Turkey's Grand Strategy and the Great Powers.

• Author: Akturk, Sener
• Position: ARTICLE

Introduction: Compatible and Incompatible Visions of Grand Strategy

Scholarly debates on Turkey's grand strategy have finally begun. A special issue on Turkey's grand strategy published by the academic periodical of Turkey's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2020, which includes five different grand strategic proposals, (1) followed by other academic articles and op-eds discussing different aspects of Turkey's grand strategy from descriptive and normative vantage points, and the TRT World Forum 2021 devoted to the theme of "Power and Paradox: Understanding Grand Strategy in the 21st Century," (2) are indicative of the rapidly rising interest on this subject. Despite this recent scholarly efflorescence, comparative analyses of grand strategies that include Turkey are still very rare. Moreover, to the best of my knowledge, there is not a single study of the compatibility of Turkish grand strategy and the grand strategies of multiple great powers. This article attempts to address this lacuna by reviewing the grand strategies of five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) with an eye to gauging their degree of compatibility or incompatibility with Turkey's grand strategic priorities.

Such an endeavor might be criticized as being unfeasible due to the uncertainty and the changing nature of the grand strategies of both Turkey and the great powers, since comparing two grand strategies that are both subject to change and uncertainty is unlikely to generate conclusions that are reliable in the long-term. This is a valid criticism since the grand strategies that will be compared are themselves ever-changing, and furthermore, different political actors in each country may have (and often do have) somewhat different views on their country's grand strategy. Despite these uncertainties and domestic disagreements over grand strategy in almost every country including Turkey, there is sufficient evidence from the foreign policy behaviors of the five great powers that make up the UNSC, to sketch the preliminary outlines of their grand strategies 30 years after the end of the Cold War. Likewise, there are sufficient descriptive and normative sketches of Turkey's grand strategy that allow us to conduct a preliminary assessment of its compatibility with the grand strategies of the great powers.

It must be emphasized from the outset, nonetheless, that the American, British, French, Russian, and Turkish grand strategies are all contested with different viewpoints found among both practitioners and scholars, and many domestic actors often disagree with aspects of their countries' grand strategies based on deep partisan, ideological, and factional differences. This is not only limited to the six countries discussed in this article either. For example, among many member states of the EU and NATO, including Bulgaria, Greece, Germany, and Italy, there are significant political parties and leaders who advocate closer geopolitical ties with Russia, and withdrawing from and even dismantling NATO, and yet these countries continue to be part of the North Atlantic Alliance and participate in many of its missions despite such vociferous domestic opposition. (3) Relatedly, it is possible to suggest that the scholarship on grand strategy combines descriptive and normative dimensions since different theoretical assumptions about international politics and different conceptualizations of countries' material 'hard' and nonmaterial 'soft' power capabilities are likely to generate different grand strategic assessments and recommendations. This article is similar to the scholarship on grand strategy in that it combines both descriptive and normative elements in providing both analyses and prescriptions on Turkey's grand strategy.

Turkish Grand Strategy

The primary imperative of Turkey's grand strategy should be to keep great powers' militaries out of its immediate neighbors and to establish a 'neighborly core' in which no neighbor poses a significant military threat. (4) This is not the official grand strategy of Turkey since Turkey does not have an official grand strategy, but rather the current author's prescriptive (normative) formulation of what Turkey's grand strategy should be, based on Turkey's foreign and security policies since the end of the Cold War. In other words, it is a grand strategic proposal based on broadly realist assumptions, but it is also based on how Turkish political and security elites reacted to the developments in Turkey's geopolitical environment in the three decades since the end of the Cold War, if not much earlier.

This primary imperative is based on an assessment of Turkey's neighbors' latent and actual power capabilities from a neorealist point of view. Such an assessment reveals that Turkey's military and economic power is unrivaled among its immediate neighbors with the partial exception of Iran. (5) Therefore, no immediate neighbor of Turkey, with the partial exception of Iran, can pose an existential threat to Turkey. However, if a great power's military occupies and is stationed in one of Turkey's neighbors, then the presence of such a great power's occupation forces in Turkey's immediate neighborhood does pose a potential threat to Turkey's national security. The fact that four of Turkey's eight immediate neighbors have been occupied in part or entirety by one or more of the five great powers that make up the UNSC demonstrates that such a dire prospect is not a nightmarish conspiracy theory but rather the geopolitical reality that Turkey has been facing since the end of the Cold War. From the foregoing, I concluded that 'Turkey's position has to be that of the 'third power' buttressing the independence and territorial integrity of the countries in its neighborhood that are being partitioned and destroyed in proxy wars.' (6)

Turkey's attitude toward the occupation of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iraq, and Syria has been consistent with this principle in the sense that Turkey vociferously objected to the interventions in these countries by Russian (Georgia, Syria, and through its Armenian proxies, Azerbaijan), American (Iraq and Syria), British (Iraq), and French (Syria) military forces. Only after military interventions by these great powers and their proxies occurred, despite Turkey's objections and to the detriment of Turkey's vital interests, did Turkey also conduct (in Iraq and Syria) or support (in Azerbaijan) limited military interventions to secure its borders or to restore the status quo ante. In contrast, the neighbors of Turkey's immediate neighbors (Turkey's 'periphery') include some middle and great powers that approach or surpass Turkey's military and economic capacity, most importantly Russia, but also Israel and Italy in their military and economic power (including nuclear energy), and which may pose a military threat to Turkey if they approach Turkey's borders. Therefore, the Turkish grand strategy should also aim to keep these potentially threatening countries in its periphery away from Turkey's immediate borders. In short, both Turkey's foreign policy behavior and an assessment of military and economic capabilities in Turkey's immediate neighborhood support the proposition that keeping great powers' militaries out of its immediate neighborhood is the primary imperative of Turkish grand strategy. To achieve this goal, not only should Turkey strive to keep the great powers' (e.g., Russia and the U.S.) militaries out of its immediate neighbors, but it should also balance against Iran, and keep potentially threatening powers in its 'periphery' such as Russia, Israel, and Italy sufficiently far away from its immediate borders.

How compatible are Turkey's grand strategic priorities with the grand strategies of the great powers in the international system? Relatedly, which great power, if any, has interests and priorities that are broadly compatible with such a Turkish grand strategy? Which great power is the most likely ally and which great power is the least likely ally (or most likely adversary) for Turkey's grand strategy? In other words, which great power is more likely not to militarily intervene and occupy Turkey's immediate neighbors to the detriment of Turkey's vital national interests, and might even ally with Turkey to counter Iranian and Russian expansion among Turkey's immediate neighbors? Along these lines, which great power might be supportive of Turkey's efforts in critical areas of conflict such as Syria, the South Caucasus, and Libya? One must attempt to sketch the broad outlines of the five great powers' grand strategies to gauge their compatibility or incompatibility with Turkey's grand strategic priorities as such, which I attempt to do in the next five sections.

U.S. Grand Strategy and Turkey's Priorities

Any discussion of comparative grand strategy must begin with a discussion of U.S. grand strategy both because the scholarship on grand strategy, in general, is asymmetrically focused on and most refined in the discussion of the U.S. case, and also because of the U.S. preponderance in both economic and military power. Most strikingly, U.S. defense spending is still three times more than that of China, its nearest competitor, and U.S. defense spending is also much more than the total defense spending of the other four members of the UNSC (China, France, Russia, and the UK) combined. (7) Therefore, all the other great powers' grand strategies, as well as that of Turkey, will have to take into account the U.S. grand strategy. More specifically, to what extent does U.S. grand strategy supports or threaten (or is neutral) vis-a-vis changes in the relative power position of other great and middle powers such as France, Iran, Israel, and Turkey?

What is the grand strategy of the U.S. thirty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, its primary peer competitor during the Cold War? As in almost any country examined in this article and beyond, there have...