Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has trodden a fine line between the west, Russia and China for more than two decades. Turkey has profited from helping both sides in Russia’s war against Ukraine, extended its military reach and influence in Syria, Libya, the south Caucasus, the eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf, spread its soft power in Africa, central Asia and the western Balkans, and built a substantial national defence industry.
When international relations experts assess this, they often fall back on the term “balancing act”. Turkish analysts prefer to speak of a quest for “strategic autonomy” – the ability to defend the country’s interests against all threats without being dependent on any outside power.
But in the second Trump era can Erdoğan sustain his geopolitical acrobatics and reap benefits? A bromance between the two strongmen characterised Trump’s last term but there was also a series of clashes and misunderstandings that sowed deep distrust between Turkey and the US.
“This is [Erdogan’s] fifth US president … he’s not exactly afraid of the Oval Office,” Aaron Stein, a Turkey specialist who is president of the US Foreign Policy Research Institute, told a recent European Policy Centre event. The relationship is now one of stable instability, he said, and while the two countries don’t get along well any more, “there’s no breaking of the Nato link”.
Under Donald Trump’s first administration, the US kicked Turkey out of its flagship F35 fighter aircraft consortium after Ankara defied Washington by buying an advanced air defence system from Russia.
For his part, Erdoğan accused the US of harbouring and abetting Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish Islamic preacher based in Pennsylvania, whom he blamed for a 2016 coup attempt that nearly toppled him. Gülen died last year, removing one irritant.
At one point, Trump publicly threatened to destroy Turkey’s economy if Erdoğan sent troops into Syria to attack US-backed Kurdish forces, which Ankara regards as a branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), its most deadly domestic foe.
Yet Erdoğan was one of the world leaders who welcomed Trump’s second election victory most enthusiastically, while Trump has described the authoritarian Turkish leader as a friend and voiced admiration for Turkey’s role in helping bring about the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime in Syria, toppled by the Turkish-backed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in December.
There are opportunities and pitfalls for Turkey in the return of a mercurial US leader who is less likely than Joe Biden to keep Erdoğan in quarantine over his baleful record on human rights, media freedom and state capture, but may be tougher on his bombastic hostility to Israel and support for Hamas.
Erdoğan was never welcomed to the White House under Biden and ties were frosty, whereas Trump still takes his phone calls. The new administration recognises that Turkey, a pivotal nation of 85 million people strategically located on the hinge of Europe, Asia and the Middle East, controlling access to the Black Sea, has become an important, self-confident middle power, with influence spanning from central Asia to Africa and the Arab world.
Despite refusing to join western sanctions against Russia over its war in Ukraine, and recently asking unsuccessfully to join the Brics group of non-western emerging powers dominated by Moscow and Beijing, Turkey remains anchored in the west as a member of Nato and an eternal, if no-hope, candidate for EU membership.
On the plus side, Turkish and US experts see an opportunity to lay to rest the dispute over the Russian S-400 missiles. A possible compromise would be to secure the mothballed Russian kit in storage on the Incirlik airbase where the US air force has one of its largest concentrations of troops in the Middle East. In return, Washington would lift arms sanctions on Turkey and sell it F35s, though it’s not clear whether Ankara, which is developing its own fighter aircraft, is now so keen to rejoin the programme.
There may also be an opportunity for the US and Turkey to cooperate more closely in Syria, where they have been at loggerheads ever since Washington lent support to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a Kurdish militia in north-eastern Syria that Ankara says is an offshoot of the PKK. Stein called that alliance “the ultimate sin” in Turkish eyes.
As part of his effort to disengage from “forever wars” in the Middle East, Trump tried unsuccessfully in his first term to withdraw US special forces operating alongside the SDF against Islanic State in Syria.
Relations with eternal regional rival Greece are back in a constructive phase after Erdoğan threatened to bomb Turkey’s Aegean neighbour during his last presidential campaign.
Ankara has also complied with discreet warnings from the US Treasury to curb the activities of banks suspected of helping sanctioned Russian oligarchs move money offshore and facilitating trade with Moscow in goods sanctioned by the US and the European Union. Turkey’s trade with Russia has nearly tripled since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine although it has suffered from a loss of Russian tourism. Yet Ankara has also continued to supply arms to Kyiv including Bayraktar drones that proved crucial in the early days of the war and are now being manufactured in Ukraine.
Some Turkish commentators speculate that Erdoğan might offer to mediate between Trump and Vladimir Putin. But former Turkish diplomat Alper Coşkun said he did not believe Putin would want to “give the glory” of mediating with the US to any third-party intermediary, and in particular not to Turkey in the aftermath of Syria.
On the minus side, Erdoğan’s full-throated support for Hamas and Palestinian resistance – accusing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu of “genocide” and comparing him to Hitler – may bring him into confrontation with a pro-Israeli Trump administration.
Yet, Erdoğan was on the brink of welcoming Netanyahu to Turkey and restoring relations just before Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023. Israel’s heavy-handed military response against Gaza caused a new crisis in ties.
Ankara officially severed trade relations with Israel last year, but Mustafa Aydın, president of the International Relations Council of Turkey, told me that oil from Azerbaijan continues to flow to Israel via Turkish ports and trade with “Palestine” has since spiked by 2,400% in official Turkish statistics, suggesting business continues under a different name. Likewise, the head of Israel’s internal security service, Shin Bet, is reported by Israeli media to have held secret talks with his Turkish counterpart, Ibrahim Kalın, in November.
Pragmatic, western-educated advisers such as Kalın and foreign minister Hakan Fidan are thought to be in the ascendancy in Erdoğan’s entourage, whereas hardline nationalist military and political advisers seem to have been sidelined.
Perhaps the biggest wild-card risk to US-Turkish ties is the possibility of Turkey and Israel coming into direct confrontation in Syria, where they have effectively become neighbours in the post-Assad security vacuum. Aydın noted that Israeli politicians and academics were increasingly talking up Turkey as a threat to the Jewish state, while some Turkish military planners fear that Israel, in covert collaboration with Kurdish fighters, could become a threat to Turkey.
An Israel-Turkey clash could wreck Trump’s plans to pacify and disengage from the Middle East. Erdoğan seems too cunningly pragmatic to let it come to that.
Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre
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