Turkish Foreign Policy

The AKP’s policy towards Palestine is the main core of this article. The Turkish authorities have tried to play as the mediator in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and have attempted through various political and economic initiatives to support a peace agreement between both sides. However, after the 2008 Gaza war, the AKP government’s foreign policy stance towards Israel began to change, at least officially. This war, alongside to other events such as 2009 Davos, the 2010 Low Chair and the 2010 Mavi Marmara, produced a public political conflict in the Turkish-Israeli relations. This tension extended from the 2008 Gaza war until the normalization deal between the two countries in June 2016. But this political tension did not have very impact on the other current fields of cooperation between Ankara and Tel Aviv. This emphasizes clearly that both countries were pragmatic in maintaining efficient and strategic ties. The major research question can be stated as the following: What has been the Turkish government's policy on the Palestinian issue between 2002-2020? In addition we want to assess the proximity and distance of Turkey's policies from Iranian perspectives and positions.

This article analyzes the transformation of Turkish foreign policy towards the Middle East during the turbulent years initiated with the Arab Spring. In due course, Turkish policy considerably shifted from proactive engagement with the region in the early 2000s to a bid to leading regional transformation, particularly in the initial years of the Arab Spring. However, the reversal of the Arab Spring increasingly presented a blowback for Türkiye’s regional engagements. The ensuing regional insecurity resulted in a realist turn in Turkish foreign policy, with frequent resort to military instruments and coercive diplomacy. Eventually, regional policies of Türkiye corresponded to the search for de-escalation and normalization within the emerging Middle Eastern order since 2020. The article argues that changing regional dynamics corresponding with domestic conditions influenced and shaped Türkiye’s policies towards the Middle East. Recently, under the impact of the regional-systemic pressures coupled with changing domestic conditions, recalibrating its regional engagement, Türkiye has prioritized the normalization agenda. It argues that while normalization agenda will remain an important objective for Türkiye’s regional policies, it will evolve in a partial manner, and case-by-case, conditional on the unfolding regional order and Ankara’s strategic priorities.