The Logic Beyond Lausanne: A Geopolitical Perspective on the Congruence between Turkey's New Hard Power and its Strategic Reorientation.

• Author: Tanchum, Michael
• Position: COMMENTARY

Turkey's successful military intervention to preserve Libya's Government of National Accord (GNA) marks a turning point for the security architecture of the Middle East and North Africa. Turkey's new capability to project military power far beyond its coastal borders--a paradigm shift enabled by the rise of its defense industry--has made Turkey's strategic orientation one of the most significant determinants of the region's geopolitics. How Turkey calibrates the congruence between its hard power instruments and its strategic orientation now constitutes a factor of the utmost consequence for the strategic calculus of the entire Mediterranean basin.

The renowned strategic theorist Carl von Clausewitz noted that war's "grammar may be its own, but its logic is not." (1) The military means that a country employs in the international arena to achieve its policy objectives, and the manner in which those means function, constitute the grammar of a country's warfighting capability. It is the country's strategic orientation in relation to its geopolitical circumstances that provides the logic of the policy objectives of that warfighting capability. In Clausewitzian terms, the transformation of Turkey's defense industry has enhanced Turkey's grammar of warfare through the production of new hard power instruments. Turkey's strategic principles and purposes in relation to its geopolitics, its Clausewitzian logic, will determine Turkey's use of those hard power instruments and its impact on the regional security architecture.

Turkey's new expeditionary capability, resting on the twin advancements of increased blue-water capability and the establishment of forward bases, originated as the logical outcome of Turkey's strategic reorientation resulting from the conclusion of the Cold War. In moving beyond the Cold War framework, Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) has been guided by the strategic goal of transforming Turkey into an interregional power that will set the terms for a new pattern of connectivity between Europe, Africa and Asia. In so doing, the AK Party seeks to 'reclaim' for the Republic of Turkey a foreign policy prerogative exercised by the Ottoman Empire but discontinued after Turkey's founding following the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, when the fledgling republic's foreign policy scope was limited by the exigencies of preserving its territorial integrity during the interwar period. Threatened by rising Soviet power in the wider Black Sea region and the Middle East in the aftermath of World War II, the Lausanne orientation informed Turkey's 1952 NATO accession and persisted through the duration of the Cold War.

In forging an effective strategic logic for Turkey that moves beyond Lausanne, Ankara is presented with the challenge of calibrating the use of its expeditionary hard power to serve its strategic orientation toward establishing a Turkey-centered, interregional connectivity. This calibration entails distinguishing systemic rivals from locally-focused actors and gauging the use of coercive force toward each accordingly. Additionally, the utility of forward bases needs to be assessed on the basis of whether their contribution to maintaining or expanding interregional connectivity warrants the cost of Turkey's extended expeditionary posture in relation to its productive capacity.

Turkey's calibration is occurring in the geopolitical context of two concentric containment arcs: an inner arc in the Eastern Mediterranean and an outer arc roughly corresponding to the 19th parallel north latitude, spanning the G-5 countries of the western Sahel and Sudan. The extent to which Ankara will succeed in building a Turkey-centered connectivity after its success in Libya will depend on the manner in which its post-Lausanne logic guides Turkey's calculus in these two regions.

The Geopolitical Logic of Turkey's Strategic Reorientation

Turkey's robust expeditionary capabilities derive from the build-up of its defense industry over the course of the past two decades, a transformation whose logic extends back into Turkey's strategic reorientation beginning in the early post-Cold War period. The Soviet Union's collapse at the Cold War's conclusion removed the overarching systemic conflict that formed NATO's raison d'etre and the basis of Turkey's membership. Turkey's uncertain future role in the alliance necessitated the country's strategic planners in the early 1990s to contemplate the diversification of Turkey's security relationships, developing new relationships with regional actors beyond the NATO framework and even relationships outside the U.S. security umbrella.

With a particular concern for Turkey's Middle Eastern interests, this decade of reassessment was inaugurated by the 1991 Persian Gulf War in which the United States led an ad hoc coalition of 35 nations in Operation Desert Storm to reverse Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. For Ankara, America's 'unipolar moment' in Iraq carried potentially dire consequences for Turkey's national interests. With heightened concerns that Turkey could face a flood of Iraqi Kurdish refugees or that Kurdish terrorists could exploit a political vacuum in Iraq, Ankara's insufficient impact on events near Turkey's borders highlighted the future possibility that Turkey could be left to fend for itself in the Middle East and the Mediterranean basin.

Within this evolving geopolitical context, Turkey developed its National Military Strategic Concept during General Huseyin Kivrikoglu's tenure as Chief of Staff (1998-2002). Turkey's new strategic outlook called for an 'active deterrence' in which military force would be deployed to neutralize threats at their source. (2) The National Military Strategic Concept situated this limited power projection posture within the framework of Turkey's military preparedness to fight 'two and a half wars'--two conventional inter-state conflicts on Turkey's southern and western fronts and the simultaneous prosecution of a large-scale counter-terrorism campaign (the 'half' war) against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) terrorist organization. (3) The impetus for Turkey's military industrial transformation was thus nascent within Turkey's strategic logic.

Turkey's period of strategic reassessment was punctuated at the onset of the AK Party's governance by the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The stark reality of a U.S. hard power presence operating directly opposite Turkey's southern borders, potentially counter to Turkey's vital national interests, further impelled Ankara's already established orientation to diversify its security partners; but now the logic of that orientation included a perceived need for the ability to counter adverse consequences of U.S. power in the Middle East through cultivating deeper strategic relationships with Washington's rivals. Thus, the program to build up the manufacturing capacities of Turkey's defense industry developed as a correlate of Turkey's strategic imperative to function geopolitically as an independent actor. In the absence of a coherent NATO framework that treated Turkey as an equal partner in the Middle East...