This is part of the MENA Politics Newsletter, Volume 3, Issue 1, Spring 2020.
Introduction
Turkey’s foreign policy over the past several years has been characterized as increasingly unilateral, aggressive, and risk-tolerant, from the purchase of a NATO-incompatible missile defense system from Russia to its clashes in Syria and Libya with Moscow-backed fighters. These policy shifts, and the anti-Western rhetoric that accompany them, became starkly evident in the wake of the July 2016 coup attempt. Ankara’s hostility toward the United States had been aroused by American support for a Syrian Kurdish militia against ISIS that Turkey deems a terrorist group. It was exacerbated by the Obama administration’s hesitation immediately to condemn the coup plotters and Washington’s ongoing refusal to extradite Fethullah Gulen, the Pennsylvania-based cleric Turkey blames for the failed putsch.
These policy and attitude shifts follow a pattern sketched in my recent book: they are not merely responses to a changing security environment but rather reflect earlier processes of internal and external contestation over what it means to be Turkish and what Turkey’s domestic and foreign policy priorities should be.4 By taking its fight over Turkey’s national identity to the foreign policy arena in the early 2000s, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) was able to use EU conditionality levers to weaken and then reconfigure domestic institutions that opposed what I term its Ottoman Islamist understanding of Turkishness.
This symposium offers novel insights into this pattern of intersecting domestic politics and foreign policy in Turkey. Ferhat Zabun analyzes the role of the coup attempt in creating distrust of US intentions as well as the role of so-called “Eurasianist” influences on Turkey’s policy of strategic ambiguity in balancing its relations with the United States and Russia. Sinem Adar argues that the trauma of the coup attempt may have generated new motivations for militarization, but that without the earlier expansion of the domestic defense industry, these motivations would not have translated into a more “hard power”-oriented foreign policy. Sibel Oktay demonstrates the importance of getting our definitions right with her China-focused exploration of the Nationalist Action Party’s lack of the policy leverage normally attributed to coalition partners. Sercan Canbolat presents a novel Turkish operational code analysis tool (TOCA) for studying the impact of AKP leaders’ audience based adjustments in their speeches on foreign policy. Together these contributions offer a glimpse into a rich emerging literature on Turkish foreign policy.
Lisel Hintz, School of Advanced International Study, Johns Hopkins University, lhintz1@jhu.edu