Deepika Saraswat
PhD, Associate Fellow
Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses
New Delhi, India
In the post-Cold War era, Turkey no longer faced a Soviet threat and its strategic importance as a ‘frontline state’ lost relevance. Following its early failure in securing European Union membership, Turkey’s focus has been to acquire autonomous levers of geopolitical and geoeconomic power. Since the 1990s, Turkey has tried to take advantage of its geographical position to emerge as Europe’s gateway into the Caspian energy resources, and similar motives have informed Turkey’s involvement in the pipeline and energy geopolitics of the Eastern Mediterranean. In the aftermath of the Turkish parliament’s vote denying United States the use of Turkey as staging ground for invasion of Iraq, the US policy was seen as destabilising Turkey’s security environment. Under the rubric of the ‘zero problem’ neighbourhood policy, AKP-led government projected Turkey as a stakeholder in fostering a stability in the Middle East. Also, Turkey’s economic rise was seen as dependent on facilitating regional economic integration.
As the Arab uprisings and the US retrenchment from the Middle East paved the way for an interventionist policy by multiple regional actors, Turkey aligned itself with pro-democracy Islamist forces in Egypt, Libya to Syria. Turkey’s failure in toppling Assad regime, its three military operations in northern Syria justified in terms of tackling the Kurdish threat have put Ankara at odds with the United States, which supports Syrian Kurdish fighters as key partner in the fight against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Over the last two decades, while the US Middle East policy has traversed democracy promotion through military intervention to limited engagement in countering transnational Islamist terrorism and a low-risk policy of sanctions and diplomacy to deal with nuclear threat from Iran, Turkey has fashioned itself as a quintessential regional power. It has utilised ideological instruments of Islamism and pan-Turkism, proxies and also hard power to deal with what sees it as security challenges and actively participate in regional power-play with Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia. Turkey’s backing of Azerbaijan in the Second Karabakh war in 2020 not only underscored prowess of Turkish-made drones, but more importantly advantageously positioned Turkey to cultivate geoeconomic influence in the Caucasus and Central Asia at the expense of Russia and Iran. More recently, twin goals of safeguarding economic growth and national security, have led Ankara to seek dialogue and de-escalation with its regional rivals.
In another testimony to how Turkey’s geopolitical identity no longer ‘anchored’ in the West, the last decade under the AKP-led government was marked by an ‘authoritarian turn’, with 2017 constitutional changes undermining judicial and legislative independence, and the ‘disinformation law’ further controlling freedom of expression. Turkey has all but abandoned its liberal democracy project in favour of ‘civilisational state’, which at once questions the universality of Western liberal democracy, while reviving historical and religious-cultural narratives of national self. As Richard Sakwa argues, civilizational states such as Russia, Russia and Iran share a vision of world as geopolitically multipolar and as containing a multiplicity of civilisations.
In the current global context, where the NATO has come in full support of Ukraine against the Russian invasion and the US has resorted to sanctions and tightening of anti-China coalition, Turkey is keen to avoid being ensnared into zero-sum great power confrontations. Like other regional powers such as India, Iran and even Saudi Arabia, Turkey seems to have recognised the Russia-Ukraine war as a European conflict, which has posed serious challenges in terms food, energy security and also presented economic opportunities. Turkey has not joined the Western sanctions against Russia, instead it has put in place alternative banking arrangements for uninterrupted tourism, trade and investment ties with Russia. Furthermore, by strengthening Organisation of Turkic States, which has adopted a transportation cooperation agenda centred on the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR) or the ‘Middle Corridor’, Turkey aims to strengthen its own transit role in east-west connectivity given the ‘northern corridor’ connecting North-East Asia with Europe via Russia came to an abrupt halt with Baltic states and Poland closing their border with Russia. Even as Turkey continues to expand cooperation with China within the BRI framework, AKP-led government, to placate its Turkic nationalist constituency has engaged in public criticism of Beijing on its treatment of Uighur minority. Going forward Turkey, as an autonomous strategic actor, will continue to play a complex game of cooperation and competition in various sub-regions including Black Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean, Central Asia-Caucasus and the Middle East.