase-first-quarter.

100 Nicholas Danforth, “The Nonsense of Neo-Ottomanism,” War on the Rocks,

May 29, 2020.

101 Ryan Gingeras, “Why Erdogan Might Choose War with Greece,” War on the
Rocks, October 5, 2022.

102 Nektaria Stamouli, “Greece, Turkey vie for US goods — at the other’s ex-
pense,” Politico Europe, June 15, 2022.

103 Conversation with Greek Prime Minister Mitsotakis, Georgetown University,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgPaL4nkSr0

104 Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ address to the Joint Session of the
USUS Congress, May 17, 2022 https://primeminister.gr/en/2022/05/17/29339

105 Monteagle Stearns, Entangled Allies: US Policy Toward Greece, Turkey, and
Cyprus (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1992).

106 “Egypt and Turkey seek to overhaul tense ties with frank talks on Libya,”
Reuters, May 6, 2021.

107 “Is Turkey going to crack down Muslim Brotherhood aligned TV in gesture
to Egypt?,” Al Monitor, April 2, 2021.

108 Diana Shalhub, “Egypt praises Turkey's moves towards rapprochement,”

Anatolia Agency, March 19, 2021.

108
109 Aaron Stein, “Erbil over Baghdad: Turkey Explores its Options with the Iraqi
Kurds,” Atlantic Council, June 1, 2017.

110 “Iraq: Allaying Turkey’s Fears over Kurdish Ambitions,” Middle East Report
No. 35, International Crisis Group, January 26, 2005, https://d2071andvip0wj.
cloudfront.net/35-iraq-allaying- turkey-s-fears-over-kurdish-ambitions.pdf.

111 Ben Van Heuvelen, “Turkey planning to control Iraqi oil revenue,” Iraq Oil
Report, April 2, 2013.

112 Ibid.

113 Loveday Morris, “How the Kurdish independence referendum backfired

spectacularly,” Washington Post, October 20, 2017, https://www.washington-
post.com/world/how-the-kurdish-independence-referendum-backfired-
/2017/10/20/3010c820-b371-11e7-9b93-b97043e57a22_story.html.

114 “Kurdish forces seize some oil wells from Iraqi control, Iraqi company says,”
Reuters, May 14, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/kurdish-
force-seizes-some-oil-wells-iraqi-govt-control-statement-2022-05-14/.

115 “Iraq's Kurdistan judicial council defies supreme court over oil law,” Reuters,
June 4, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/iraqs-kurdistan-ju-
dicial-council-defies-supreme-court-over-oil-law-2022-06-04/.

116 “Turkish base in Bashiqa targeted in rocket strikes,” Medyanews, April 4,

2002, https://medyanews.net/turkish-base-in-bashiqa-targeted-in-rocket-strikes/;
Manuel Fernandez, “Iraqi Kurdistan's oil industry targeted by pro-Iranian Shia
militias,” Atalayar, May 6, 2022, https://atalayar.com/en/content/iraqi-kurdis-
tans-oil-industry-targeted-pro-iranian-shia-militias.

117 Murat Yetkin, “Which photo of the Saudi Prince and Erdoğan depicts the
situation the best?” Yetkin Report, June 23, 2022.

109
 AB OUT THE AUTHOR S

Nicholas Danforth an editor at War on the Rocks and Senior

Fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy
(ELIAMEP). He is also the author of The Remaking of Republican
Turkey: Memory and Modernity since the Fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Aaron Stein is the Chief Content Officer at Metamorphic Media/

War on the Rocks and a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy
Research Institute (FPRI). He is also the author of The US War
Against ISIS: How America and its Allies Defeated the Caliphate and
Turkey’s New Foreign Policy: Davutoglu, the AKP and the Pursuit of
Regional Order.

110
The Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) is a nonpartisan Philadelphia-
based think tank dedicated to strengthening U.S. national security and
improving American foreign policy.

FPRI conducts in-depth research to find new information about U.S.

foreign policy challenges and provide insightful analysis that is evidence-
driven, policy- relevant, and nonpartisan. We produce research reports,
articles, and summary briefs tailored to the needs of different audiences. We
host public events and private briefings to make our findings as accessible
as possible and to ensure the information we uncover reaches the American
people and the policymakers who need it most.

www.fpri.org

111
 Published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute

January 2023

Authors: Nicholas Danforth, Aaron Stein

Edited by: Shane Mason

Design by: Natalia Kopytnik

Copyright ©2023 Foreign Policy Research Institute

112
 TURKEY’S
NEW FOREIGN POLICY
Ankara’s Ambitions, Regional Responses,
and Implications for the United States

Over the course of the past decade, Turkey has transformed from a crucial
U.S. partner to a growing challenge for U.S. policymakers. This coincides
with a growing sense in both Ankara and the region that Turkey is no
longer a status quo power, but rather seeks to revise the regional order in
keeping with its own interests. This book explores the historic and
contemporary dynamics behind Turkey's changing foreign policy. Building
on academic research and extensive interviews, it seeks to understand
how ideology, interests and emerging global dynamics have come
together to reshape Turkey's relations with Washington and with its
immediate neighbors. The result is a timely and comprehensive look at one
of America's most pressing foreign policy challenges, complete with a set
of actionable recommendations for policymakers tasked with tackling it.

Nicholas Danforth is an editor at War on the Rocks and Senior Fellow at the
Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP). He is also the
author of The Remaking of Republican Turkey: Memory and Modernity since the
Fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Aaron Stein is the Chief Content Officer at Metamorphic Media/War on the Rocks
and a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI). He is also the
author of The US War Against ISIS: How America and its Allies Defeated the
Caliphate and Turkey's New Foreign Policy: Davutoglu, the AKP and the Pursuit of
Regional Order.

ISBN 978-0-910191-18-0

90000>

215.732.3774 • www.fpri.org
Published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute
Design ©Natalia Kopytnik
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