Strategic Ambiguity: Explaining Foreign Policy Under the Erdogan Presidency

On 27 February 2020, at least 34 Turkish soldiers were killed in Syria’s Idlib province.[i] In response, Turkey started a military operation against the Syrian army of Bashar al-Assad.[ii] This escalation of conflict jeopardized Turkey’s fragile, yet until recently improving, relationship with Russia. Concurrently, US-Turkey relations remained extremely tense, due in part to concerns over “hostage diplomacy,”[iii] the S-400 purchase from Russia,[iv] and Turkey’s incursion into northern Syria. This raises an interesting and important puzzle about how Turkey managed to allow its relationship with Russia and the US to deteriorate at the same time. I argue this spiraling of diplomatic and military relations on both fronts is the unintended result of strategic ambiguity in Turkish foreign policy.

The main purpose of strategic ambiguity is to create a balance between states so that no asymmetrical relationship could emerge with either of them. The policy of strategic ambiguity stems from domestic factors, but the success or failure of the policy is constrained by the structure of international politics, which affects countries in different ways in proportion to their relative capabilities. As I explore in my research, Turkey’s policies toward Russia and the US fit this model well. On the one hand, Turkey, as a NATO member, purchased a Russian air defense missile system and established a close relationship with Russia. On the other hand, it could not risk alienating the US due to path-dependent interests stemming from their 60-year alliance. This policy of strategic ambiguity is a result of domestic motivations of actors in Turkish politics. Given the lack of escalation on either side, strategic ambiguity served its purpose until very recently. However, the Turkish army’s military confrontation with the Russian-backed Syrian army and US-backed Kurdish forces in northern Syria shows that the policy of strategic ambiguity has started to become destructive for Turkey.

What is Strategic Ambiguity?

Ambiguity is a constant in international politics, but that is not the same as strategic ambiguity. When a leader sends signals to the international community, different states could interpret the signals in different ways; however, these different perceptions do not necessarily mean that the leader has created this ambiguity on purpose. To illustrate, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan described the downing of a Russian jet by a Turkish warplane in 2015 as a mistake. He said “it is really thought-provoking that our relations with Mr. Putin came to the current level from a very different point and Putin sacrificed Turkey due to a mistake or fault by a pilot.”[v] However, he did not elaborate on whether it was a mistake or fault by the Turkish or Russian pilot. This kind of ambiguity seems to have arisen as a result of misunderstanding because the Turkish presidency made a statement that Erdogan meant the Russian pilot only in one hour without observing the possible effects of the ambiguity.[vi]

My research focuses on ambiguity that is deliberately created to maintain a balance between states without taking sides. During World War II, for example, President Ismet Inonu secured a defensive alliance with Britain and France without breaking Turkey’s entente with the Soviet Union. By also supporting the policy of negotiating with Hitler and Mussolini, while refraining from taking sides with anyone until an Allied victory proved likely, his use of strategic ambiguity protected Turkey from the destructive effects of combat.[vii]

Conventional wisdom from political science holds that ambiguity ends up fostering conditions for war more easily than cooperation.[viii] Scholars advance two main perspectives. Firstly, they treat strategic ambiguity as a discursive strategy of policy-makers use in drafting of a diplomatic text.[ix] The main purpose here is to create an ambiguous text that could be interpreted by the conflicting parties differently within the scope of their own national interests and thus helps facilitate agreement. I demonstrate elsewhere, for example, that strategic ambiguity on key issues including continuity of the Cypriot state and federation/confederation of its governance helped Turkish and Greek Cypriots sign the (now defunct) Annan Plan.[x]Crucially, although strategic ambiguity made an agreement possible at the time, it did not lead to constructive effects in the long term; Greek Cypriots later rejected the plan in a referendum.

Secondly, political scientists treat strategic ambiguity as a practice of foreign policy through which states attempt to create a balance between other states without taking sides.[xi] I engage this point here to argue that the foreign policy of strategic ambiguity in this realm similarly has short-term effects on cooperation but can be destructive in the long-term. I use the theoretical framework of neoclassical realism (NCR) to advance my argument. Examining foreign policy through an NCR lens enables us to take domestic factors into consideration as independent variables along with structural incentives to explain the practice of strategic ambiguity.[xii] Structural effects are important in shaping state behavior; however, they are insufficient in accounting for the observed variance both across and within states that neoclassical realism captures with its focus on internal factors.

To determine the kinds of state behavior that can produce strategic ambiguity within the scope of this framework, I turn to the structural realism of Walt: “weaker powers have essentially three choices in a unipolar world: they can (1) ally with each other to try to mitigate the unipole’s influence, (2) align with the unipole in order to support its actions or exploit its power for their own purposes, or (3) remain neutral.”[xiii] I argue that if a state is sending other states mixed signals and is pursuing at least two of these strategies at the same time, then strategic ambiguity is at work. However, we need to focus on NCR’s domestic factors to explore why a state would do so. Therefore, in the rest of this essay, I enumerate the domestic factors that led Turkey to pursue a policy of strategic ambiguity.

Domestic Sources of Strategic Ambiguity: The Case of Turkey

During the tenure of President Erdogan, who became prime minister in 2003 and president in 2014, Turkey attempted both to ally with the unipole (the US) in order to exploit its power for its own national interests and to ally with Russia to mitigate the unipole’s influence. Even though it seems to have helped create the balance between these two great powers until very recently, Turkey has started to see destructive effects of the policy of strategic ambiguity with the latest attacks on Turkish army in Syria. This foreign policy is a result of domestic motivations of actors in Turkish politics.

The current tensions between the US and Turkey may mark a nadir in their relationship, but the NATO allies have a tumultuous past. Major sources of friction included the US withdrawal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey during the Cuban Missile Crisis, US attempts to prevent (1963) and later sanction (1974) Turkey’s intervention in Cyprus, and the Turkish parliament’s 2003 rejection of a proposal to allow the US to operate from Turkish bases during the Iraq War. The 2016 coup attempt is the critical difference in how Turkey has approached strategic ambiguity.  Turkey was never willing to risk its strategic alliance with the US at any of these critical junctures in the manner it has since the coup attempt. I focus here on the reason why Turkey decided to establish close Russian ties and thus mitigate the influence of the US in a form of strategic ambiguity.

The 2016 coup attempt became a critical moment for US-Turkey relations when Erdogan blamed US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, who is the leader of an Islamic community called the Gulen movement, for the bloody attempted coup and requested his extradition from the US.[xiv] Since this request has thus far been refused, Turkey has shifted blame for the coup attempt to the US. The coup attempt was a critical moment leading Turkey to look for alternative alliances. Immediately after the coup attempt, Erdogan proclaimed: “Turkey would be unable to continue its strategic allegiance with the US if it continues to harbor the exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen.”[xv] Since then, he has sent mixed signals about Turkey’s strategic alliance with the US. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jim Risch put it well: “Every move he makes, every sentence he utters, points us in a different direction.”[xvi]

Another factor in domestic politics shaping the government’s new hostility towards the US is the alliance between the US and the Kurdish militia groups in Syria. The Turkish government views the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the militia group that helped the US fight against the ISIS, as a terrorist group. The government points to the close relationship between the PKK, designated as a terrorist group not only by Turkey but also by the US, and the YPG. Therefore, the Turkish side’s main argument is that the US has been indirectly helping the PKK and acting against the national security concerns of Turkey.

These two factors led Turkey to look for alternative alliances to mitigate the influence of the US and did not directly give rise to a close relationship with Russia. One of the factors behind the attempt to balance US influence with Russian ties is the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government’s alliance with so-called Eurasianists.[xvii] Some members of this pro-Russia cohort were imprisoned during the Ergenekon and Balyoz trials by police and judiciary members affiliated with Gulen movement during the period of loose alliance between the movement and the AKP. Erdogan used this tension not only in the war against Gulenists but also as a way of tilting towards Russia. Compounding this dynamic is the AKP’s alliance with the Nationalist Action Party (MHP). This party not only supported hostility towards the US because of the latter’s close relationship with Kurdish groups vehemently despised by the MHP, but also facilitated Erdogan’s authoritarian drift by playing the role of key actor in the parliament. Just after the 2016 coup attempt, it was MHP leader Devlet Bahceli who initiated the discussion of switching to a highly consolidated presidential system and whose voters’ support nudged Erdogan over the line to win the referendum approving the switch.

Within the scope of the theoretical framework used here, these domestic factors gave rise to the policy of strategic ambiguity in Turkish foreign policy. While the political tensions with the US about the Gulen movement and support for Kurdish forces in northern Syria led Turkey to distance itself from the US, the Eurasianists and MHP’s support for President Erdogan helped Turkey enter into closer military and political relations with Russia. This policy of strategic ambiguity was useful in the sense that Turkey could create a balance between the US and Russia without any military escalation with either of them.

However, these domestic sources cannot explain the success or failure of the policy; here, structural realism’s systemic incentives fare better. In a (at least for now), unipolar world in which there is greater freedom of action for the US and greater obstacles to counterhegemonic balancing,[xviii] the US has the power to punish those countries that try to join the opposition. These constraints make it infeasible, in the long-term, for Turkey to pursue a foreign policy of strategic ambiguity. Turkey found itself isolated after the Turkish army’s military confrontation with both the Russian-backed Syrian army and the US-backed Kurdish forces in northern Syria. In a twist that would be ironic were it not for implications regarding the sustainability of strategic ambiguity laid out here, Turkey’s February request for the US deployment on its southern border of precisely the Patriot missile system that Ankara passed up in favor of the S-400s went unfulfilled.[xix]

The argument here can also be applied to other countries within the scope of the theoretical framework of NCR. However, the fact that strategic ambiguity has had destructive effects on Turkish foreign policy does not necessarily mean that it will have similar effects on all the countries. Structural constraints – the determinant factor in the success or failure of the policy of strategic ambiguity – are different for each country in proportion to their relative capabilities in the system. The more capable a country is, the more successful the policy will be. The foreign policy of strategic ambiguity is risky for such a middle power as Turkey located in one of the most unstable regions in the world.

[i] “At least 34 Turkish soldiers killed in air strikes in Syria’s Idlib: Syrian Observatory,” Reuters, 27 February 2020: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-security-toll/at-least-34-turkish-soldiers-killed-in-air-strikes-in-syrias-idlib-syrian-observatory-idUSKCN20L32S

[ii] “Turkey Declares Major Offensive Against Syrian Government,” New York Times, 1 March 2020: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/01/world/middleeast/turkey-syria-assault.html

[iii] Aykan Erdemir and Merve Tahiroglu, “The Pastor Is Not the Only US Hostage in Turkey,” War on the Rocks, 23 August 2018: https://warontherocks.com/2018/08/the-pastor-is-not-the-only-u-s-hostage-in-turkey/

[iv] “What Turkey’s purchase of a Russian air defense system means for the U.S. and NATO,” Washington Post, 23 July 2019: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/07/23/what-turkeys-s-purchase-means-us-nato/

[v] “Downing of Russian jet a ‘pilot’s mistake,’ says Turkish President Erdoğan,” Hurriyet Daily News, 31 May 2016: https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/downing-of-russian-jet-a-pilots-mistake-says-turkish-president-erdogan–99925

[vi] “Erdoğan: Bir pilotun hatasıyla Türkiye’nin gözden çıkarılması…,” Aljazeera, 31 May 2016: http://www.aljazeera.com.tr/haber/erdogan-bir-pilotun-hatasiyla-turkiyenin-gozden-cikarilmasi

[vii] William Hale, Turkish Foreign Policy, 1774-2000 (Taylor & Francis, 2002), 65-66.

[viii] In the game theoretical sense, uncertainty increases the odds of war. According to Fearon, high levels of uncertainty based on private information can be seen as a rationalist explanation of war.

James D. Fearon, “Rationalist explanations for war,” International Organization 49, no.3 (1995): 379-414.

[ix] See different applications of this perspective:

Itay Fischhendler, “When ambiguity in treaty design becomes destructive: a study of transboundary water,” Global Environmental Politics 8, no. 1 (2008): 111-136.

Drazen Pehar, “Use of Ambiguities in Peace Agreements,” in Language and Diplomacy, ed. Jovan Kurbalija and Hannah Slavik (Malta: Diplo Foundation, 2001), 163-200.

Juyan Zhang and Yi Han, “Testing the rhetoric of China’s soft power campaign: a case analysis of its strategic ambiguity in the Six Party Talks over North Korea’s nuclear program,” Asian Journal of Communication 23, No.2, (2013): 191-208.

Antoine Rayroux, “Speaking EU defence at home: Contentious discourses and constructive ambiguity,” Cooperation and Conflict 49, No.3 (2014): 386-405.

[x] Ferhat Zabun, “Cooperation through Strategic Ambiguity: A Discursive-Institutionalist Analysis of the Annan Plan,” Uluslararasi Iliskiler(under review)

[xi] See different applications of this perspective:

Sandeep Baliga and Tomas Sjöström, “Strategic Ambiguity and Arms Proliferation,” Journal of Political Economy 116, no. 6 (2008): 1023-1057.

Patrick Hummel, “Strategic Ambiguity and Military Capacity with Multiple Adversaries,” Journal of Theoretica Politics 27, no. 2 (2015): 288-300.

Why Trump’s Shapeshifting Syria Policy Worked—Until It Didn’t,” Foreign Affairs, 13 November 2019: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/turkey/2019-11-13/why-trumps-shapeshifting-syria-policy-worked-until-it-didnt

[xii] Gideon Rose, “Neoclassical realism and theories of foreign policy,” World politics 51, no.1 (1998): 154.

[xiii] Stephen Walt, “Alliances in a Unipolar World,” World Politics 61, No. 1 (2009): 94

[xiv] “U.S. Is ‘Working On’ Extraditing Gulen, Top Turkish Official Says,” New York Times, 16 December 2018: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/16/world/europe/fethullah-gulen-turkey-extradite.html

[xv] “Erdogan blames ‘foreign powers’ for coup and says West is supporting terrorism,” Independent, 2 August 2016: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/erdogan-turkey-coup-latest-news-blames-us-west-terrorism-gulen-a7168271.html

[xvi] “US-Turkey alliance in downward spiral as Congress mulls sanctions,” Defense News, 30 October 2019: https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2019/10/30/us-turkey-alliance-in-downward-spiral-as-congress-mulls-sanctions

[xvii] Gonul Tol and Omer Taspinar, “Turkey’s Russian Roulette,” The MENA region: A Great Power Competition (2019): 118-120.

[xviii] Stephen Walt, “Alliances in a Unipolar World,” World Politics 61, No. 1 (2009): 94-96.

[xix] Jack Detsch, “Turkey Asks US for Missile Defense Amid Syria Standoff,” Al Monitor, 21 February 2020: https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2020/02/turkey-asks-us-patriot-syria-standoff.html