It’s a great deal of credit to President Erdogan and his cabinet that one can still perceive a degree of swagger to Turkey’s foreign policy. An ambitious and at times ruthless actor, 21st century Turkey has developed a deserved reputation for assertiveness and independence in its interventions in the region that, occasionally, lead observers in the West rather unfairly to mention him in the same breath as Vladimir Putin. Though it’s not clear whether these comparisons were always taken in the derogatory way that they were meant. 

Turkey has faced a constant stream of severe security challenges and setbacks

In reality, in the decades since the Justice & Development party came to power at the turn of the century, Turkey has faced a constant stream of severe security challenges and setbacks, mainly as a result of entirely unforced strategic errors by a succession of US administrations.  If Turkey’s president has gained a reputation for aggressiveness — for a de-prioritisation of NATO’s principles and at times even for a callous disregard for human rights — it’s largely been a consequence of attempts to mitigate these various threats. 

Now, the lightning break-out of rebel forces in Syria requires a dramatic but timely re-focussing of US priorities in the Middle East.  The sudden offensive by Hayat Tahir Al-Sham (HTS) in and its capture of swathes of Syrian territory comes just as Donald Trump is in the process of staffing and setting priorities for his second term in office. Whilst the latest outbreak of hostilities spells further chaos for the people of Syria, its timing might have come at just the right moment to nudge the incoming administration into a reappraisal of a neglected and damaged relationship with what was once a critical regional ally. 

Though Washington’s blunders have been many, the two standout examples have been Donald Rumsfeld’s decision to disband the Iraqi Army in 2003, and Barack Obama’s decision to allow the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Shia militia groups under its control to lead the ground war to remove ISIS from most of the territory it controlled in Iraq and Syria.  The result has been that Turkey’s southern borders have become far more dangerous than they were before Erdogan came to power, and Turkey ended up becoming almost fully encircled by groups aligned to Russia and Iran.  These two nations have been the Turks’ main geopolitical opponents for centuries, and their presence to the south (in addition to their usual locations in the east) are regarded by Ankara as a threat. 

From the perspective of the Turkish government, the most heinous betrayals by the West were the apparent support from the Obama Administration for the attempted coup against Erdogan in January 2016, and the very real support for the YPG (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel, or People’s Protection Units) from multiple NATO members including the US and Britain during the fight against ISIS.  While officially a distinct organisation, the YPG is known to be a working name for the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in its operations on Syrian territory; the PKK is designated as a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the US, the EU and the UK due to an extensive history of deadly attacks against Turkish civilians. 

After the territorial defeat of ISIS in 2017, YPG ended up in control of huge swathes of northern Syria, while maintaining extensive operations in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). A de-facto state dominated by an organisation dedicated to the territorial dismemberment of large parts of Turkey along hundreds of kilometres of the nation’s borders was an unbearable threat, compounded by the fact that forces loyal to Tehran and Moscow stood not much further behind them.  

The fact that all of these groups had enjoyed Western support stood in obvious contrast to the west’s apparent willingness to allow his regime to fall when it was threatened in 2016. Thereafter, Turkey’s practical commitment to NATO or its goals effectively ceased in everything but name. In practice Turkey had already begun supporting a variety of the radical Sunni militia groups that proliferated in Syria before 2016 as a means of securing some influence, but after the coup, and especially after the fall of ISIS, they saw very little need to hide this. Particularly as the West was doing exactly the same. 

Trump’s first presidency came as an immense disappointment to Ankara

Possibly because of excessively high hopes, Trump’s first presidency came as an immense disappointment to Ankara. During his initial months in office, he and his appointees wished to be seen as being more effective than Obama at finishing off ISIS, and other priorities were overlooked. A number of mistakes in his initial appointments meant that his administration failed to get a firm grip of the Department of Defense (DoD), or any kind of grip on the State Department. For the Turkish who expected a more decisive change from the Obama administration, this was disheartening.  

Trump was not able to make any substantial concession toward the Turks until October 2019, when the US withdrawal allowed Turkish forces to secure a buffer zone along a partial length of the border on the Syrian side. This represents the most substantial recognition of Turkish alarm about the West’s support for PKK-linked groups. However, due to a lack of control over diplomatic and security policy, this move had to be made clumsily, without the foreknowledge of NATO allies in the region. As a result, Erdogan was forced to come to terms with Russia to obtain a critical ceasefire, which included joint Turkish-Russian patrols within 10km of Turkey’s southern borders. 

Trump was able to tighten the screws on Iran’s ability to finance its network of proxies over the course of his first presidency, and carry out a dramatic and debilitating assassination against the IRGC’s illustrious commander Qasem Soleimani. However, with the exception of the more irreversible of these measures, most of these steps were duly retracted by the present Democratic administration.  

The combination of JCPOA (which Putin signed as “honest broker” just weeks before the invasion of Ukraine) and Biden’s $6bn hostage deal, mean that Iranian cash once again flows freely between Tehran and a network of armed proxies across the region. Furthermore, Western support for YPG fully resumed, with a number of NATO members treating them as full partners. 

So it is that the Turks now contemplate a second Trump administration with cooler heads and lower expectations than in 2016. Despite coming to the table with a far stronger hand to play than they held eight years ago, they are probably right to do so, at least to some extent. 

In Turkey’s favour, the most drastic change to the balance of power comes in the form of the huge deterioration in the ability of Russia to project force. The Kuweiris airbase near Aleppo was besieged by ISIS and a number of Sunni jihadi allies for two years from 2013, but managed to hold out with Russian helicopter and air support. HTS were able to take it in just a couple of days. Now that so much of Russia’s helicopter lift capacity has either been destroyed or is committed to use in Ukraine, such support is no longer available to regime forces in Syria. At the time of writing there are reports that the Russian Navy is evacuating the Port of Tartus; potentially signalling the end to one of Obama’s most serious foreign policy failures that the Russian presence in the Eastern Mediterranean represented.  

Furthermore, the huge losses faced by the IRGC and Iran’s proxies as a result of the war with Israel have further diminished the strength of the Moscow-Tehran axis, and has left the forces loyal to that axis leaderless and adrift in the face of the latest onslaught.

Whilst it is not accurate to describe HTS as a Turkish proxy, Turkey clearly enjoys a substantial degree of influence over the group. Turkey still formally designates HTS as a terrorist organisation, although both the West and Russia have long since rendered this phrase meaningless in the Syrian context in terms of who supplies what to whom. Turkey is the clear beneficiary of HTS’s gains, and Russia and Iran its obvious losers; Turkish ministers appear to have suggested that Assad only has himself to blame for the attacks. 

If Turkey feels it has no choice but to fully capitalise on the moment of weakness of both Russia and Iran, it is unlikely only to be in Syria that we see movement. In Lebanon, the decapitation of Hizbollah seems to invite both the Sunni and Christian communities to reassert themselves. In Sunni areas of Iraq which have been mercifully quiet the last six or seven years, such as Anbar province, radicals may decide that the moment has come to reassess the balance of powers.  

Since the fall of ISIS, we have grown used to a Middle East where, even in Sunni areas such as Palestine, the forces of militancy were directed by Shias and took their cues from Tehran. The ambitions of exclusionary Sunni sectarianism have been diminished these past few years. That may well be about to change, and it is Turkey that probably has most influence over how that plays out. The Trump administration will want to leverage that, but keep it firmly in check. 

There are, to put mildly, a number of internal challenges that Trump is going to face in crafting and implementing a coherent policy. Most of these relate to personnel; a hostile Department of State; a Department of Defense with a variety of its own ideas; a lack of diplomatic and foreign policy experience among his allies (and again, conflicting and occasionally bizarre ideas among some of them). 

I wrote last week how the glee among some liberal internationalists for the HTS campaign was dangerously misplaced. But as night follows day, this will almost certainly result in an even more stupid counterclaim on parts of the US Right that the latest Sunni insurgency has been engineered by the CIA to draw the US into another conflict in the Middle East, and further conflict with Russia, before Trump takes office. This is a more extreme position, but it is part of an increasingly influential school of thought — by no means unique to the Right, but far more influential on the Right than elsewhere on the spectrum — that Erdogan is effectively a Muslim Brotherhood operative, determined to encourage Salafist militancy as a matter of principle. This view is usually combined with the perception of Qatar as a rogue state, citing its diplomatic sheltering of Hamas officials. 

This bloc of opinion has substantial overlap with another foreign policy grouping with high hopes of the next administration, in the form of the pro-Israel hawks. Israel’s relationship with Turkey, once healthy, has been another casualty of the failure of US policy in the region over the last 20 years, and of the subsequent deterioration in relations between Turkey and the West.  

Marco Rubio will need to handle both of these camps carefully as Secretary of State, whilst the administration inevitably fishes among both of them for staff. Turkey has given (really fairly limited) support to Hamas largely because the West has offered it no good reason not to, and Israel presents an obvious target by which to apply pressure to Washington.  Encouraging it to stop should be one of the goals of restoring US-Turkish relations, but by no means among the most urgent. As for Qatar, I really don’t know what to tell anybody who cannot see that its hosting of senior Hamas people (and the Taliban before that) has been condoned at the very highest levels in Washington and Tel Aviv. Ultimately, they will need to talk to somebody who isn’t in a tunnel or a cave with all of their electronic devices switched off.

In addition to Obama-era holdouts in the State Department wedded to the most conciliatory stances toward Iran, there will also be sentimental voices urging the administration to persist with support for the YPG. Rubio will need to be clear that any ongoing partnership with the Syrian Kurds requires a breaking of links to the PKK; this is of course an impossibility for the YPG since they are essentially the same organisation.  

Turkey’s objectives in Syria largely align with the interests of the US. Insofar as their aim is to roll back the Russian and Iranian presence from Turkey (and NATO’s) southern borders, they should be welcomed by most of the Trump camp. Turkey will aim to do a deal with Russia once the balance of power has been restructured in Syria to its favour, and Trump should support them in doing this. Some sort of concord between Turkey and Russia that keeps the presence of Iran and its proxies limited in Syria, and that maintains a balance of power between whatever is left of the regime and its opponents, is likely to be the best that either the West, or the people of Syria, can hope for at the moment.  

Erdogan of course, will not be the only leader looking to do a geopolitical deal with Putin to end a bloody conflict. Ensuring that the waning of Iran’s power in the Levant is not followed up by another wave of Sunni militancy will be critical to ensuring Russia’s dispensability in the Middle East. Turkey holds many of the cards as to whether this happens — it is well past time to return them to the American fold.