Maximilian Hess is the founder of the London-based political risk consultancy Enmetena Advisory and a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and associate fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
James Ryan is the Executive Director of the Middle East Research and Information Project. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania and writes frequently on politics and culture in Turkey’s past and present.
Nicholas Danforth and Aaron Stein recently cautioned that Washington and the West must ‘come to terms’ with losing Turkey’ as a key geopolitical ally. We disagree. A positive case for how to get the most from the current relationship and prepare for its growth in the future is more urgent than ever. Turkish domestic dynamics are at a particularly tender moment, as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been dealt a defeat in recent mayoral elections, and is four years away from closing out his final term as President, according to the current constitutional rules.
There are many areas where the US can be a positive influence in the near and medium term, chief among them on Syria policy where the US and Turkey have long been at odds. As Erdoğan and Bashar al-Assad are sending signals of normalization of their bilateral ties, the US could work to make sure a Turkish-Syrian rapprochement does not continue to trample on marginalized refugee populations, or greenlight significant military action against its Kurdish partners. Additionally, Washington can still hope for positive contributions from Ankara with regards to Russia policy and European energy security. Washington’s demands have not, and will not, sway Ankara – but the right offers may.
There remain significant potential upsides to further developing the West’s relationship with Turkey, for both sides of the bargaining table – and in particular for the United States, EU, and regional and global governance. Looking ahead to a post-Erdoğan horizon, western policymaking institutions should find ways to non-coercively signal that a Turkey that restores rule of law, cleans up its human rights record, and reverses its authoritarian slide has friends and wealth waiting for it on the other end.
Addressing these challenges in the international relationship and in Turkey’s domestic dynamics will take work. But Ankara’s geostrategic position is not going away – and is only increasingly important. Even if the U.S. does somehow manage to extract itself from its long-standing overfocus on the Middle East – an always-unlikely outcome made all-but-impossible amid Israel’s war in Gaza and threatened expansion of the conflict – Turkey will remain crucial in a number of areas of Western interests – including with regards to migration towards Europe, efforts to constrain Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin, energy policy particularly on natural gas, and political transition and instability on the horizon in the Caucasus and in Iran.
As Stein and Danforth correctly identify, “U.S. policy is to now engage with Turkey on specific issues of concern, rather than simply build policy around Turkey as a crucial and trusted partner” but while they recognize that transactionalism can result in key benefits to the relationship, they also argue that “where U.S.-Turkish interests overlap…Turkey will work toward these interests without the need for American incentives. Where U.S.-Turkish interests diverge, Turkey will do what it wants regardless of what America tells it”. This is precisely the argument for both more assertive engagement and for offering Ankara more carrots that create an overlap of interests, rather than focusing on sticks and a strategy of coercion.
This relationship has worked best when the messaging from the West has encouraged deeper cooperation, and supported stable democratic growth, best demonstrated in the early years of the Cold War when the Marshall Plan and NATO membership worked to amplify democratic progress.
Carrots and Sticks
To understand Turkey’s role in the western bloc we must clearly understand how Turkey ended up joining Western institutions in the first place. While Turkey has perceived itself as “westernizing” in social, cultural, and institutional modes since the beginning of the republic, it would be a far stretch to say that the regime of Atatürk and his initial successor shared much ideological affinity with Western Europe and the United States. During World War II, the prime motivating factor behind Turkey’s quixotic neutrality was a fear of Russian encroachment on Turkish sovereignty – and it was for this reason Turkey only joined the Allies after the German defeat at Stalingrad, and even then in name only.
Following the war, Stalin voiced several revisionist aspirations on the regime across the Straits and regarding borderland territories in Turkey’s northeastern provinces. This prompted Turkey to hew closely to the western bloc in the San Francisco conference in August 1945, and ultimately join the Marshall Plan in July 1947. It was only after signing those documents, which would ultimately provide Turkey with massive western-backed economic assistance, that Turkey would commit itself to a more democratic future, which would first erupt in the defeat of Atatürk’s party and the ascension of Adnan Menderes’ Democrat Party in the 1950 parliamentary elections.
This sequence of events is often credited to some deep commitment to liberalization on the part of Turkey’s authoritarian ruler of the time – President İsmet İnönü. On the contrary, İnönü had already proved throughout the war to be ruthless in his suppression of dissent and ambivalent in his commitments to liberalism and democracy throughout his career. Rather, it was the perception that limited liberalization and democratization would secure even greater security against a Russian threat that prompted İnönü’s decisions to advance multiparty politics in Turkey. This should be a key example to keep in mind as a post-Erdoğan future creeps closer to a reality.
Knowing what to ask
Learning from these past successful approaches, the West must take a selective but targeted approach towards offering Ankara carrots. The Turkish economy remains strained and Erdogan will likely grab at any and all such opportunities – for evidence one need to look no further than the benefits that Erdogan has extracted from Russia through the construction of the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant, set to open next year that have stretched from Russian subsidies for its construction to extracting funds from the programme to help support the Turkish bond markets as they cratered in 2022.
The West – and in particular the United States – has the ability to offer far greater carrots, however, and indeed the Biden Administration and Western allies have quietly already begun to do so. We’ve already seen Turkey open to these efforts. At June’s St. Petersburg International Economic Forum – Russia’s alternative to Davos – Putin himself complained about the successes here, stating “it seems to me that the economic bloc of the Turkish government has lately been focused on obtaining, loans, investments and grants from Western financial institutions…but if this is connected with limiting the trade and economic connections with Russia then the losses for the Turkish economy will be greater than the gains”. Turkish trade with Russia did indeed stall in the first quarter of 2024. And while Washington has expanded its secondary sanctions threats over support for the Russian economy, no notable Turkish financial institutions or even smaller money transfer services were targeted in the first major round of such designations issued on 12 June.
It is, regrettably, unrealistic to hope that Erdogan will join the sanctions regime against Russia in full, or take significant steps to embrace it more. But that is not to say that Turkey is entirely unresponsive to Western sanctions policy against Russia. Erdogan will continue to seek to transact with Russia and the West, but it is clear that he also has very strict red lines for the relationship with Moscow. Ankara has never recognised Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and Erdogan has repeatedly granted Turkish state awards to members of the region’s indigenous Crimean Tatar population and called for the release of activists from the community, which suffers state sponsored discrimination under Putin’s occupation. Erdogan sees Turkey as the leading power in Eurasia, and his support for the Crimean Tatars follows in part from his efforts to position himself as the leader of Turkic peoples across the region, as seen through the Organization of Turkic States that Turkey founded when Erdogan was prime minister in 2009.
It is more urgent than ever that the West engage seriously with the idea that Turkey may be its energy hub of the future – and to transact accordingly – rather than leave open the door to future weaponization of energy supplies by Putin.
The economics of natural gas reveal how Erdogan’s interests are increasingly diverging from Russia’s, even as Turkey remains the main conduit for Russian natural gas entering Europe through the Blue Stream and Turk Stream pipelines and from Turkey to Hungary, Ankara and Serbia through the Balkan Stream pipeline. The latter two were even developed after Russia’s initial 2014 invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea. But so too were the Trans-Anatolian and Trans-Adriatic Pipelines, bringing natural gas from Azerbaijan to Europe. The launch of that network, the culmination of a goal first set by the European Union in 2008 to create a ‘southern gas corridor,’ to diversify away from Russia and long backed by the United States as well, came just fourteen months before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
While Azerbaijan carries its own substantial geopolitical risks given its still-unsettled conflict with Armenia and capacity limitations, Baku cannot alone become Europe’s key natural gas provider. Turkey offers the route not only to Azeri gas, but Ankara also itself offers potential crucial additional supplies given recent promising exploration in the Black Sea. Additionally, Ankara can help to push Russian gas further out of the European market thanks to Turkey’s substantial liquefied natural gas (LNG) regasification capacity, making it a potential import hub into the Balkans and south-eastern Europe’s pipeline networks. This is crucial to defeating the claims made by regional populists that there is still a need for Europe to secure Russian gas in the future. It is more urgent than ever that the West engage seriously with the idea that Turkey may be its energy hub of the future – and to transact accordingly – rather than leave open the door to future weaponization of energy supplies by Putin.
Human Rights and Democracy
Restoration of the rule of law and a return to democracy should focus on the independence of the judiciary, which has acted as the vengeful arm of the Erdoğan regime, in targeting political opponents and perceived conspiracists with trumped up charges and thin evidence for over a decade now.
In particular, diplomatic energy should be focused on loosening the grip on Turkey’s Kurdish-led DEM Party (previously the People’s Democracy Party, or HDP). DEM’s co-founder, Selahattin Demirtaş, is among Turkey’s most talented politicians and has been serving lifetime sentences for trumped up terrorism charges for several years. DEM’s elected mayors in the southeast continually face arbitrary suspension and replacement with AKP appointees. Increasingly, Kurds are becoming disaffected with the electoral process in Turkey and there is a serious risk of Kurds turning in bigger numbers to radical, armed groups like the PKK, and set the limited progress achieved in Turkish-Kurdish reconciliation over the past decade back 30-40 years. Releasing Demirtaş and normalizing relationships with the country’s Kurdish population will shore up human rights, democracy and rule of law, and could serve as a crucial step to bringing the US and Turkey closer together on Syria policy.
The current regime’s motivations in Syria are driven by a combination of personal animus with Bashar al-Asad, the economic value of refugee labor, the salience of anti-Kurdish nationalism in Turkish politics and the soft-expansionist aims of creating Turkish-sponsored buffer zones along the border. Opponents of Erdoğan might be less engaged on some of these aspects – if the 2023 election was any guide, they would like refugees sent back to Syria as soon as humanly possible – but they certainly share, perhaps with even greater fervor, the desire to freeze out potential Kurdish autonomy in NE Syria.
Any rapprochement between the two sides on this issue will be hard won as long as the United States is committed to cooperating with Kurdish groups in Syria, but calming tensions inside Turkey around this issue is a critical first step. If the Syrian groups are increasingly seen as the champions of Kurdish autonomy by their brothers inside Turkey, and Kurdish electoral advances are repeatedly met with arbitrary repression and prosecution, then the divides between the West and Turkey are likely to deepen no matter what corner Erdoğan’s successor may come from.
Building a healthy relationship
Turkey under Erdogan is a strong candidate for engaging with in a transactional manner, but the asks should be limited, not tailored. The country’s economy remains highly fragile and although Erdogan has allowed orthodox central bankers and Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek to take the lead in trying to stabilize the still-inflating lira since the 2023 elections, there remain substantial risks to the downside. Erdogan recently declared that he still believes in his ‘neo-Fisherite’ economics – which flips the traditional relationship between interest rates and inflation – and may be his own worst enemy. But he has repeatedly adapted policy in response to economic carrots – as Putin’s aforementioned complaint alludes to. There are also already signs that the West is aware of this, with the World Bank, in which the US holds the dominant vote share, last September outlining plans to more than double credit to the Turkish government. Proving a positive partner on this front will not only be able to shape Erdogan’s policy, but help align interests with any future Turkish government. The West can also offer other carrots that would appeal to Erdogan, and even benefit Western interests.
Firstly, recognizing Ankara’s increasingly important geopolitical position across Eurasia – particularly in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus – and working through Turkey, rather than against it, offers a more credible alternative to the region’s strongman leaders who worry about Western interest only being fleeting in response to Russia and challenge Putin’s assertions that increased geopolitical competition there is somehow the result of Western expansion rather than Russian mismanagement. Secondly, by offering to partner with Ankara to boost its own gas production, and invest in LNG networks, Turkish interests can align more with Washington’s own broad desire for promoting American LNG and provide the EU with a sustainable pipeline alternative as well.
Balancing these carrots will require the West remaining steadfast about its ‘sticks’ as well. The secondary sanctions threat regarding trade with sanctioned Russian entities has already proven effective and cannot be allowed to weaken going forward, otherwise Erdogan will exploit it to secure carrots from Putin as well. Similarly, the west cannot count on Turkey to be a reliable partner as long as power continues to be centralized in the Presidential Palace. Turkey is a tough negotiator, and under Erdogan particularly so. But it has not been lost to the West forever, and by improving the offer, and being serious about the value of democracy, there is still much to be gained for both parties.
