Turkey’s recent diplomatic reconciliations with both Israel and Russia came as a pleasant surprise to a country that has lately grown numb to bad news. There are also signs of positive steps with Egypt and even Syria, as signaled this week by Prime Minister Binali Yildirim. Yildirim had promised this shift right after coming to power in late May, when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan replaced former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu with him. “We’ll increase the number of our friends and we’ll decrease the number of our enemies,” Yildirim had said, and apparently he meant it.

Of course, this pragmatic turn in Turkish foreign policy is a positive move that should be welcomed and supported. However, Turkey’s rulers — Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) — should understand why they moved away from pragmatism in the first place. They should also understand that Turkey desperately needs reconciliation within itself as well.

In fact, the lesson that Erdogan needs to draw lies in his own recent past. In his first eight years in power, from 2002 to 2010, he pursued a basically moderate and reformist policy at home and a modest and realist one abroad. At the core of this approach lay the elimination of the concept of “enemies.” In a 2010 speech that captured the spirit of the time, Erdogan criticized the “Old Turkey” for seeing itself as “a country surrounded by seas from three sides, and enemies from four sides.” Whenever the state failed, Erdogan had added, the blame was placed on these imagined enemies, and that was why Turkey could not make progress.

Sadly, soon after fully dominating the state structure and destroying its checks and balances, Erdogan began to adopt the exact same narrative, pumping out a strident mix of nationalism and Islamism. Especially after the Gezi Park protests of June 2013, he began telling his base that the world is full of heinous enemies that conspire against his glorious “New Turkey.” The opposition forces, he added, are a fifth column of these dark powers. This propaganda has worked very well for consolidating Erdogan’s religious base, but it did not help the sinking Turkish lira, the decline in foreign investment and tourism or Turkey's diplomatic weakness. After all the brouhaha, it turned out that a country does not live on propaganda alone.