Over the past decade, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey has been extremely contentious. For long periods he had no ambassadors in Egypt and Syria, and the ambassador in Israel returned to his place only a few months ago, after a four-year absence. The Turkish government has had complicated and fragmented contacts with various Mediterranean countries – from Libya to Greece, with which the relationship has always been conflictual – and has also quarreled with various countries of the Persian Gulf, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Finally, it has developed increasingly difficult relations with the European Union.
This contentious foreign policy was the result of a precise approach given by Erdogan to diplomatic action, which had the objective of increasing Turkey’s influence in the Mediterranean and in the Islamic world. However, the result was not what Erdogan expected and in recent months Turkish foreign policy has changed completely: Erdogan has renewed dialogue with the leaders of countries with which he had not had relations for years, restored diplomatic relations and re-established trade agreements . He has done this from time to time to respond to specific economic and political needs, but the overall result has been a total change in Turkey’s foreign policy, to the point that many analysts have spoken of a “reset”.
In the last ten years, Turkey’s foreign policy has been oriented towards the support of “political Islam”, a rather loose term used to refer to movements, political forces and parties that intend to bring Islamic doctrine into society, in ways that are sometimes democratic and sometimes not. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP in Turkish) is one of them, as is the Muslim Brotherhood, a large international Islamist movement that Erdogan has always tried to support.
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This means, for example, that after the so-called “Arab Spring” over ten years ago, when popular revolts in many countries of North Africa and the Middle East brought down the old authoritarian and secular regimes that had governed since the Cold War, Turkey tried to get Islamist leaders to take their place. This happened, for example, in Egypt, where after the fall of the dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2012, Mohammed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, was democratically elected. Erdogan hoped to establish a lasting alliance with Morsi’s Egypt, but the Egyptian president was ousted just a year later in a military coup led by General Abdel Fattah al Sisi, who is still in power.
Since then, Erdogan’s Turkey’s attempts to support Islamist movements and governments in the region have always been a failure, or otherwise unsatisfactory. In Syria, Erdogan strenuously opposed Bashar al Assad’s regime, but without ever really succeeding in overthrowing him and ending up slipping rather badly into the Syrian civil war.
During the civil war in Libya, Turkey supported the Tripoli government against the forces of Marshal Khalifa Haftar, head of the other government, that of Tubruk (Tripoli was also supported by a large part of the West and the international community). Here Erdogan’s action has in a certain sense been successful, because Turkish military aid has contributed in a fundamental way to the weakening of Haftar. But the political and military situation in Libya is so unstable and fragmented that Turkey has benefited rather meagerly from his intervention, at least for now.
Over the years, Erdogan has also made enemies in the Persian Gulf, where the Muslim Brotherhood he supports is very frowned upon, because they are considered a threat to the governments of the absolute monarchies that dominate the region. In Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the Muslim Brotherhood is believed to be a terrorist organization.
Then there were some single events that worsened relations between Turkey and other countries in the region. The killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, for example, has caused a rather serious crisis between Turkey and Saudi Arabia. At the same time, relations between Turkey and Israel have long been terribly complicated, both due to Turkey’s historic support for Hamas (the Islamist organization that controls the Gaza Strip, close to the Muslim Brotherhood) and due to some specific incidents, such as the case of the Mavi Marmara ship, in 2010, or the war between Israel and Hamas in 2018.
All these circumstances, largely dictated by unhappy or unfortunate choices by the Turkish leadership, have meant that Turkey has found itself increasingly isolated internationally in recent years. Relations with the European Union and NATO, of which Turkey is a member country, are also increasingly difficult and made complicated by Erdogan’s growing authoritarianism.
For this reason, Turkey has been implementing what has been called a “reset” in foreign policy for about a year. Erdogan has begun to adopt a more pragmatic policy, which aims to favor Turkey’s national interests.
In November, for the first time since the coup in Egypt, Erdogan met with the dictator al Sisi, the one who had ousted his ally Morsi, on the sidelines of the soccer World Cup in Qatar. Last summer Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince credibly involved in Khashoggi’s murder, went to Turkey on an official visit, and Erdogan spoke of a “new era” for relations between the two countries. In August 2022, for the first time since 2018, Israel and Turkey re-established full diplomatic relations, and the two countries’ ambassadors returned to Ankara and Tel Aviv respectively, after four years of absence.
Another notable rapprochement is the one with Syria, which is only in its infancy but is very important, also considering that Turkey is still occupying a large portion of territory in northern Syria.
This much more accommodative foreign policy is driven in part by necessity.
Turkey is in a very peculiar economic situation, due to very high inflation and Erdogan’s decision not to raise interest rates to try to counter it. To avoid the collapse of the Turkish lira, in recent months Erdogan has tried to obtain huge foreign investments, and he found them in the Gulf countries: both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have promised to support the Turkish economy with billions of dollars.
Furthermore, Turkey is in the midst of a dispute with Greece over control of the vast gas reserves located in the eastern Mediterranean, which are also shared by Egypt and Israel. So far these two countries had supported Greece in various gas exploration and export plans, but Erdogan hopes that the diplomatic rapprochement will change the energy balance of the region.
This more pragmatic foreign policy has come at the expense of support for political Islam. For example, Turkey effectively dropped all pretense of trying Jamal Khashoggi’s killers, even though Erdogan had promised that he would bring justice to the murder. The rapprochement with Israel cost Erdogan some criticisms, and the resumption of relations with Egypt and above all with Syria could also require considerable compromises.
