Turkey Rediscovers the Middle East

F. Stephen Larrabee

From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2007

Summary:  In a departure from its traditional foreign policy, Turkey is now becoming an important player in the Middle East. Turkey's growing concern over Kurdish nationalism has brought Ankara closer to the governments of Iran and Syria, which also contend with restive Kurds at home. Although troubling, this shift could be an opportunity for Washington and its allies to use Turkey as a bridge to the Middle East.

F. Stephen Larrabee holds the Corporate Chair in European Security at the RAND Corporation.

HOME, SWEET HOME

While the recent wrangling in Turkey between the generals and the Islamists has drawn attention to Turkey's domestic policies, a significant shift in the country's foreign policy has gone largely unnoticed: after decades of passivity, Turkey is now emerging as an important diplomatic actor in the Middle East. Over the past few years, Ankara has established close ties with Iran and Syria, with which it had tense relations during the 1980s and 1990s; adopted a more active approach toward the Palestinians' grievances; and improved relations with the Arab world more broadly.

This new activism is an important departure from recent Turkish foreign policy. One of the basic principles espoused by Mustafa Kemal (better known as Atatürk), the founder of the modern Turkish republic, was that Turkey should limit its involvement in Middle Eastern affairs, and except for a brief period in the 1950s, Ankara largely stuck to it.

Turkey's recent focus on the Middle East, however, does not mean that Turkey is about to turn its back on the West. Nor is the shift evidence of the "creeping Islamization" of Turkish foreign policy, as some critics claim. Turkey's new activism is a response to structural changes in its security environment since the end of the Cold War. And, if managed properly, it could be an opportunity for Washington and its Western allies to use Turkey as a bridge to the Middle East.

CASUALTIES OF WAR

During the Cold War, the main threats to Turkish security came almost exclusively from the Soviet Union. Today, Turkey faces a much more diverse set of challenges: growing Kurdish separatism, sectarian violence in Iraq that could spill over, the rise of Iran, and the fragmentation of Lebanon, partly at the hands of radical groups with close ties to Syria and Iran. Since most of these come from Turkey's southern periphery and the wider Middle East, Turkey has understandably begun to focus more attention on the region.

At the same time, Turkey's ties to the West have deteriorated. Its path to European Union membership has been blocked by disagreements with Brussels over Cyprus and over stalled political and economic reforms in Turkey, as well as by rising concern among Europeans about immigration, unemployment, and eu enlargement. In addition, Turkey's relations with the United States have become increasingly strained, largely because of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. According to a poll conducted by the German Marshall Fund in September 2006, 81 percent of Turks disapproved (and only seven percent approved) of President George W. Bush's handling of international policies. Turkey is now in the unprecedented situation of having poor relations with the eu and the United States simultaneously.

These trends have coincided with -- and to some extent been reinforced by -- important domestic changes in Turkish society. The pro-Western elite that has shaped Turkish foreign policy since the end of World War II is gradually being replaced by a more conservative, more religious, and more nationalist elite that is suspicious of the West and has a more positive attitude toward Turkey's Ottoman past. The ruling Islamist Justice and Development Party (known as the akp), headed by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has managed to tap into rising popular nationalism by fusing it with Islam.

The Gulf War in 1990-91 was a critical catalyst for Turkey's reentry into the Middle East. Against the advice of many of his advisers and of the Turkish military, President Turgut Özal threw Turkey's full support behind the U.S. military campaign to drive Iraq out of Kuwait. He enforced United Nations sanctions by cutting off the flow of Iraq's oil exports through Turkish pipelines, deployed 100,000 troops along the Iraqi-Turkish border, and allowed the United States to fly sorties into Iraq from Turkish bases. Özal saw the war as an opportunity to demonstrate Turkey's continued strategic importance and cement closer defense ties with the United States. He hoped that Turkey's support would strengthen its "strategic partnership" with the United States and enhance its prospects of joining the European Community (as the eu was then called).