ASSESSMENTS
The Modern Geopolitics of Turkey
Jul 21, 2023 | 14:32 GMT
A Natural Middle Power
Turkey is a classic geopolitical middle power. It’s not strong enough to unilaterally impose its policies, but not weak enough to be forced into the orbit of another great power. This middle power status is rooted in its geographic position between Europe and Asia, which affords Turkey great economic opportunities and knowledge transfers, but also exposes it to security threats by placing it between numerous powerful countries and potential invaders.
Turkey is best able to pursue its own core interests — internal unity, access to global markets, and external security — when the global geopolitical environment is fragmented. But Turkey cannot do so in the face of determined great power opposition without also exposing itself to threats that could unravel the state. Together, these realities mean that while Turkey can (and does) independently pursue many of its policies, it must still be measured in its behavior abroad.
Map of natural resources in Turkey
Anatolia: Turkey's Geographic Core
Anatolia, Asia's westernmost point, is the geographic heart of Turkey, as it was for numerous empires and provinces of great empires throughout human history. This is no accident: the geographic strengths of the peninsula — with the Black Sea to its north, Iran to its east, Europe to its west, the Mediterranean Sea to its southwest, and Iraq and Syria to its southeast — lend themselves to geopolitical power by both connecting the region to the world while also partially shielding it.
Anatolia's position between the Black and Mediterranean seas not only creates trade links to Russia, southeastern Europe and North Africa, but forms barriers to invasions if enemies lack sufficient sea power to travel the waves. To the southwest, the arid deserts of Iraq and Syria also deter invaders, as well as undermine the growth of major civilizations that could threaten Anatolia. Anatolia's position between Iran and Europe gives it access to economic, cultural and technological powerhouses to trade with and learn from, while simultaneously giving rise to states that seek to dominate the peninsula. But attacking Anatolia from the west requires crossing the Aegean Sea, creating an obstacle for any European power that lacks a strong navy. And attacking the region from the east requires crossing the cold and rugged mountains that hem in the attractive central Anatolian plateau, creating a logistical constraint that helps anchor the modern Iranian-Turkish border.
For a state that takes control of Anatolia, economic benefits abound. Its mild climate and adequate rainfall favor agriculture and timber, as well as improve the attractiveness of settlements, while the region's rivers (including the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates) provide farms with reliable water supplies. Anatolia's iron, copper, coal, gold, marble, and other natural resources also provide the raw materials for an advanced material culture. And its position between Russia and the Mediterranean, and between Europe and Asia more broadly, makes it a natural waypoint for trade routes, of which Anatolian states have always in some form or another taken their cut. On the route between Russia and the Mediterranean, Anatolian states control the critical Turkish straits, through which passes the breadbasket of Ukrainian and Russian grain to the rest of the world. These benefits have long made Anatolia a center of urban human civilization: one of the earliest cities in the world, Catalhoyuk, was founded in southwestern Anatolia an estimated 9,400 years ago.
These early advantages gave rise to great powers basing themselves in Anatolia, like the Hittites, Byzantines and Ottomans. But the disadvantages of being surrounded by other advanced civilizations — and in more recent times, advanced nation-states — have also exposed Anatolian powers to the potential of multifront challenges that at times they have been unable to balance. Anatolia's position on major trade routes brings material wealth, but also foreign ideas, cultures and religions that can destabilize the cultural heartland, disorganize the state, and open it up to internal divisions that external challengers can then exploit. The history of civilization in Anatolia generally experiences phases in which states are effective in balancing these factors and phases in which they collapse because they cannot.
Modern Anatolia has had centuries of settlement patterns that have left behind various cultural and religious artifacts. But it was the coming of the Turks in the 11th and 12th centuries that have since defined the region's dominant identity. The Turkish people, originally from Central-East Asia, settled down into the Anatolian plains and steadily colonized and transformed the demographic landscape, pushing out the region's Christian Greco-Roman identity and replacing it with Muslim Turkish culture over several centuries. One Turkish-speaking family — the Ottomans — founded a dynasty that would eventually expand into many of the same regions as the former Roman and Byzantine Empires along the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean. For centuries, the Ottomans, a great power themselves, achieved the necessary balance to maintain the empire.
Map of population density in Turkey
Turkey's Opportunities and Constraints in the 20th Century
Turkey's 20th-century experience went through four distinct phases: the late Ottoman period, the interwar republic, the Cold War, and the era of U.S.-led globalization that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. For Turkey, the century began with collapse, followed by consolidation, and then alignment.
Prior to the 20th century, the Ottoman Empire was a great Mediterranean power. In the 16th century, the empire had vassals and territory extending from Algeria to Crimea and dominated the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean's shores on borders similar to that of the Roman-Byzantine Empire at its own height. But by the 1600s, the Ottoman Empire was facing a resurgent Europe, where the Renaissance sparked new ideas, including military technologies, and the New World provided new wealth that helped European countries (like the Austrian Empire, Spain, Russia and Portugal) push Ottoman power back. In this era, the Ottoman state embarked on a period of strategic balancing, both at home and abroad. Internally, the sultanate tried to reform the empire without breaking its frail, multi-ethnic and religious social contract, sometimes without success. And externally, the Ottoman Empire abandoned expansionism in favor of playing European rivalries off against one another.
This strategy lasted hundreds of years, but its failure was inevitable amid the rise of new ideological, technological and strategic forces from Europe. The Ottoman Empire's fall came about as other multi-ethnic, dynastic systems around Europe were collapsing in the face of rising nationalism, industrialization, ideological conflict and increasing great power competition. Traditional empires were not well-suited to these challenges, including the Ottoman system. By the time of World War I, it was a matter of when, not if, the Ottoman Empire would fall. After defeat in 1918 and the Treaty of Sevres in 1919, the empire collapsed in all but name.
But the defeat of the Ottoman Empire did not mean the end of the Turkish people. Unlike previous phases of conquest, which had resulted in population displacement by foreigners moving into Anatolia, the victorious Allies in 1919 were in no position to colonize the region. With their demographic dominance further assured by the genocide of the Armenians during World War I, the numerous Turks living in Anatolia reorganized under Turkish Gen. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and successfully counterattacked. The Turkish War of Independence began the interwar period of reorganization and consolidation to create a modern Turkish state able to hold off the challenges of the 20th century.
General Ataturk and his supporters won the war against the Allies, but they inherited a disorganized state, along with a population divided by sect, ethnicity, class and region, and the rise of expansionary ideologies like fascism and communism. Ataturk's own political establishment was just as divided, and the prospect of recurrent civil wars loomed. Meanwhile, even beyond the clash of ideologies, Turkey still faced traditional foreign challenges. Turkey had already lost its Arab territories, and both Greece and its Kurdish populations aimed to further shrink Turkey's borders. To maintain a stable state, Turkey focused on national and political unity, producing an ideology able to compete with foreign ones, and navigate between hostile camps without being dragged into their wars.
General Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and his supporters — dubbed Kemalists — decided the best way to confront these ideological, political, security and diplomatic challenges was to build a secular, nationalist Turkish republic. To glue the Turkish people themselves together, they chose to embrace and build upon Turkish nationalism. This also required a break with the past: they began purging the Ottoman Empire's old associations with pan-Islamic ideals (but not from Islam itself), first by abolishing the caliphate in 1924 and then by adopting enforced secular norms that would last until the 21st century. They sought to emphasize Turkishness, replacing the Arabic alphabet with the Latin script in 1928. They moved the capital to the Anatolian heartland, Ankara, away from the baggage of the traditional capital of Constantinople (which had since been renamed Istanbul). Rather than a new Turkish monarchy or empire, they also chose to establish a republic, which would be less likely to suffer the dynastic hang-ups among the elites that had plagued the Ottomans. And to prevent revanchism by the still-powerful Muslim establishment, they created one of the first modern deep-states within this republic: a cadre of generals, politicians and businesspeople who would overthrow the political process should populists or Islamists pull Turkey back toward the failed policies of the Ottoman era. The enduring influence of these military, political and business leaders continues to shape Turkish politics, even as their ability to overthrow governments has waned.
Notably, this choice of Turkish nationalism left out one of Turkey's last remaining minorities: the Kurds, an independent ethnic group with roots in the country's isolated, mountainous southeast dating back thousands of years. In the 1920s, the Kurds did not seem to pose a major threat to Turkey; they lived in tribal and undeveloped regions and had never controlled their own country or empire. But Turkish nationalism provided an ideological foil that eventually saw the Kurds develop their own distinct identity, creating a long-term ethnically-based challenge to Turkish unity that crossed borders to other Kurdish regions in Syria, Iraq and Iran.
A map of the Ottoman Empire at its height in the 17th century
Abroad, the new state in Turkey realized it had to narrow its ambitions greatly from the imperial era, which overstretched the Ottoman Empire by bringing it into too many conflicts on too many fronts, and caused imperial models of governance to become increasingly difficult to sustain. In the interwar and World War II periods, Ankara stayed strictly neutral on international conflicts, preferring to await a victor in the competition between capitalist democracy, fascism and communism.
After World War II, Turkey began a period of alignment with the West against the Soviets, who had inherited Moscow's ambition to dominate the Turkish straits (this time through a communist revolution in Turkey). For decades, the Cold War defined most Turkish foreign interests: fears of a communist uprising and a Soviet-backed insurgency, particularly in the non-Turkish Kurdish southeast, kept Ankara largely aligned with the West for decades. This era saw Turkey use its access to Western technology, capital and defense industries to modernize and rebuild its military and economy to bury the Ottoman past further. At home, the Kemalist establishment, backed by the military, intervened in politics through coups or threats of coups in 1960, 1971, 1980 and 1997, maintaining the secular ideology of the state in the face of a surge of Islamic fundamentalism that began in the 1960s and 1970s.
There were hints of the old Anatolian impulses, however. In 1974, spurred by Turkish nationalists and exploiting a moment of NATO disunity over the future of Cyprus, Turkey launched an invasion of the northern part of the island, where thousands of ethnic Turks remained from the Ottoman era. This resulted in the creation of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which only Turkey recognizes. But in the Cold War, such moments were rare; Turkey had few opportunities to maneuver in places where the United States or the Soviets were not already active.
But with the end of the Cold War and the bipolar world order it created, would end, Turkey's opportunities and constraints would again shift.
The Erdogan Era and the Return to a Multipolar World
Though the Cold War ended in victory for the West, it produced only a short-lived unipolar moment, where international norms and behaviors were often shaped by the foreign policies set out by the West. As the United States embarked on military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, and its economy and social contract were hit by the 2008 financial crisis, the United States became increasingly unable to impose its global vision, while both rivals (like Russia, China and Iran) and friends (like France and Germany) grew bolder in asserting their own interests, even if it meant placing themselves in competition with the world's last superpower. A multipolar world, like that which dominated the global system before World War II, began to re-emerge. By the mid-2010s, this multipolar world order was firmly in swing, as the United States shifted its attention to China and away from the Middle East. The United States was not gone, but its interests had a different priority; policymakers no longer assumed they could chase all American interests equally as they had in the 1990s. With the global order redefined, Turkey's own interests were reshaped as well.
Turkey's own political and social institutions were undergoing their own transformation. By the late 1990s, the fear of reverting to failed Ottoman-era policies had long disappeared. Meanwhile, Islamist ideas and institutions were growing in popularity, often fused with Turkish nationalism. The meaning of Turkish unity thus changed and weakened the Kemalist argument for strictly enforced secularism, even at the expense of democracy and popular will.
These internal changes in attitudes and political redlines, combined with the establishment's loss of legitimacy in the wake of a weak Turkish economy, gave way to a shocking election victory for the Muslim Brotherhood-inspired Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2002 — bringing an Islamist government to power, led by Prime Minister (and eventually President) Recep Tayyip Erdogan, after almost a century of secular parties. The AKP leaned into these shifting attitudes, weakening the Kemalist establishment by taking control of the judiciary, the media and eventually the military. After the 2016 coup attempt against the AKP, a widespread purge allowed the ruling party to purge the government of the old Kemalist deep state and, in parts, replace it with its own. This process largely retained the old, centralized structure of the secular state, swapping out the Kemalist ideology for Turko-Islamist nationalism that better fit the public mood. The process was then furthered when Turkey swapped to a presidential system from a parliamentary one in 2018.
Meanwhile, regional developments also created challenges and opportunities for Turkey. The U.S. wars with Iraq created a power vacuum on Turkey's southern border that was filled by Iran, Islamist militants like al Qaeda, and eventually the Islamic State (IS). Most challenging to Turkey, an autonomous Kurdish region eventually organized as the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) that sought to formally establish the world's first Kurdish nation-state.
The Arab Spring in the early 2010s also provided openings for Turkish power, as well as challenges to it. The collapse of the Arab authoritarian regional order enabled Turkey, alongside Qatar, to try to spread its Islamist political vision to the Arab world; Turkish-aligned or -friendly Islamist governments emerged in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya before conventional counter-revolutionary forces, led by the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, eventually emerged to overthrow or deter them.
In Syria, the Arab Spring brought civil war, which Turkey initially saw as an opportunity to replace Syrian President Bashar al Assad's regime with one that might be more friendly to Ankara. But Turkey eventually saw the conflict as another power vacuum amid the emergence of a fresh Kurdish statelet, the Rojava region, led by the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Russia's intervention in Syria in 2015 also brought Russian forces close to Turkish ones in northern Syria, where Turkey was trying to prevent the expansion of the Rojava statelet — creating periods of confrontation and cooperation between Ankara and Moscow, whose interests clashed and converged in the course of the civil war.
Turkey's internal ideology also drove policy much further abroad — to Central Asia and Islamic Asia, where Ankara was postured as a leader of both the world's Muslim population and Turkish-speaking peoples. This did not provide a direct economic or military benefit to Ankara, and actually came with risks, as Turkey had to downplay China's policies against its Turkic-speaking and Uyghur Muslim minority populations to preserve commercial contacts with Beijing. But it did help legitimize the AKP in the eyes of the Turkish citizens looking for ideologically consistent leaders. While its ideological posturing abroad remained largely a political imperative, Turkey would only provide supportive rhetoric and limited aid, wary of entanglements that might come at the expense of other Turkish priorities, or spark pushback from important regional powers like China.
The Russian invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 added another chapter to Turkey's views of the global order. With Europe returning to an East-West military confrontation, Turkey staked out a middle ground: it would trade and buy weapons from Russia, but also support Ukraine's territorial integrity and, after 2022, provide arms to Kyiv.
The Imperatives of Modern Turkey
Today, Turkey exists in a global order with greater maneuvering for middle powers than in the 1990s and 2000s. It does not see itself as strictly a Middle Eastern, European, Turkic, Islamic or Western power, but as having ties to all these regions, with distinct differences that also separate Turkey from each.
There are no alignments that push Ankara into one camp or another permanently, but rather Turkey's interests in internal unity, access to global markets, and avoiding multi-front challenges that drive Turkish behavior.
Turkey is aware that some of its core interests are not the same as its NATO allies, and thus knows it cannot count on its fellow NATO members' support in pursuing those interests. Additionally, Turkey knows that some of its interests are in direct competition or contradiction with other great powers, including the United States, European Union, Russia, China and Iran. But Turkey knows these great powers are also in competition with one another and do not necessarily have the power to block all Turkish policies.
Within this context, Turkey's approach to great powers is often risk-averse and pragmatic, while its approach to minor and middle powers is often risk-friendly and more ideological — two broad patterns typical of middle powers.
Turkey's Modern Imperatives
Economic: Maintain access to global markets and investment flows, especially Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and Asia.
Security: Prevent the emergence of an independent Kurdish state in Syria, Iraq and southeastern Turkey; develop an indigenous arms industry able to free the country's military to operate with fewer diplomatic constraints.
Political: Paper over differences between various Muslim sects, ethnic groups and economic classes by leaning on an Islamo-nationalist ideology that draws on Ottoman, Kemalist, and pan-Islamic historical and social traditions.
Geographic: Secure the Turkish Straits, the Aegean coast, the Kurdish southeast and the Eastern Mediterranean to gain access to resources and trade, and/or block potential encroachment from rivals (like Russia, Egypt, Israel and Greece).
Diplomatic: Preserve access to NATO's military hardware by maintaining a working relationship with both NATO and the European Union; prevent the NATO alliance from drawing Turkey into extra-regional conflicts.
Turkey lacks the military, diplomatic, or economic strength to directly challenge great powers like the United States, China and Russia, or European powers like the United Kingdom, France and Germany. But these states, too, are increasingly constrained and distracted by the multipolar environment they are operating in — creating windows of opportunity for Turkey to periodically push for its interests, as well as play these powers' rivalries off one another to Turkey's benefit.
Turkey's current, oft-contentious relationships with the United States, the European Union and NATO exemplify this dynamic. Western politicians often expect Turkey to align with their strategies, much as it did during the Cold War. But Ankara increasingly sees daylight between Western interests and Ankara. While the West sees Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine as a challenge to the global order, Turkey does not ascribe to this vision. The ongoing war affects Turkish energy and food supplies, threatens the economies of its trade partners, and creates Western sanctions risks for Ankara. But Turkey is less concerned with the actual outcome of the conflict, as whoever ends up controlling Ukrainian territory will not affect Turkey's overarching strategies. For that matter, the NATO-Russia confrontation, with NATO steadily cutting Russia off from their economies, is also not a direct interest of Turkey, which needs Russian energy, grain, tourism and investment. But Turkey is not naturally aligned with Moscow either; it has little opinion on Moscow's goals to push back Western influence from post-Soviet states. And in some places — like the Caucuses, Syria and Libya — Turkey has come to blows with Russian forces or proxies.
When it comes to dealing with minor powers or fellow middle powers (like Syria, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates), Turkey is able to challenge, and even impose, conditions on rivals without incurring the dangerous blowback that it would from challenging a great power. In these interactions, Turkey's ideological and political goals drive policy more often, as evidenced by Ankara's recurrent military operations against Kurds in Syria and Iraq, despite protests from Damascus and Baghdad. Turkey can support its fellow Islamist powers (like Libya and Qatar) with force against anti-Islamist powers (like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates). But Turkey often compartmentalizes these competitions, aware that pushing too far with too many regional powers can create a multifront challenge or escalation Ankara does not desire. Turkey can trade with Iran while battling its proxies in Syria on the same day, or take investment from the United Arab Emirates while also backing opposing UAE and Egyptian-backed factions in Libya. Knowing the dangers of escalation, Turkish statecraft focuses narrowly on achievable goals.
Turkey's Imperative Outlook and Risks
Turkey's future geopolitical compulsions will be founded on the pursuit of its core interests. Instead of being defined by coherent blocs as they develop in the multipolar world, Turkey will maneuver within and between them, only aligning with a particular bloc should its interests strongly overlap with Turkey's. To this end, Ankara will take weak or ambivalent positions on the NATO-Russia and U.S.-China confrontations unless these conflicts threaten its own unity, produce power vacuums on its borders, threaten access to markets or create the prospect of a multi-front challenge to Turkey itself.
At home, Turkish nationalism will evolve to meet the ideological and social challenges of the 21st century. Kemalism, the secular ideology that helped establish the Turkish state after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, has already largely run its course, with fewer and fewer Turks worried about Islamist influence, so Turkish nationalism will grow to include more elements of Islam. But at the same time, a better-educated population more connected to the world will constrain the over-Islamization of Turkish society. Therefore, Islamization will be described as a process of liberalization against a strictly secular state, rather than as a reversion to an Islamist authoritarian past.
But with Islamo-nationalism at the country's ideological core, Turkey's political system is unlikely to integrate the religiously diverse Kurds. Instead, Kurds will experience cycles of toleration and suppression; periods of toleration will likely involve government-led pushes for assimilation, and when Kurds resist these efforts, Turkey will revert to suppression until the dust settles, kicking off the cycle anew.
Because Turkey will be unable to solve the Kurdish challenge at home, it will also have to prioritize strategies that block the creation of a Kurdish state in any of its neighbors. This will mean coming to regional accommodations with the powers that might enable, intentionally or not, a Kurdish state, like Syria, Iran, Iraq, Russia and the United States.
These accommodations will be shaped by diplomacy and force. Since Iran, Iraq and Syria also oppose a Kurdish state, Turkey will use diplomatic connections with them to coordinate action against Kurdish secessionism and militancy. But if these states are too weak to be effective partners, Turkey will resort to military force. In the near term, military forces will have to maneuver around the United States and Russia, neither of which want to see Turkey expand into Iran, Iraq or Syria. But as both the United States and Russia become more focused on other global priorities, they will also likely retrench from the region, which will give Turkey greater freedom to operate against the Kurds. Turkey will also carefully follow the normalization of territorial expansionism; should the multipolar world order enable expansionism, Ankara may be tempted to convert its current buffer zones in Syria and Iraq into occupied territories, proxy republics or even Turkish territory if such tactics would enable it to prevent the formation of a Kurdish state.
Beyond the Kurdish question, Turkey must have access to foreign energy, goods and resources, which will inevitably include sourcing such imports from countries engaged in rivalries and even war with one another. For example, Western sanctions regimes may escalate over the coming years, particularly in the case of a crisis with China or a further escalation of tensions with Russia, and these sanctions will aim to stop nations like Turkey from importing goods from targeted countries. But Turkey will resist such pressure by using its middle position to earn exemptions and concessions from its Western allies, only fully cooperating if the West offsets the economic impact of such trade cutoffs. As part of this pattern, Turko-EU relations will remain pragmatic, if fraught; the European Union will not allow Turkey to enter the bloc as long as Turkey's ideological and political imperatives undermine its democratic institutions, but neither will the European Union use its economic heft against Turkey to force potentially destabilizing political change inside the country. Turkey will also resist the European Union's pressure to democratize, seeing joining the bloc as a weaker imperative than maintaining its internal political stability.
Finally, Turkey will use both its position in NATO and its independence from it to avoid being dragged into damaging foreign conflicts. Hypothetical wars like a Chinese invasion of Taiwan or a U.S-Iranian war are unlikely to inspire Turkey to join its NATO allies barring direct threats to Turkish security. However, Turkey's NATO membership will help deter Iranian, Greek or Russian aggression, which means Ankara will not leave the alliance of its own accord. Turkey will also use its NATO membership to ensure that when it asserts its own interests, pushback from the West remains diplomatic and economic, rather than military. Overall, Turkey will rarely be fully aligned with or against NATO's interests.
But even as this approach to the multipolar world appears to minimize risks, Ankara will at times misjudge shifts in the global strategic environment and could suffer serious consequences as a result. Its Islamo-Turkish ideology will bind its governments to anti-Kurdish policies that at times could spark Western sanctions or produce military confrontations for which the country is not prepared. This same ideology will also drive economic policies that may be out of sync with more orthodox approaches, leaving Turkey in greater debt and more exposed to downturns in the global macroeconomic environment. Its political centralization at home will not be entirely popular, either, and at times it will spark unrest, protests and widespread violence. Such unrest could grow significant enough to affect the Turkish economy or disorganize the government, potentially leading to prolonged periods of internal stability that would make it difficult for Turkey to assert its foreign policies.
Turkey's multipolar balance will hinge on successful navigation between great power rivalries and wars, but its ideological inclinations will at times sabotage this balance. This ideological contradiction with orthodox strategy appears unlikely to produce a crisis too great for the modern Turkish state to balance, but it will result in significant setbacks and behavior that some will see as erratic. However unlikely, this contradiction carries with it a low, long-term risk of serious destabilization in Turkey that could begin another cycle of collapse, consolidation and alignment.
