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By Emil Avdaliani
Turkey and Saudi Arabia have pledged to elevate bilateral relations by expanding cooperation in defense and renewable energy spheres, marking a new page in bilateral relations. Turkey’s engagement with Saudi Arabia is expected to grow as the two countries’ geopolitical ambitions align from Syria to Sudan to Yemen. For Turkey, boosting the relations with Saudi Arabia fits into its broader effort of containing Israel and improving ties with key Middle East actors. Given that Saudi Arabia too has much at stake in Syria’s economic and political rehabilitation as well as in the Horn of Africa, its alignment with Ankara is now accelerating at a full speed. Another key driver of the growing alignment between the two countries has been their expanding military cooperation. The Saudi-Turkish alignment is also about the middle power activism, based on the recognition that a multi-aligned foreign policy is the order of the day, providing space and opportunities for geopolitical maneuvering. Nonetheless, Turkey and Saudi Arabia will refrain from building an official alliance as it would limit their freedom of maneuvering.
BACKGROUND: On February 3, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan visited Riyadh where he met Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The two sides pledged to elevate bilateral relations by expanding cooperation in defense and renewable energy spheres marking a new page in bilateral relations.
The two countries have not always enjoyed positive ties. In the recent past, divergent strategic visions on most of the conflicts in the Middle East kept Riyadh and Ankara apart. By 2021, however, the strategic environment shifted. Turkey’s outreach to its regional competitors –including Saudi Arabia – began amid a “de-escalation moment,” driven by economic constraints after the pandemic and uncertainty about long-term United States security commitments.
One of the key drivers of the growing alignment between the two countries has been the expanding military cooperation. Riyadh wants to become less dependent on foreign supplies of military hardware and boost domestic military production. As a major military exporter, Turkey’s experience in know-how is key in that regard. The two countries have signed a string of military deals over the past few years. For instance, during President Erdoğan’s tour of the Gulf countries in 2023, Saudi Arabia agreed to buy Turkish drones; moreover, the package was explicitly tied to industrial cooperation such as technology transfer and joint production leading to long-term high-technology development. Later the same year, the Saudi side announced a strategic agreement with the Turkish defense producer Baykar to localize drone manufacturing in the kingdom. Another area of ongoing cooperation is joint investment in Turkey’s KAAN fighter project.
There is also a burgeoning cooperation in renewable-energy sphere. Turkey and Saudi Arabia have now signed an agreement which will involve Saudi investment of $2 billion to build two 1,000MW solar farms in Sivas and Karaman (2,000MW first phase) in Turkey. The joint statement released by the Turkish and Saudi leaders also emphasized cooperation on grid interconnection feasibility studies, energy storage, energy efficiency, and clean hydrogen. Relatedly, bilateral trade had reached $8 billion in 2025 and around 400 projects in Saudi Arabia worth more than $30 billion were carried out through the involvement of Turkish companies.
This strategic pragmatism is embodied Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030. The pursuit of economic diversification and local defense-industrial capacity has created incentives to engage a capable regional producer (Turkey) rather than relying exclusively on traditional Western suppliers, while also preserving flexibility in an increasingly multipolar environment. This logic is evident in the emphasis on technology transfer and localisation in the defence relationship, and in expanding energy cooperation beyond hydrocarbons into renewables.
IMPLICATIONS: Crucially, there is also a wider geopolitical context that is pushing Turkey and Saudi Arabia closer. Across the Middle East, from Yemen to Iran to Syria, the two countries’ foreign policies are increasingly aligned. Ankara and Riyadh have both opposed Israel’s war in Gaza. This is not only out of Islamic solidarity but more based on shared strategic calculations, chiefly to contain Israel. The latter’s military power and regional influence has grown since 2023 when the war in Gaza broke out. Since then, the Jewish state has defeated Iran’s allies, Hezbollah and Hamas and intermittently bombed the Houthis in Yemen, also part of the Iran-backed Axis of Resistance. And since the downfall of the Assad regime in Syria, Israel has carried out a systemic aerial campaigning against military assets across Syria. Tel-Aviv’s calculus has been clear. It has acted against the growing Turkish influence in Syria.
Israel’s projection of power reached the Persian Gulf when Hamas’ representation in Doha was targeted shattering the sense of security in the region as the United States, which has a military base in Qatar, stood by. In late 2025 Tel-Aviv recognized the breakaway Somaliland as independent state signaling Israel’s intentions in the Horn of Africa. Israel’s goal is to move as closely as possible to Yemen to better target and contain the Houthis. Yet, the move is ultimately also about containing Turkey’s ambitions in Somalia, Sudan and Ethiopia. Containing Israel, therefore, now a key foreign policy goal of Turkey and given that Saudi Arabia too has much at stake in Syria’s economic and political rehabilitation as well as in the Horn of Africa, its alignment with Ankara is now accelerating at a full speed.
Turkey and Saudi Arabia align around the idea of a united Yemen and are determined to thwart the secessionism in the south of the country. Ankara and Riyadh share a similar approach in relation to Sudan and especially regarding Syria, where President Ahmed al-Sharaa has been supported by Turkey and Saudi Arabia in his endeavor to bring the Kurds into the central state’s fold.
Riyadh’s openness to expand relations with Turkey is also linked to the kingdom’s ongoing tensions with the United Arab Emirates. Saudi Arabia wants to balance Abu-Dhabi, and Ankara is a good candidate in that regard. Moreover, Turkey itself has strategic interests in the regions -- from Yemen to the Horn of Africa -- where the Saudi-UAE rift has materialized and has increased its engagement through military and economic cooperation. Neither Ankara nor Riyadh want to see a nuclear Iran, but oppose a U.S. attack against Iran as a weakened and destabilized Iran would further shift the regional balance of power in Israel’s favor.
While moving closer, Turkey and Saudi Arabia nonetheless remain hesitant to form an official alliance as a formalized relationship would constrain their freedom of maneuver. Although there have been reports that Turkey has exhibited an interest in joining the Saudi-Pakistani military alliance, Ankara has allegedly refrained from doing so.
Turkey is a NATO member and joining the Saudi-Pakistan alliance would have brought additional security responsibilities that Ankara does not want to take on officially, notwithstanding that Turkey’s relations with Pakistan have reached unprecedented highs whether in security, military or economic spheres. Thus, the ongoing alignment should not be mistaken for a formal alliance in the making. It rests on a convergence of interests – regional stability, autonomy from great-power constraints -- and offers mutually beneficial economic opportunities; it is pragmatic and not ideological.
CONCLUSION: For Turkey, boosting the relations with Saudi Arabia fits into its broader effort of containing Israel and improving ties with key Middle East actors. It was therefore no coincidence that Turkish President Erdoğan after his trip to Saudi Arabia visited Egypt, a major regional player involved in the efforts to bring the war in Gaza to an end.
The Saudi-Turkish alignment is also about the middle power activism. Both Turkey and Saudi Arabia are key middle-powers and actors in the Middle East, and their alignment is ultimately boosted by a shared understanding that the world has entered into a multipolar period where multi-aligned foreign policy is the order of the day, providing space and opportunities for geopolitical maneuvering.
AUTHOR'S BIO: Emil Avdaliani is a research fellow at the Turan Research Center and a professor of international relations at the European University in Tbilisi, Georgia. His research focuses on the history of the Silk Roads and the interests of great powers in the Middle East and the Caucasus.
By Halil Karaveli
Read the full article in Foreign Policy here.
In an illiberal world, the Turkish opposition can no longer convince voters that democracy alone is a source of strength.
Much has been written about how U.S. President Donald Trump is pursuing an authoritarian agenda at home while embracing dictators abroad. But even this criticism does not fully capture the way he has reconfigured the global order to strengthen the logic of authoritarianism itself.
The results can be seen with regrettable clarity in Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a leading beneficiary of Trump’s force-based international disorder. Erdogan has simultaneously denounced the United States and cozied up to Trump, all while personifying the national strength that Turkey relies on in an anarchic and illiberal world. Turkey’s opposition, meanwhile, is animated by an idealistic faith in the discarded liberal order and vows to abandon Erdogan’s nationalist foreign policy. Unless it reconsiders and doubles down on nationalism, Turkish voters will return to Erdogan.
Erdogan presents himself as the incarnation of Turkish aspirations for regional and global power. He has long advocated for a multipolar global order not dominated by great powers, saying, “The world is bigger than five”—a reference to the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. In pursuit of this vision, Ankara has cultivated strong relations with Venezuelan President Nicólas Maduro. When Maduro was captured by U.S. forces in January, Erdogan’s chief advisor, Mehmet Ucum, stated, “There is no option other than power-based struggle against imperialist aggression.”
At the same time, Erdogan has also acted as an acquiescent Trump ally who is keen to cooperate with the United States when it serves his purposes. Thus, as his advisor condemned imperialist aggression, Erdogan himself abstained from expressing any criticism of the Maduro raid. After a conversation with Trump on Jan. 27, Erdogan said, “We will continue to develop the cooperation between the United States and Turkey,” adding, “It’s in our common interest that the relations progress in all areas.” Turkey accepted the invitation to join Trump’s Board of Peace, while most NATO allies declined.
The relationship that Erdogan enjoys with Trump provides Turkey with opportunities to promote its national interests in tandem with the United States. According to a recent survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations, only 11 percent of Turks see the United States as an ally with whom they share values, but 42 percent see it as a necessary partner, with whom Turkey must strategically cooperate.
This opportunistic approach helps Erdogan make Turkey into a significant geopolitical actor, capable of projecting military and economic power from the Middle East and the Balkans to Africa and Central Asia. Disparaged by critics as an expression of imperial delusion, the extension of Turkish influence is a source of national pride and an unquestionable asset for Erdogan in today’s uncertain world.
What’s more, changing international conditions have increasingly fused the case for projecting power internationally with Erdogan’s case for projecting power in domestic politics.
Continue reading the full article in Foreign Policy here.
AUTHOR'S BIO: Halil Karaveli is a senior fellow with the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program Joint Center. He is the author of Why Turkey is Authoritarian: From Ataturk to Erdogan.
By Halil Karaveli
Now, with the perceived threat from Rojava having been removed, the Turkish government has less reason to fear a Turkish nationalist backlash after meeting the demands of the Kurds, and has a free hand to re-commit to the peace process. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is in fact compelled to accommodate the Kurds to secure his hold on power. Meanwhile, the Kurds’ best bet is to team up with Turkey: there’s no potential foreign patron left after the U.S. abandoned them. The Kurds may eventually find it in their hearts to forgive Erdoğan; the question however is whether the Turks will empathize with the Kurds and accept them as their equals. Ultimately, society must internalize the change that the state has deemed is in its interest. Otherwise, social cohesion, and the state’s century-long quest for a stable base will continue to elude Turkey.
BACKGROUND:
A lightning offensive by Syrian government forces in late January undid over a decade of Kurdish self-rule in northeastern Syria, where the Syrian offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its military wing, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), supported by Arab tribes – with whom the PYD formed the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) -- had established a proto-state since 2012. The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, also known as Rojava or western Kurdistan, comprised around a quarter of Syria – even though the Kurds make up less than ten percent of Syria’s population -- and included most of the country’s critical resources, oil and water.
Rojava represented the greatest achievement of the PKK in its more than four decades long struggle for an independent Kurdish state. The organization, which officially dissolved in May 2025, lost its military campaign in Turkey a decade ago and was hemmed in by Turkey in northern Iraq, from where it was no longer able to mount any military threat against Turkey. Absent continued U.S. endorsement, its statelet in Syria was no longer viable.
The Syrian government offensive followed after the United States, which had relied on the Kurdish forces to prevent the return of the Islamic State (IS) and to the chagrin of Turkey had armed and financed them made a volte-face. Tom Barrack, the U.S. special envoy to Syria, and ambassador to Turkey, stated that the rationale for the partnership with the SDF had largely expired because Damascus was ready to assume responsibility for security.
The fall of Rojava is a victory not only for the Syrian government, but also for Turkey that had seen the existence of a PKK-statelet, backed by the United States, along a 600 kilometer-stretch of its southern border as an existential threat. In December 2024, Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan described the elimination of the YPG as Ankara’s “strategic objective.” Nonetheless, Kurdish and pro-Kurdish politicians and activists in Turkey expressed consternation and deplored that Turkey had thrown its weight behind Syria’s Sunni Arab regime – Ankara has developed a close military and security relation with Damascus – instead of siding with the Kurds. They argue that Turkey should have taken the Kurds “under its wings” and hold that Turkey’s choice, and not least the fact that the Turkish nationalist public rejoiced at the Kurdish defeat, has caused an unprecedented “emotional rupture” among the Kurds in Turkey. Tuncer Bakırhan, the co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Democracy and Equality (DEM) Party, warned that the Kurds were now “lost” for Turkey.
IMPLICATIONS:
Yet what’s lost is rather the prospect – never openly acknowledged -- of eventually establishing a Greater Rojava, a Kurdish entity that would have re-united the Kurds on both sides of the Turkish-Syrian border. It’s easy to understand why the survival of the PKK statelet in northeastern Syria mattered to the Kurdish political movement in Turkey, and correspondingly why it struck fear in the Turkish government: the border between Turkey and Syria separates the same Kurdish communities, and the continued existence of Rojava would have emboldened the aspirations of the Kurds in southeastern Turkey to wrest self-government from Ankara.
In 2013, Turkey, fearing that the empowerment of the PKK’s Syrian offshoot would embolden the broader organization, initiated peace negotiations with the PKK’s imprisoned leader Abdullah Öcalan. As Turkey had feared, the PKK was indeed emboldened and did not commit to the peace talks, preferring to use Rojava as a base for an attempt to seize control of urban centers in Kurdish-majority provinces of southeastern Turkey, after which Turkey terminated the talks with Öcalan in 2015. The peace process that re-started in late 2024, when Devlet Bahçeli, the leader of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), the key ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, proposed that Öcalan could receive parole if he disbanded the PKK and renounced violence, similarly stalled when the PKK’s offshoot in Syria refused to yield territorial control and subordinate to the central Syrian government.
Now, with the perceived threat from Rojava having been removed, the Turkish government has less reason to fear a Turkish nationalist backlash for meeting the demands of the Kurds, and has a free hand to re-commit to the peace process. As long as the PKK maintained a statelet in Syria -- and enjoyed the backing of the United States -- Erdoğan could not afford to accommodate the Kurds. Although there is broad support in Turkish society for the peace process, Turks and Kurds have different expectations; while the former endorse the process as a means to end violence, the latter crave dignity and equality. Accommodating the Kurds becomes politically less costly for Erdoğan and Bahçeli after the U.S.-backed – and therefore all the more threatening -- Kurdish security challenge across Turkey’s southern border has disappeared.
On February 3, Bahçeli reiterated that Öcalan should receive parole, that the former Kurdish party leader Selahattin Demirtaş must be freed and the two Kurdish mayors Ahmet Türk and Ahmet Özer be reinstated to their posts. Meanwhile, Feti Yıldız, the deputy party leader of the MHP, stressed that Turkey must abide by the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights. The court has ruled that the imprisonment of Demirtaş violates his human rights, a ruling that Turkey has so far ignored. Bahçeli’s statements signal to the Kurds that the peace process continues, while also preparing the Turkish public for forthcoming moves.
In Syria, the fall of Rojava has precipitated a political integration of the Kurds, with President Ahmed al-Sharaa recognizing the Kurds as a constitutive element of Syria, making Kurdish an official language and appointing the first Kurdish mayor in the country’s history. Turkey experts Aslı Aydıntaşbaş and Henri Barkey – in the New York Times and Foreign Policy respectively -- argue that the integration of the Kurds in Syria offers a model for Turkey to emulate. Yet it’s less likely – at least in the shorter term – that the Kurds in Turkey will be offered far-reaching cultural rights such as the right to education in the mother tongue or will be recognized constitutionally as the co-equals of Turks.
Nonetheless, the consolidation of the regime that Erdoğan and Bahçeli have put in place requires that Erdoğan is reelected and that makes it imperative that the Kurds are co-opted. Indeed, shoring up the regime was likely always the main rationale of the opening to Öcalan. The reverence that Bahçeli shows Öcalan is intended to demonstrate respect for the Kurds. That – together with the release of Demirtaş and other Kurdish political prisoners and the planned amnesty for PKK members -- will go a long way toward healing Kurdish wounds and may well win them over and secure another term for Erdoğan.
And while Erdoğan is compelled to accommodate the Kurds to secure another presidential term, the Kurds’ best bet is to team up with Turkey: there’s no potential foreign patron left after the U.S. Statements made by Israeli officials since 2023 have made clear that the Jewish state is eager to use the Kurds as an asset against not only Iran but also Turkey, which has raised the hopes of some Kurds, but Israel would need U.S. sanction.
CONCLUSIONS:
Turkey is a nation that was created top-down, by a bureaucratic elite that set about to construct a uniform base for the new state, suppressing ethnic and cultural differences. The PKK’s four decades long insurrection was proof that the nation-building endeavor remained unaccomplished. The present, state-decreed accommodation of the Kurds is in a sense another version of the old top-down approach. The question today is if the Turkish state, which was unsuccessful in imposing a homogenous identity on a diverse population will now be able to enforce social harmony.
Because while Devlet Bahçeli can be ruthlessly pragmatic in the pursuit of the interests of the state -- like his predecessors at the helm of the Turkish republic have generally been -- ordinary Turks have been raised to think of themselves as the sole owners of Turkey; at best, they condescendingly tolerate the Kurds, at worst they view them with racist-tinged contempt. The Kurds may eventually find it in their hearts to forgive Erdoğan; the question however is whether the Turks will empathize with the Kurds and accept them as their equals. Ultimately, society must internalize the change that the state has deemed is in its interest. Otherwise, social cohesion, and the state’s century-long quest for a stable base will continue to elude Turkey.
AUTHOR'S BIO: Halil Karaveli is a Senior Fellow with the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program Joint Center and the Editor of the Turkey Analyst. He is the author of Why Turkey is Authoritarian: From Atatürk to Erdoğan (Pluto Press).
Earlier Articles
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Joint Center PublicationsOp-ed Halil Karaveli "The Rise and Rise of the Turkish Right", The New York Times, April 8, 2019 Analysis Halil Karaveli "The Myth of Erdogan's Power", Foreign Policy, August 29, 2018 Analysis Svante E. Cornell, A Road to Understanding in Syria? The U.S. and Turkey, The American Interest, June 2018 Op-ed Halil Karaveli "Erdogan Wins Reelection", Foreign Affairs, June 25, 2018 Article Halil Karaveli "Will the Kurdish Question Secure Erdogan's Re-election?", Turkey Analyst, June 18, 2018 Research Article Svante E. Cornell "Erbakan, Kisakürek, and the Mainstreaming of Extremism in Turkey", Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, June 2018 Analysis Svante E. Cornell "The U.S. and Turkey: Past the Point of No Return?", The American Interest, February 1, 2018 Op-ed Svante E. Cornell "Erdogan's Turkey: the Role of a Little Known Islamic Poet", Breaking Defense, January 2, 2018 Research Article Halil Karaveli "Turkey's Authoritarian Legacy", Cairo Review of Global Affairs, January 2, 2018
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