Turkey, Lonely Man Of the Middle East
Turkish foreign policy is in endemic crisis because of the Islamist and sectarian foreign policies of the AKP government.
Today, four years and three months after the appointment of Ahmet Davutoglu as Turkish foreign minister, Ankara's foreign policy faces an endemic crisis.
The problem with the “new Turkish foreign policy,” managed by the duo of Davutoglu and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, goes beyond bad governance, incompetence and wrong-headed tactics. Had these features been the only issues, one would not label the current situation “endemic.” Rather, it is ideology that leads to it being an “endemic crisis.” Before dissecting this ideology, it is useful to ponder the panorama of crises, starting with the most recent and working backward.
There is this reality: Foreign policies of countries that are not a direct party to an issue at hand will be affected by developments negatively or positively depending on the scope of the positions they have taken. The coup in Egypt, which constitutes Ankara's latest strategic foreign policy loss, evolved accordingly. Turkey became the country most negatively affected by the coup because of the ideological and political positions it had adopted vis-à-vis the phenomenon referred to as the Arab Spring.
After the onset of the Arab Spring, Turkey shaped its policy in the eastern Mediterranean on a fantasy of “Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] internationalism” through which to create a new regional order hand in hand with other Sunni Islamist actors. This strategic approach would bestow Turkey with “game changing and proprietor of the change” roles to allow it to assume a superior position among its partners. The foreign policy makers in Ankara enunciated this wishful thinking on many occasions using a variety of different words.
