By Barçın Yinanç

September 5, 2024

Consecutive summits of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and NATO this summer underscored Turkey’s current, peculiar global positioning. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his advisors appear to be seeking to leverage the relations with Russia and China against Turkey’s Western allies. But playing one against the other risks alienating everyone. Ultimately, Turkey may end up having forfeited the confidence of all interlocutors, and ending up alone out in the cold in an increasingly insecure world should not be the desired option for Turkey.

BACKGROUND: In July, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan attended the NATO summit in Washington and joined member countries to call Russia the most significant and direct threat to the Allies’ security. The decisions taken at the organization’s 75th anniversary included increasing military support to Ukraine and bolstering the Alliance’s defense measures against the Russian threat. However, the summit declaration’s anti-Russian wording contrasted with the statements that Erdoğan made during his meeting with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin only a week earlier. Calling him “my dear friend,” Erdoğan met the Russian leader at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit, a security and defense grouping founded by Beijing and Moscow. While condemning Russian aggression against Ukraine ever since its annexation of Crimea in 2014 and being a steady supplier of weapons to Kyiv, Ankara continues to maintain open communications with Moscow.

Before meeting Putin on July 3, Erdoğan attended the G20 summit in Italy in mid-June, where he used the occasion to hold bilateral talks with several leaders from the Western alliance but also from the so-called Global south. In addition to Erdoğan’s summit diplomacy, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan’s high-profile visits to China and Russia during the same period are emblematic of what Turkey calls a “multidimensional foreign policy.”

Parallel to the intensive diplomatic traffic, Turkey has openly displayed renewed interest in the SCO as well as in BRICS, a club of nations comprising Russia, China, Brazil, India, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. While Erdoğan reiterated his wish for Turkey to be a member of SCO of which the country remains a dialogue partner, Foreign Minister Fidan has added to the confusion and reignited the debate about Turkey’s foreign policy orientation and its commitments to the Western alliance with his statements on a possible membership in BRICS.

Turkish decision makers are fully aware of the importance of Turkey’s membership in NATO and are at pains underlining that SCO or BRICS are not alternatives to its alliance with the West. “We do not see SCO as an alternative to NATO”, said Erdoğan. “Similarly, we do not consider BRICS to be an alternative to any other structure,” he added in an interview with Newsweek. “We are an unwavering NATO ally. However, we do not believe that this impedes our ability to establish positive relationships with nations such as China and Russia,” Erdoğan opined. Accordingly, the Turkish president sees no contradiction in adhering to NATO’s hardening stance towards China and Russia while Turkey simultaneously intensifies its cooperation with both powers.

Past NATO language on China was sharpened at the Washington summit, with the final declaration naming Beijing a "decisive enabler" of Russia's war in Ukraine and claiming that Beijing continues to pose systemic challenges to Euro-Atlantic security. Yet only a few hours before leaving for the Washington summit, Erdoğan attended the signing ceremony of a 1 billion USD landmark investment agreement with China’s BYD, the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer. The Chinese car maker will build an electric and plug-in hybrid car production facility with the capacity to manufacture 150,000 units annually. Other Chinese carmakers are expected to follow suit.

IMPLICATIONS: Turkey’s deep economic crisis has made it desperate to attract foreign investment, and with Western investors showing little interest, Ankara has no alternative but to turn east. Ankara sees SCO as well as BRICS as a platform to engage with Russia and China, and as a lever to increase its economic relations with emerging markets. Yet Turkey’s deviation from most NATO allies on Russia is rooted in more than economic imperatives and energy dependency. Turkey also wants to avoid a military escalation of the conflict between NATO and Russia.

Although the Washington summit focused on bolstering military support for Ukraine, Erdoğan warned against direct conflict between NATO and Russia. “NATO should never be allowed to be a party to the war in Ukraine,” Erdoğan told a news conference, calling on the allies to keep the door open for diplomacy. “Negotiations do not necessarily mean surrendering,” he said.

A rare NATO member not to join sanctions on Russia, Turkey’s call for negotiations could on the face of it appear to translate a pro-Russian stance. Yet a Russian victory is not in the interest of Turkey as it would inevitably strengthen the hands of Moscow in the highly competitive relationship with Ankara.

Russia is winning the war because it is not losing, according to Turkish officials. In this respect, Ankara believes that time is not in favor of Kyiv and that Russia stands to consolidate its territorial gains in Ukraine in the event of Donald Trump’s now more likely return to the White House. Meanwhile, and as Ankara sees it, Turkey needs to engage with Russia and avoid confrontation independent of the war in Ukraine. Moscow is a crucial actor in Syria, which remains one of Turkey’s most difficult foreign policy challenges. Neither does Turkey’s interest in the SCO speak of any desire to align with Russia in an organization that is seen as anti-Western. In fact, Turkey wants to join forces with the Central Asian member countries of the SCO to present a counterbalance against Russian and Chinese influence. The war in Ukraine has revived alternative trade routes to bypass Russia, increasing Central Asia’s geopolitical importance and Turkey seeks to develop the cooperation among the Turkic states of the region.

More than anything, it is the strains in Turkey’s relations with the West that are pushing the country to look for diversifying its partners. Ankara is frustrated with the veiled arms embargo applied by key allies like the U.S. and Germany and with the glaring lack of political will in European capitals to even modestly improve relations. Ankara has been calling for the updating of the Customs Union that was established with the European Union in 1995 for more than a decade, but the consensus among leading EU member countries is that this would amount to awarding an authoritarian regime. Together with the longstanding Cyprus problem Turkey’s democratic deficit provides Germany and France with the alibi not to move forward on the Customs Union.

When asked about Turkey’s potential membership in BRICS, foreign minister Fidan said that Turkey was following the evolution of these organizations, adding, “If the EU had the will to take a step forward, our perspective on certain issues could have changed more.” Fidan’s statement is a clear message that Turkey is looking for alternative partners mainly because it is cold-shouldered by the EU. Yet Ankara is nonetheless also aware that the West remains its core partner. Speaking at the London Conference 2024 organized by Chatham House, Turkish Treasury and Finance Minister Mehmet Şimsek emphasized the importance of Turkey’s trade with the West. “We have 213 billion USD of trade volume, not services, just goods trade with the EU. And it thus remains our core partner in terms of trade, investments, tourism flows, so we cannot afford to decouple,” Şimsek remarked.

CONCLUSIONS: The consecutive summits of SCO and NATO underscored Turkey’s current, peculiar global positioning. This positioning represents a break with historical continuity. Even though Turkey has balanced uneasily politically between East and West ever since Ottoman times, it has nonetheless aspired to be part of the West for the last century if not more. The Cold War certainly left no alternative for a Turkey that feared the Soviet Union. But today Turkey’s decision-makers hold that the current global drift toward multipolarity dictates a multidimensional foreign policy. Critics of the Turkish regime point out that the democratic backsliding in the country has opened the door to enhanced rapprochement with authoritarian regimes. Clearly, as leading Western countries turn a cold shoulder to Turkey, the EU has become a push factor rather than a pull factor, providing a convenient alibi to the Turkish ruling elite to distance the country from the democratic West. 

This elite increasingly tends to subscribe to the view that the West is losing power and influence -- while at the same time denouncing its supposed schemes against Turkey -- arguing that Turkey accordingly ought to pivot to Asia. While Islamist optics predispose Erdoğan to take this view, a new, more assertive nationalism is also at play. This is especially the case since the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) became dependent on the support of far-right Nationalist Action Party (MHP). But many independent international relations experts in Turkey disagree; they question the conclusion that the West has lost its global primacy and make the case – which obviously does not impress the regime -- that drifting further away from the West will further deepen Turkey’s democratic deficit.

Yet there is nonetheless a consensus that no matter which political party governs Turkey, current international trends do require some form of strategic autonomy. Arguably though, the quest for strategic autonomy will have to be based on the recognition that there is a fundamental difference between being allies and partners and that Turkey is in an alliance with democratic countries, while its relations with the rest of the world will and must remain a network of partnerships.

Even though Ankara claims that its relations with competing blocs are meant to complement each other, Erdoğan and his advisors appear to be seeking to leverage the relations with Russia and China against Turkey’s Western allies. But playing one against the other risks alienating everyone. Ultimately, Turkey may end up having forfeited the confidence of all interlocutors, and ending up alone out in the cold in an increasingly insecure world should not be the desired option for Turkey.

Barçın Yinanç is a foreign policy commentator at the Turkish news site t24