The recent deal between Turkey and the United States (US) on the governance of the Syrian town of Manbij marks the provisional culmination of the Turkish military campaign against the Kurds in Syria. It foresees the withdrawal of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) from the city, which will enable Turkish armed proxies to establish control.[1] The deal seals Turkish control over the Afrin area, provides a launch pad for potential military operations towards the east and handily resolves the risk of confrontation between Turkey and YPG-allied US forces in the area. The Turkish army and its auxiliaries took control of Afrin with a speed and success that are remarkable given the mix of mountainous and urban terrain that its recently purged forces had to contend with.[2] The entire episode has also become yet another of the many unexpected twists in the Syrian civil war.

However, the Turkish invasion did not materialise overnight. Rather, it is the product of a series of domestic, regional and global political developments over the past 16 years. This report examines shifts in Turkish foreign policy towards the Middle East between 2002 and 2018 on the basis that they are largely a function of the country’s domestic politics.[3] In the case of Afrin, Turkey’s unresolved domestic ‘Kurdish issue’, which reignited in force after the 2015 Turkish elections, is the key explanatory factor. A country’s foreign policy is of course also influenced by regional and global events.[4] In addition, domestic developments influence foreign policy and foreign policy is used for domestic purposes.[5] Nevertheless, on balance, our analysis suggests that domestic Turkish politics are the more decisive variable for understanding the country’s foreign policy towards the Middle East. This should hardly come as a surprise given the work-in-progress that the Turkish state-building project has proven to be over past decades.

For this report, it is argued that Turkish domestic politics between 2002 and 2018 feature four key developments. To start with, the political ascent of the Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AKP) gradually removed the Turkish military from its decade-long role as (in)formal guardian of the Kemalist state,[6] culminating in the 2016 attempted coup.[7] In the same period, the religious character of the AKP grew in tandem with its political strength. This has meant that, particularly since 2007, Islamist and statist policies have gradually become more prominent after an initially more progressive and liberal period of AKP rule. Linked to this, the AKP’s majoritarian understanding of democracy and its authoritarian reflexes triggered a dynamic process in which electoral success and state control reinforced each other to keep the party in power.[8] Ultimately, their interaction produced a broad range of illiberal effects. Finally, the power base and role of one person within the AKP, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has consolidated in the form of a rewrite of Turkey’s constitution creating a powerful presidency and suggesting an overall regression of the independence and plurality of Turkish state institutions.

There have been many foreign policy reverberations from these developments. Critical junctures include: a shift from Turkey’s initially peaceful, economically-based foreign policy to a more aggressive, security-focused one ; an increase in support for the Muslim Brotherhood and armed Sunni groups across the region, particularly after 2011; a shift from seeking a deal with Kurds in Turkey to a much more antagonistic policy towards Kurds in Turkey, Syria and – to a lesser extent – Iraq; and a shift from a pro-Western foreign policy orientation to a mixed Western-Eurasian one.

The report explores linkages between these domestic political developments and such shifts in Turkish foreign policy towards the Middle East. In a bid to make sense of such profound changes, the report starts with a short analysis of the political fortunes of the AKP between 2002 and 2018 (Section 2). Subsequently, it takes a closer look at the reverberations of key domestic trends and events in Turkish foreign policy through a mix of general analysis and three short case studies – Syria, Iraq and Iran/Saudi Arabia (Section 3). It closes with a few forward-looking reflections relevant to policy makers in both the region itself and in Europe (Section 4).