Turkish Foreign Policy and the Middle East: Compartmentalized, Cautious, and Multi-Directional Cooperation
Türkiye’s influence and involvement in Middle Eastern politics have steadily grown in recent years, and policies that position Ankara as a regional agenda-setter and constructive actor have begun to stand out. Türkiye’s Middle East outlook in foreign policy offers insights into both the internal political dynamics and its relations with the West and global affairs. The years in which Ankara remained a passive diplomatic interlocutor in the Middle East ended with the combined impact of global, regional and domestic dynamics such as the end of the Cold War, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, and Turgut Özal’s political vision that projected Türkiye’s role into the region. Therefore, examining Türkiye’s foreign policy toward the region requires a three-dimensional analysis. The first dimension concentrates on domestic politics, influenced by the political preferences of governments in power during specific periods and by ongoing internal agendas, and explores how Ankara’s political reasoning regarding the Middle East is reflected in regional policy. The second dimension examines Türkiye’s reactions to events in the Middle East, assessing whether Ankara has acted reactively or proactively through regional cooperation or diplomatic tensions. In this phase, Türkiye’s ability to correctly interpret rising tensions and rapprochements in the region and its capacity to negotiate with different interest groups have varied across periods. This process has largely been shaped by the strategic choices of political leaders of the time. The final dimension involves global trends that develop either independently of Türkiye’s domestic politics and regional engagement or as a result of their influence. These dynamics can broadly be understood as ranging between systemic uncertainty and global stability, shaping Ankara’s regional outlook as a middle power engaged in economic, political and military cooperation with global actors.
Considering all three analytical dimensions, it can be argued that since the Arab uprisings that began at the end of 2010, Türkiye has pursued a Middle East policy marked by cautious and compartmentalized alliances within a landscape of multiple regional hegemonies. To understand this policy, which has evolved over the past two decades, it is necessary to define the regional and global dynamics shaping it.
