AL-Monitor
[Ankara appears to be mulling a US-friendly foreign policy revision to
counter Iran and Russia in the Caucasus and Black Sea regions, but
such a shift will not be without geopolitical risks elsewhere.]
By Metin Gurcan
Dec. 24, 2020
In a rather unusual post on its website last week, Turkey’s Defense
Ministry published footage and pictures from a meeting the country’s
defense and foreign ministers had with representatives of two Turkic
minorities — the Ahiska Turks and the Gagauzes — during their visit to
Ukraine. Holding meetings with Turkic minorities abroad and
publicizing them is hardly commonplace for Turkish defense ministers,
as long-time Ankara watchers would know. Such contacts have been the
duty primarily of the Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related
Communities, a branch of the Culture and Tourism Ministry, within the
scope of soft power projection rather than defense and security.
Ankara’s interest in its ethnic kin abroad has markedly perked since
the flare-up of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Azerbaijan and
Armenia in late September. Turkey’s military assistance to Azerbaijan,
with which it has close political and ethnic bonds, helped the Azeri
army reclaim some of the territories that Armenian forces had occupied
since the early 1990s. In Turkey, the six-week war shifted public
attention to the South Caucasus from the Middle East, where Turkish
military operations in Syria and Libya had dominated the country’s
foreign agenda in the past several years.
The state-owned and pro-government media, in particular, have hailed
the Russian-brokered cease-fire deal as a victory for both Azerbaijan
and Turkey. A joint Turkish-Russian center to monitor the truce has
been portrayed as “the return of Turkish soldiers to Azerbaijan after
102 years” and the planned reopening of transport routes in the region
as Turkey’s gain of a strategic gateway to the Turkic republics of
Central Asia.
On Dec. 10, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan attended a
celebratory military parade in Baku, where his speech included verses
by a nationalist Azeri poet that sparked a diplomatic row with Iran.
For some Turkish observers, Erdogan’s speech resonated as the signal
of a shift in Ankara’s foreign policy.
Though the controversial verses belonged to anonymous folklore, they
had inspired a 1960 poem lamenting Azerbaijan’s 19th-century partition
between Iran and Russia by Azeri poet Bahtiyar Vahapzade, an ardent
supporter of the pan-Turkism movement, which advocates the cultural
and political unification of all Turkic peoples in the world.
Vahapzade was stigmatized as a “nationalist” over the poem and
expelled from his post as a university professor in what was then the
Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic.
The row with Tehran abated, as Ankara seemed to have misunderstood the
poem as a reference to the Armenian occupation of Azeri lands. Still,
Erdogan’s emphasis on stronger bonds with Azerbaijan reinforced
anticipation that the focus of his foreign policy will increasingly
shift from the Arab world to the Caucasus, the Black Sea and Caspian
basins, and Central Asia. Efforts to invigorate ties including
military and security cooperation with the Central Asian Turkic
republics — which Ankara has neglected for some time — should not come
as a surprise.
Dictating the shift is the realpolitik of both foreign and domestic
politics. In the regional context, Erdogan’s government has ended up
with no real allies in the Middle East and North Africa except Qatar,
despite its claim at leadership in the Muslim world. At home, the
declining political fortunes of Erdogan’s Justice and Development
Party (AKP) have made it a hostage of its ally, the far-right
Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), which promotes Turkish nationalism
and stronger ties with Azerbaijan and the rest of the Turkic world. To
preserve his strong grip on power, Erdogan needs to sustain the
alliance, so he is unlikely to object to his voter base becoming more
nationalist amid a pan-Turkist orientation in foreign policy and
growing populist, far-right and nationalist sentiments in domestic
politics. The AKP and the MHP have sought to woo the Good Party,
another nationalist outfit, to their alliance, which is another
dynamic nourishing the pan-Turkist twist in foreign policy.
Whether this new inclination is a transient or lasting one is hard to
gauge, given the fast U-turns in Erdogan’s foreign policy record.
Still, judging by the writings of scholars close to the government,
Ankara appears on course to enter the new year with a pan-Turkist
perspective at the expense of angering Moscow and Tehran.
According to Burhanettin Duran, the head of a pro-government think
tank, Tehran is “deeply unhappy” with Ankara’s growing regional
influence and worried about the prospect of shifting allegiances in
the region after the change of guard in Washington. “In this new
chapter, the great game between regional powers will involve Turkey,
Iran and Israel — with the former having the upper hand. The Iranian
elite must now put aside their nationalistic pride and exaggerated
hopes, and focus on the region's new geopolitics,” Duran wrote in a
Dec. 17 article in the Daily Sabah.
Seemingly, Ankara’s preparations for a Joe Biden White House involve
plans for a foreign policy readjustment with a pan-Turkist flavor that
would aim to isolate Iran and contain Russia in the Black Sea and
Caucasus regions with Israel’s support. Such objectives, Ankara seems
to believe, will strike a chord with the Biden administration, which
assumes office Jan. 20.
Yet such a shift would come with the increased risk of a geopolitical
disconnect between Turkey’s postures to the north and the south. To
counterbalance Russia and isolate Iran to the north, that is the Black
Sea and the Caucasus, Turkey would need to lean on the Western
security bloc, get NATO involved, improve ties with Ukraine and Israel
and, most importantly, reset ties with Washington under the Biden
administration.
To the south, however, Turkey needs continued Russian and Iranian
cooperation to counterbalance the United States and Europe in the
Syrian conflict and the energy rivalry in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Such a geopolitical disconnect poses a tough dilemma that will
inevitably strain and test Ankara’s capabilities next year.