“No issue in the Middle East can be discussed without Turkey.” So spoke Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in March 2013 as he boasted how the Justice and Development Party (AKP) had transformed Turkey from a country that “sought help from others 10 years ago” to a country that leads “an active foreign policy” and sees “the whole world” as the domain of its diplomacy.

More recently, on Oct. 22, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan grumbled about how the 1923 Lausanne Treaty, which led to the creation of modern Turkey on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, “shrank our lands to 780,000 square kilometers [480,000 square miles] from 2.5 million square kilometers [1.5 million square miles] in 1914.” Things had to change, according to Erdogan. “Those who have kept Turkey confined to this vicious circle since 1923 have sought to make us forget the millennium-old memory of our lands.” he said. “We can’t go on with the psychology of 1923 in 2016. We can’t take pride in having preserved our 1923 posture while everything in the world has been changing since we established the republic. We have to abandon the notion of ‘defense lines’ in protecting the republic. … We have to resolve the Mosul issue at Mosul.”

Such AKP outbursts have often been criticized as neo-Ottomanism, expansionism and sectarianism. Such criticism has recently escalated, with added reproofs of irredentism fueled largely by Erdogan’s emphasis on a new security policy, which could be summarized as “intervention in developments that threaten the country’s interests and security, regardless of where they happen.”

Examples of this new approach include Turkish operations against the Islamic State (IS) and the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) on Syrian soil; Turkey’s military presence in Iraq; eagerness to take part in the liberation of Mosul; vocal objections to Shiite dominance in the area; and efforts to cast itself as Mosul’s protector. What does all this mean in political terms? To what extent is the AKP’s ideology swaying Turkey’s foreign policy?