Galip DalayAbsract: Regional geopolitics is shifting at an accelerated pace. While some of Turkey’s traditional security concerns and foreign policy challenges still linger, new threats are also emerging. Nevertheless, Turkey’s foreign policy has not kept up with these dynamic new challenges, though Ankara’s attempts to adjust to new realities and recalibrate in the face of emerging threats are gradually taking shape. It seems plausible to expect Turkey to downsize its foreign policy ambitions and reduce its confrontational style in favor of a cooperative one to a certain extent in its surrounding region. It will be more enmeshed in its domestic political challenges, above all the Kurdish issue, and will craft its foreign policy engagements with these domestic political challenges in mind. Lastly, Turkey’s relations with the West, but particularly with the United States, will remain transactional and compartmentalized.
Turkey’s foreign policy during most of the republican era was informed by the security imperatives of the Cold War and the crises that ensued from the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. These influences were coupled with the country’s republican elites crafting Turkey’s identity along the lines of strict secularism, militant nationalism, and a western orientation. As a status quo power, Turkey looked at its neighborhood through the lens of security, becoming highly sensitive to threats of all varieties and seeing itself in a hostile environment—if not surrounded by outright enemies.
Upon coming to power in 2002, successive Justice and Development Party, or AKP, governments tried to change this understanding and minimize areas of friction with Turkey’s neighbors. During the early years, they adopted a utilitarian approach, attempting to develop mutual interests and opportunities and to create a degree of interdependency, particularly through economic exchange. This was expressed through then-Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu’s “zero problems with the neighbors” principle, which provided the intellectual architecture for much of Turkey’s foreign policy. The AKP sought to build an “economy first” approach, which it would later hope to leverage for political purposes.[^1]
From the beginning of the AKP’s second term in 2007 to the early days of the Arab uprisings in late 2010 and into 2011, the party gradually expanded its ambitions and policy toward the Middle East through attempts to achieve regional integration and, later, to build an order centered on Turkey. All of these attempts sought to build on economic relations toward economic integration and political cooperation and were very much in line with the neofunctionalist approach to regional integration theories.[^2]
This policy proved to be relatively successful when the regional context was amenable and not driven by survival concerns and security challenges. However, the violent turn of the Arab uprisings dramatically changed the context of Turkey’s foreign policy.