Relations between Russia and Turkey Before, During, and After the Failed Coup of 2016.

• Author: Akturk, Sener
• Position: ARTICLE

Introduction

The foundations of increasing cooperation between Russia and Turkey in the 2010s date back to the 1990s, and hence transcend the idiosyncratic choices or contingent preferences of a specific political party or political leader such as presidents Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Russia and Turkey, respectively. Seismic geopolitical shifts that motivate Russian-Turkish rapprochment were already underway with the end of the Cold War. (1) However, a number of seemingly incompatible geopolitical interests pitted Russia and Turkey against one another in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and the Middle East. (2) While 1999 provided the first significant turning point for increased cooperation since the end of the Cold War, when Russia refused PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan's request for political asylum in Moscow, despite Duma's almost unanimous approval, (3) the failed coup of 2016 seems to have provided another turning point for the elevation of bilateral cooperation between Russia and Turkey. The launching of an all out offensive by the PKK against Turkey in July 2015, (4) and the coup attempt by the Gulenists in July 2016, combined with the explicit support and shelter provided by the United States (U.S.) to the PYD and the Gulenists, respectively, motivated Turkey to seek closer relations with Russia. In contrast, the United States became increasingly unreliable if not obstructive and hostile in the context of Turkey's fight against the PKK-PYD and the Gulenists. (5) I argue that this is a case of military-strategic considerations regarding internal security outweighing any other causal factor in explaining the improvement of Turkish-Russian relations in 2016, and this argument about internal threats exceeding external threats also constitutes the original contribution of the current article to the scholarly literature. By seeking closer cooperation with Russia, Turkey in effect was "balancing" against two major internal threats, both of which were increasingly perceived as proxies of other great powers, including the greatest military power in the international system, namely, the United States. Such diversification of Turkey's alliance portfolio is not entirely new either, as the current article will explain, and as some other scholars also pointed out. (6) Likewise, Russia's dependence on the Turkish Straits as the main supply route to its Syrian bases, (7) its need for Turkey's assistance for a durable new status quo in Syria, Turkey's role as a key customer of Russian natural gas, and the Russian-Turkish nuclear power plant construction by the Mediterranean, all motivate Russia to seek closer relations with Turkey.

Military-strategic, economic, (8) ideational, (9) as well as more idiosyncratic factors have been invoked to explain conflict and cooperation between Russia and Turkey over the centuries, including after the Cold War. The two countries' similar status as the "outsider" neighbors whose proximate exclusion has been employed to forge a common European identity is also noteworthy. (10) Early on in the 1990s, some scholars argued that Turkey and Russia have competing geopolitical interests that are only moderated by their common economic interests, hence juxtaposing the "geopolitical" and the "economic" imperatives as implying opposite trajectories. (11) Moreover, the asymmetrical nature of Russian-Turkish economic relations are often highlighted, sometimes to explicitly claim that Turkey is dependent on Russia, but what is commonly overlooked in these assessments is the fact that Russia is critically dependent on the export revenue from a few items such as oil, natural gas, grain, and arms, and Turkey became a key customer of Russia in terms of the latter three. While Turkish import of Russian natural gas and weapons (e.g., S-400s) are very well known and extensively discussed in both scholarship and popular media, the fact that "Turkey replaced Egypt as the largest purchaser of Russian grain" in 2017, making Russia the largest exporter of grain in the world, ahead of the United States, is not noted nearly as much. (12) In short, economic ties with Turkey are also critical for Russia, especially at a time when the Russian economy is squeezed by Western sanctions and real incomes continued to fall "for the fifth year in a row" in 2018. (13) Moreover, as Peter Katzenstein and Nicole Weygandt argue, "the insularity of Russia's geopolitical and civilizational approaches limits its foreign policies," (14) which has arguably benefited and favored Turkey in various ways. In contrast to these depictions, the dissolution of the Soviet Union gave rise to a very powerful geopolitical dynamic in favor of Russian-Turkish cooperation. In short, the rapid decline of the Soviet/Russian threat, epitomized in the disappearance of a land border between post-Soviet Russia and Turkey, opened up multiple avenues for bilateral cooperation. (15)

Vacillations of Cooperation and Conflict between Unstable Governments, 1992-2002

The first decade after the Cold War witnessed radical vacillations of cooperation and conflict in the bilateral relations between Russia and Turkey, which had coincided with numerous short-lived coalition governments in Turkey and the tumultuous two terms of Yeltsin's presidency with different prime ministers in Russia. While the two countries came to the brink of war through their involvement in the Azerbaijani-Armenian conflict over Nagorno Karabagh in May 1992, (16) only a decade later, in March 2002, the secretary general of Turkey's National Security Council General Tuncer Kilinc proposed to form an "alliance" with Russia and Iran in the face of hostility from the European Union (EU) member states. (17)

These radical swings were indicative of two long-term trends that characterize Russian-Turkish relations since the end of the Cold War to the present-day: First, they were indicative of the issue-specific variation in relations, such that Russia and Turkey may tend to (and often do) support opposite parties in active military conflicts such as in the Azerbaijani-Armenian, Bosnian, and Syrian conflicts, while in other critical issues such as opposing the U.S. invasion of Iraq or pushing against the U.S.-supported Kurdish socialist (PYD) militants in Syria, they readily cooperate. Second, as their bilateral relations intensify, the number of issues on which Russia and Turkey are unexpectedly confronting each other for the first time lead to exposures of divergent preferences that were hitherto dormant. This has been demonstrated time and again over various conflicts in the past, and it may well happen again in the future over other dormant issues or frozen conflicts that may flare up. An important lesson to draw from past experiences, however, is that despite the occassional flare up of contentious issues that seem to fracture bilateral relations in the short run, Russia and Turkey have been able to repair the damage and maintain a high level of cooperation despite major disagreements. This may be a testimony to the more critical causes of their cooperation that allow the two countries to work together despite their differences.

The Puzzle of Russian-Turkish Rapprochement after 2016

The scholarly studies of the failed coup in Turkey on July 15, 2016 are still in their infancy. (18) As for the long-term causes of the coup, the present author has emphasized the existential threat that the decriminalization of Islamic religious practices in public posed for the messianic Gulenist cult that relied on the prohibition and suppression of Islamic religious expression for recruitment and legitimacy, (19) while some other scholars have emphasized the "inter-security dilemma" between the Gulenists and the AK Party as the primary cause of the coup. (20) Among many other shortcomings of the extant literature, the international dimension of the military coup has not so far been systematically investigated in English-language academic publications, and in most publications the geopolitical dimension is altogether neglected. In seeking to explain the improvement in Russian-Turkish relations after the coup, this article aims to describe, however briefly, the geopolitical identity and function of the Gulenists, and thus, the geopolitical implications of the failure of their attempted coup in 2016, precisely because the geopolitical identity of the Gulenists as a staunchly pro-American faction is directly related to the improvement of Turkish-Russian relations after the failure of the coup attempt.

More importantly for the purposes of the current article, there are almost no publications that primarily and specifically focus on the role of the failed coup in relation to the improvement in Russian-Turkish relations. (21) Economic, ideational, and military-strategic factors were also invoked in explaining the phenomenal increase in bilateral cooperation between Russia and Turkey after the coup attempt on July 2016. Mamedov and Lukyanov emphasize "four main issues," namely, "terrorism, nuclear weapons, the Syrian crisis and the region's security architecture," and yet it is clear that even among these four main issues, Russia and Turkey have very different interests (i.e., opposite proxies in the Syrian war, and divergent views on NATO expansion) that they pursue at the expense of each other if and whenever necessary. (22) Moreover, it is unclear what kind of radical change(s) in any of these four main issues motivated Russian-Turkish rapprochement after 2016. Likewise, Pavel Shlykov in his recent evaluation of Russian-Turkish relations in the wider Black Sea region emphasizes that "competiton [between Russia and Turkey] is equally strong," (23) while Ostap Kushnir argues that the "emergence of the Ukrainian-Turkish geopolitical linchpin is of key importance for the stabilization--in the long run--of the Black Sea regional policies." (24) The interests...