Turkey is not “lost,” but it is time for other NATO allies to more strongly reengage

Earlier this month, in Washington, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) celebrated its 75-year anniversary. Turkey, one of the Alliance’s oldest members, having joined in 1952, participated in the jubilee summit alongside NATO’s 31 other Allies.

The gathering of NATO heads of state and government in the United States’ capital advanced several issues important to Turkey. Namely, the Washington Summit Declaration references the fight against terrorism (Article 22), the removal of trade barriers between member states’ defense industries (Art. 11), the security situation in the Black Sea (Art. 31), the 1936 Montreux treaty regulating the Turkish Straits, and the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR) peacekeeping mission.

But the final text of this joint summit communiqué also ended up being a source of friction between Ankara and the rest of NATO for what it did not mention: any reference to the Israeli war in Gaza. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan rebuked his Allies for this omission, going so far as calling US President Joe Biden’s administration “complicit” in what he described as Israeli war crimes in the Gaza Strip. Additionally, he accused NATO members of having “fueled the fire” of the war in Ukraine and declared the need to discuss mutual issues of concern with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin absent any “prejudices.” Erdoğan’s comments inspired fresh hand-wringing in US and European capitals about the level of unity between Turkey and the rest of NATO — especially on the question of Russia and Ukraine. However, that concern is not only overblown but even misplaced, ignoring the various ways in which Ankara has been pushing away from Moscow in recent months.

Two steps forward, one step back on relations with US

In the months leading up to the 2024 summit, Turkey took a critically important step to improve relations with the US by, following months of vacillation, approving Sweden’s NATO membership. In turn, Washington signed off on a $23 billion sale of F-16 warplanes, missiles, and bombs to Ankara. This sale is vital to maintain the Turkish Air Force’s capacity to defend NATO’s southeastern flank and ability to continue participating in the Baltic Air Policing mission.

However, vital opportunities were missed: Foremost, Turkey might have been readmitted to the F-35 program, or at least been allowed to purchase this advanced stealth fighter, if it had agreed to transfer its S-400 surface-to-air missile unit — which it had procured from Russia over vehement protests from the US and other NATO allies — to Kyiv. That display of real solidarity with Ukraine would have finally provided a sufficiently strong argument to remove the punitive measures against Turkey the US had applied via the 2017 Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA).

President Erdoğan wasted another great opportunity when he ultimately declined his first invitation to the White House since President Biden took office. He could have used that visit, which had been scheduled for May 9, to smooth over US-Turkish military tensions in Syria and reopen talks about Turkey’s purchase and production of Patriot air-defense missile systems — first discussed a quarter century ago. It could even have led to concrete steps toward Turkey’s return to producing the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which continues to encounter production issues that Turkey, with its skilled manufacturing capacity, could help resolve.

Yet even those unresolved issues notwithstanding, Turkey’s contribution to NATO remains strategically valuable. Its sizeable military forces are deployed from the Baltic to the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, providing a crucial deterrence role. And Ankara’s closure of the Turkish Straits to the Russian Navy has been instrumental in limiting Russia’s ability to attack Ukraine from the Black Sea as well as enabling the progressive attrition of its fleet by Ukrainian attacks — thus transforming the maritime security situation in this basin. Nonetheless, Turkey’s loyalty to the Alliance is frequently questioned, including accusations of fence-sitting, especially when it comes to Russia. To ask, “Who lost Turkey?” is to misread the situation. Turkey is increasingly, albeit carefully, moving away from the Kremlin.

Conflicting foreign policy signals

Some confusion about this stems from Turkey’s conflicting foreign policy signals. Weeks before the NATO summit, the Turkish president met his Russian counterpart in Astana and attended the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit. And a month earlier, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan attended a ministerial session of BRICS+ in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. But as much as Turkish leaders try to boost their domestic political standing through such foreign policy initiatives by saying the country is “carving its own course,” their clumsy transactional moves raise doubts in the West about Turkish loyalty. Turkey would do better to air its problems directly with Euro-Atlantic allies and resolve those issues within NATO.

While the US often uses harsh rhetoric about Russia from across the Atlantic, Turkey, geographically positioned next to Russia, deliberately takes a softer tone. Meeting with Putin does not, in and of itself, make Turkey pro-Russia, however. Turkey sees Russia as just as much of a threat as its more outwardly hawkish NATO allies do — and this is especially true regarding the war in Ukraine. The descriptions of the threat are different, but the perceptions are the same.

Ankara’s drift away from Moscow

Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Ankara has, thus, sought to maintain a balancing act between Kyiv and Moscow. But despite Turkey providing loopholes to keep transport and logistics links to Russia open, recent months have seen uncertainties in Turkish-Russian ties. 

One of those is the growing number of trade hurdles, amid pressure from the US over Turkey’s role in abetting Russian sanctions evasion. As such, more and more Turkish banks are refusing to cooperate with their Russian counterparts due to sanctions pressure — a fact Russia’s Kommersant business daily explicitly noted last January, citing financial market sources. Indeed, problems with access to Turkish bank services became particularly acute for Russia starting in mid-December, after the US imposed a new set of secondary sanctions. 

A long-expected visit to Turkey from Russian President Putin has also yet to take place, prompting Turkish media speculation about possible disagreements between Ankara and Moscow. Pro-Russia voices in Turkey have in recent weeks voiced alarm over deteriorating bilateral ties, after years of apparently warming relations in trade and energy. Those growing gaps are being filled by Turkey’s Western partners.

Notably, Turkey is discussing a long-term liquefied natural gas (LNG) supply deal with US energy giant ExxonMobil, Turkish Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar told the Financial Times in mid-April. The initiative is part of the country’s ongoing strategy to reduce its reliance on Russia or any single energy supply source. 

Deepening of Turkish support for Ukraine

Moreover, Turkey has boosted its diplomatic and military ties with Ukraine in recent months. High-level Ukrainian officials, including President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, and Verkhovna Rada (parliament) Speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk, visited Istanbul and Ankara in March, to hold talks with Erdoğan and inspect warships being built by Turkey for Ukraine’s navy. New developments in Turkish military support to Ukraine have been spotlighted in domestic and international reports, such as Ankara supplying Kyiv with artillery shells and artillery systems at a time of critical need. 

Turkish defense company Baykar, whose chief technical officer (CTO) is Erdoğan’s son-in-law Selcuk Bayraktar, has in recent years become a driver of Ankara-Kyiv ties. Since 2021, Baykar has maintained an agreement with Ukrainian defense companies Ivchenko Progress and Motor Sich for the production of engines for its unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). It famously sold its vaunted Bayraktar TB2 combat drones to Kyiv prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 and donated three more of these UAVs to Ukraine shortly after the invasion. The company has said it will finish construction of its Kyiv factory within a year. Baykar CEO Haluk Bayraktar told Reuters in February that the factory will produce around 120 combat drones per year.

As pointed out above, reports have also noted the possibility of Turkey supplying domestically produced 155-millimeter artillery shells to Ukraine via the US. These shells would become Turkey’s second top defense export item after attack UAVs. In March, the government-friendly Türkiye Newspaper said the defense contractor Arca Savunma was in talks to produce more shells for the US to give to Ukraine. In addition, some reports claim that Ukrainian officials are seeking to buy Turkish-made Fırtına artillery systems through negotiations with Washington. 

Another major sign of Turkey’s alignment with NATO and Ukraine was the establishment — under Turkish leadership and with participation from littoral Allies Bulgaria and Romania — of the trilateral Black Sea Mine Countermeasures Group earlier this year. The initiative is a display of solidarity and regional ownership of an ongoing international crisis caused by the proliferation of loose sea mines used in the Russo-Ukrainian war. Creating the Black Sea Countermeasures Group shows Turkey’s real position: countering Russia and protecting commercial merchant traffic in the Black Sea, which is vital to the survival of the Ukrainian economy.

A time to reengage

Turkey’s loyalty to NATO is established, and permanent, such that the 2026 NATO summit, after the upcoming summit in The Hague, will be held in Istanbul.

Turkey is not lost, but it does need greater engagement from other North Atlantic Alliance members. If and when Washington finally internalizes and accepts that Moscow sees itself at war with the West, US policy toward Ukraine will have to shift from avoiding escalation with Russia to defeating it. The success of such a more assertive policy will require close cooperation with Ankara to secure the southeastern flank of NATO and the Black Sea, as Turkey has faithfully done for the last 72 years. Fortunately for the Alliance as a whole, this policy shift on Turkey becomes more likely in Washington if Kamala Harris is the Democratic Party presidential nominee and wins this year’s election. Her national security advisor, Philip H. Gordon, knows the country very well and, eight years ago, co-authored the forward-thinking book Winning Turkey: How America, Europe, and Turkey Can Revive a Fading Partnership. Given the immense challenges facing NATO, that prescription is still exactly what is needed.

Yörük Işık is a geopolitical analyst based in Istanbul, where he runs the Bosphorus Observer, a consultancy analyzing maritime activity on the Turkish Straits. He is also a Non-Resident Scholar with MEI’s Turkey Program.

Photo by Yörük Işık