Turkey has faced a stark beginning to 2022. Its foreign policy, which appeared to be triumphant and very effective in 2021, is suffering a rough start to the new year amid a currency meltdown and skyrocketing inflation at home.

The unprecedented and violent protests that erupted in Kazakhstan on Jan. 2 betrayed Turkey’s assertive foreign policy flaws perhaps more vividly than any other incident over the past three years. Oddly, the protests have hardly received the attention it deserves in Turkey because of the country’s highly consuming domestic political and financial situation. 

In 2020, Turkey’s military and political role in Libya changed the course of the war in favor of the Tripoli-based forces in the country’s civil war. Turkey challenged France, Greece and the European Union during a standoff over conflicting territorial claims in the Eastern Mediterranean. In the fall of 2020, Turkey’s military, political and diplomatic support for Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh war changed the balance of power dramatically in favor of Baku. Thus, with boosted Trans-Caspian ambitions extending to Turkic Central Asia via Azerbaijan, Turkey entered 2021 as a new revisionist power, albeit not on the same par with Russia and China.

Turkey has aimed to utilize the Cooperation Council of Turkic-speaking states to realize its ambitions in Central Asia. The brainchild of Kazakhstan’s former leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, the council was planned in 2006 and launched in 2009. In accordance with its new political grandstanding, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan became the new chairman of the body in 2021 during a summit held in Istanbul on Nov. 12.