Turkey’s active involvement in both Syria and Egypt undermined its plans to become a regional leader. Now, far from having “no problems with neighbors,” Ankara is trying to renew ties with the West to counter rising pressure from the East.
Presidential spokesperson and foreign policy adviser Ibrahim Kalin famously tweeted two years ago that Turkey’s apparent isolation in the international arena was a "precious loneliness." According to his line of reasoning, all others would eventually come around to Turkey’s position, realizing that its moral stance was the right place to be.
The tweet was prompted by intensifying criticism, both domestic and foreign, of the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) foreign policy. Turkey lacked ambassadors in three Middle Eastern countries (Syria, Israel, and Egypt), a number that would later increase further (Yemen and Libya), and its relationships with the EU and the United States were deteriorating. Then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s apparently successful meeting with US President Barack Obama in Washington in May of 2013 was overshadowed by a very public difference of opinion concerning Syria, and Washington shunned Erdogan following the Gezi protests and subsequent police violence against demonstrators in June of 2013. A “model partnership” became a model transactional relationship.
Read the full article here on the website of the DGAP's Berlin Policy Journal.
Soli Özel is professor of international relations at the Kadir Has University in Istanbul and a 2015 Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin.
