Turkey

Southern Turkey and northern Syria were struck by a crippling 7.8 magnitude earthquake at 4:17 AM, on Feb. 6. Twelve hours later, at least 2,400 people are known to have perished, with death tolls rapidly rising. This natural disaster could not have come at a worse time or struck a more vulnerable region — with notoriously poor construction in southern Turkey and the effects of more than a decade of brutal conflict still afflicting northern Syria.

A little over two weeks ago, the defense and intelligence chiefs of Turkey and Syria met face-to-face in Moscow — the first such meeting in over a decade. On the surface, this latest flurry of engagement with Assad’s regime is a major development. Were Turkey to decisively shift its Syria policy, the effects would be dramatic. Beyond the hype and speculation, Turkey’s decision to participate in the Moscow meetings is not altogether surprising and it does not represent a wholesale policy reversal. What has changed more recently is Turkey’s impending elections — and with them Erdoğan’s political calculations.

Expert regional analysis by MEI scholars and contributors.

The challenge of developing export strategies for the offshore natural gas resources concentrated in the Eastern Mediterranean predates the Russo-Ukrainian war. Yet over the course of 2022, Europe’s intensifying energy crisis created a new and more immediate incentive to solve those export challenges, despite a great deal of work still to be done.

Should the Turkish government make good on its threats to launch yet another military incursion into northern Syria, it would lead to a sharp escalation in violence in a country afflicted by a more-than-decade-long brutal conflict. Not only would Turkey’s military incursion have significant immediate effects on civilians and combatants in Syria, but it could also reverberate further throughout the region and world.

On Sept. 30, 2013, then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced what he termed a “democratization package,” which lifted the decades-old ban on women wearing headscarves in many state institutions. A month later, when four female MPs wearing headscarves walked into the Turkish parliament, many thought the long-running controversy on the issue was finally over. But the headscarf recently returned to the center of the Turkish political debate when the leader of the main secularist opposition party, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, announced that he would introduce legislation to protect that right.

The Ukraine grain export deal, which Turkey helped mediate over the summer, was saved last week to much fanfare; but the central unaddressed issue remains lifting Russia’s illegal blockade of Ukrainian ports, so Ukraine can freely trade with the world.

The Turkish economy’s foreign exchange liquidity problem is getting worse. The current account balance has been in the red this year with a monthly deficit of around $5 billion. The government has so far managed to avoid a repeat of the December 2021 currency shock by restricting capital mobility, further tightening regulations in October 2022.

During the second week of October, unprecedented full-fledged military confrontations broke out in northern Syria between factions of the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA), with Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) subsequently intervening in support of some factions over others. Tukey’s weariness about the constantly deteriorating state of security in the north, resulting mainly from infighting among the SNA forces it backs, and its willingness to impose order on them, could explain its silence on HTS’s military aggression. For HTS, however, expanding its rule and settling scores with some SNA factions may be the main drivers behind its recent attacks.

Since June 2015 and especially after the failed coup attempt in July 2016, the AKP has taken an increasingly nationalist and Eurasianist turn, as Erdoğan worked to consolidate power by satisfying various nationalist elements. The transition to the presidential system in mid-2018 has intensified Turkey’s existing foreign policy problems and given rise to new ones. This paper lays out the evolution of the AKP’s foreign policy, the consequences of the transition to the presidential system, the impact of Erdoğan’s coalition with the nationalists and Eurasianists, and potential pathways forward.

Turkey’s transition to a hyper-centralized presidential system has had a devastating impact on its educational and cultural affairs. The erosion of the rule of law and due process and the ensuing arbitrary rule by an all-powerful president have given rise to a growing malaise in the educational and cultural fields. The fragility of academic and media freedoms and the lack of legal and cultural norms guaranteeing freedom of speech compound the problem.