The Arab Spring Turns Sour: 2010 to 2015

Ironically, when the AKP first came to power, those critics who worried about the party’s Islamist foreign policy focused on the prospect of Turkey “turning East.” The fear was that the AKP would shift27 Turkey’s orientation from West to East28, with new allies like Iran and Syria replacing America and Europe. What happened instead was that Turkey turned against the West without necessarily having anywhere else to turn. Today, as Turkey threatens29 the US military in northern Syria, relations with Tehran and Damascus, not to mention Moscow, remain tense. Strained ties with Washington, in other words, have not resulted from, or been accompanied by, improved relations between Turkey and any of its Eastern neighbors. If anything, it was the failure of Turkey’s sequential turns East, both before and after the Arab Spring, that set the stage for its current rift with the West.

When the so-called Arab Spring began30, it forced a recalibration of Turkish policy by disrupting Turkey’s profitable relationships with a number of regional strongmen. Ankara initially opposed31 the NATO intervention in Libya in 2011, where Turkish businesses had $15 billion dollars’ worth of outstanding contracts. And after protests broke out in Syria, Davutoğlu first went to Damascus32, where he encouraged Assad to pursue a more moderate path. Quickly, though, with uprisings gaining momentum across the region, Ankara concluded that they were likely to succeed and that supporting them could be a source of expanded regional influence.

As a result, in the early years of the Arab Spring the United States and Turkey were, broadly speaking, on the same side. If Ankara was considerably more enthusiastic33 about the Islamist character of these popular uprisings, there was nonetheless a shared hope in Washington and Ankara that in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria some form of self-government would replace autocracy. When these hopes were dashed, however, the differences between American and Turkish goals came to the fore.

In 2013, for example, when the Egyptian military ousted an elected Muslim Brotherhood government, Washington took it in stride34. Whatever reservations the Obama administration may have had, it was prepared to work with Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, to this end even maintaining the official fiction35 that he had not come to power in a coup. Erdoğan, by contrast, stood by the Brotherhood, adopting the movement’s Rabia symbol as his own36 while relations with Sisi soured. Whether principled, obstinate, or a mix of the two, Erdoğan’s approach put him at odds not only with Washington but also Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, setting the stage for Turkey’s isolation in the region.

At the same time, setbacks in Syria’s civil war were also exacerbating the same fissures. While both Washington and Ankara supported the anti-Assad opposition, they differed considerably in the lengths they were prepared to go in that support. Turkey became frustrated37 after coming to expect, rightly or wrongly, that the United States would intervene directly in the summer of 2013. US policymakers, for their part, became alarmed at Turkey’s willingness to back the most radical elements of the opposition, with Turkish support for al-Nusra—an arm of al-Qaeda —becoming a festering wound in the bilateral relationship.

These tensions ultimately grew into the strategic rift38 tearing the United States and Turkey apart today. In 2014, the Islamic State emerged as Washington’s primary concern in Syria, pushing the goal of toppling Assad further into the background. For Erdoğan, by contrast, the focus was still Assad (and, increasingly, the Kurdish nationalist movement). As a result, when the United States proposed a series of joint operations narrowly targeting the Islamic State in northern Syria, Turkey countered with more sweeping proposals, arguing that a lasting solution to the threat posed by the Islamic State required regime change in Damascus.

The consequences of this impasse quickly became clear. Like its predecessor, the Trump administration embraced39 a Syrian Kurdish force called the People’s Protection Units (YPG) as its preferred partner against the Islamic State. Ankara, by contrast, following four decades of conflict with Kurdish separatists, identified the YPG—an arm of the PKK—as its primary security threat. As a result, Erdoğan reoriented Turkey’s Syria policy toward countering the YPG, leaving the United States and Turkey engaged in a dangerous game of chicken in northern Syria. Erdoğan, for his part, demanded that US soldiers evacuate the YPG-held territory of Manbij in anticipation of a Turkish attack. American officials, in turn, refused, saying that the special operation forces there “will be able to defend themselves.” 40

And yet while Syria drove the United States and Turkey apart, it has also stubbornly prevented improved relations with other regional powers. Since 2014, Erdoğan has repeatedly signaled41 his willingness, however grudging, to accept Assad’s victory. But despite pictures of Erdoğan, Putin and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani smiling together at Sochi, a negotiated settlement remains out of reach. Neither Russia nor Iran—both of whom Turkish politicians sometimes touted as potential replacements for the United States— seemed terribly eager to accommodate Turkish interests. In early 2018, a de-escalation agreement covering the territory of Idlib broke down42, pitting Turkey and its proxies and the regime and its backers.

Meanwhile, with Syria dominating Turkish foreign policy, many other Middle Eastern states remained skeptical of Turkish influence in the region. Turkish policymakers once used “Neo-Ottomanism” as a positive term43 for their attempt to capitalize on historic and religious ties with the Muslim world. Now, it appears more often in the rhetoric of Middle Eastern writers and politicians condemning what they see as Turkish imperial interference44. In a 2017 spat between Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, the Emirati Foreign Minister accused the Ottomans of plundering sacred relics from Medina during World War I. Erdoğan, in response, accused the Arabs of betrayal for siding with the British against their Ottoman co-religionists. Egypt for its part renamed a street in Cairo named after Ottoman sultan Yavuz Selim and Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman accused Erdoğan of trying to rebuild an “Ottoman caliphate.” More substantially, Turkey’s support for Qatar, as well as Islamist factions in Libya45, inflamed tensions with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates. In Iraq, by turn, Ankara improved its strained relations with Baghdad by firmly opposing a Kurdish bid for independence46 in the fall of 2017.

In short, with the collapse of the Arab Spring, Turkey became isolated in the Middle East, at odds with all the major local and external players in the region. This in part reflected the tumultuous changes in the region, including a number of rapid re-orientations that would have made a pragmatic policy difficult to follow for any government. And yet Turkey’s isolation was also the product of a number of politically or ideologically driven choices. The reemergence of the Kurdish conflict reflects, in part, Erdoğan’s own political needs, coupled with the prevalence of nationalist sentiment among key segments of the Turkish military and voting population. Similarly, the intensity and commitment with which Ankara backed Islamist actors in Egypt and Syria had a clear ideological component as well.

Anti-Westernism, too, must be understood as a force in and of itself. Indeed, what makes the current situation alarming is that antiWestern hostility, which extends far beyond Erdoğan’s base, now appears to be driving policy independent of pragmatic or specifically Islamist concerns. Erdoğan, for example, decided to court47 US sanctions by purchasing S-400 air defense missiles from Moscow48. His decision was motivated in part by a genuine belief that he needed them for self-protection following a 2016 coup attempt that he, like a majority of his citizens, believes was orchestrated by the United States.49 By comparison, if Ankara’s anger over US support for the YPG makes much more sense, it has nonetheless been dangerously inflamed by a climate of rampant nationalism.50