Turkey and the Russia Card

Turkey’s Grand Bazaar foreign policy, in which it makes transactional deals with mutually opposed interests and displays loyalty to none, isn’t working

Turkey is trying to play Russia off against the West in order to win backing for its war in Syria and exploitation rights for undersea oil and gas in the east Mediterranean, at the expense of Greece and Cyprus.

Turkey is investing in indispensability at the expense of dependability. The cost of this strategy is that at a time of great exigency for the American postwar order and geopolitical realignments, it has proven itself an opportunist rather than an ally.

Turkey entered a defence relationship with Russia in 2017, when it announced it would buy a convoy of Russian S-400 surface-to-air missile launchers.  

Turkey and Russia were already energy partners. In December 2014, Russian president Vladimir Putin declared he would build a gas pipeline across the Black Sea to the shiver of land Turkey owns in Europe.

Turkstream, originally Southstream, had been the sister project of Nordstream, which crosses the Baltic Sea, part of a grand strategy to isolate Ukraine, through which Russia’s main gas supply to Europe runs. Bulgaria was to have been Southstream’s landfall. Under pressure from the US and EU, which was by then awake to the dangers of overdependence on Russian gas, Bulgaria stalled the project. Turkey stepped in to facilitate it. What Germany did for Russia in the north, Turkey did in the south.

The 2017 defence partnership may have been the result of a crisis.

Turkstream was suspended in November 2015, when Turkey downed a Russian Sukhoi-24M fighter jet that allegedly entered its airspace. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, visited Putin in August 2016 to mend ties. That may very well have been the moment when the S-400 deal was made.