Turkey’s newfound willingness to engage states it long antagonised, most notably Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Israel, holds the potential to lead to a reshuffling of international relations in the Middle East. Across the region, these developments could herald a further weakening of Sunni Islamist organisations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and its many offshoots, and could also buttress the anti-Iran partnership linking the Gulf states to Israel.
Turkey has launched a normalisation initiative with several countries with which it has had problematic relations for the last decade. Egypt has been one of them. The relations between the two countries had hit rock bottom after the toppling of then-President Mohammed Morsi by a coup in 2013. Turkey immediately became one of the staunchest critics of the coup and new President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi's policies against the Muslim Brotherhood and its leaders.
The war in Ukraine, where Ankara plays a mediation role between Moscow and Kyiv, may produce changes in Turkey’s international posture and relations. This comes at a time of recalibration of Turkey’s foreign policy: the normalisation of diplomatic relations has become the main driver behind Ankara’s action in its neighbourhood, especially in the Middle East and North Africa region.
The successful visit of Israel’s president Isaac Herzog to Turkey on March 9-10 has the potential to be the beginning of a new phase in Turkey-Israel relations. Herzog’s visit can be compared to two previous important visits of Israeli presidents to Turkey. One was the 1992 visit to Turkey by Herzog’s father, Chaim Herzog, which ushered in what was later termed as the “Golden era” of Turkey-Israel relations in the 1990s.
On Sunday 23 January, Turkish Cypriots will head to the polls in the parliamentary elections, following the resignation of the precarious nationalist right-wing coalition formed by the National Unity Party (Ulusal Birlik Partisi - UBP), Democrat Party (Demokrat Parti - DP) and Rebirth Party (Yeniden Doğuş Partisi - YDP). Turkish Cypriot parliamentary elections are held every five years, since the first election in 1976.
In recent years, Africa has become an arena for international competition in which global balances and hierarchies have been reshuffled. The US’ gradual retrenchment and China’s simultaneous explosive growth have left power vacuums that other players have tried to fill. Among these, Turkey has gained increasing influence. In Africa, the Anatolian country can afford to play a role that exceeds its actual capacity as an emerging mid-level power.
Greco-Turkish maritime disputes, couched in competing narratives of national sovereignties, are nothing new. Plus, it has also long been the case that the two sides cannot agree on a framework within which to address their disputes. In spite of the intermittent flare ups, these disputes have traditionally taken the form of a smouldering yet frozen conflict. Despite the relative respite in the tension since early 2021, this only came after a period of high tension in the Eastern Mediterranean between 2016 and 2020.
This year marked the start of a gradual shift in Turkey’s regional foreign policy. After having played a proactive and assertive role in the broader Mediterranean in recent years, Ankara has adopted a less confrontational stance, as it has turned increasingly aware of the need to break its regional isolation and to make friends again. International, regional, and domestic developments have led Turkey to open new channels of dialogue with its neighbours in an attempt to defuse tensions and repair relations.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has adopted various instruments in order to maintain its regional primacy in the post-Soviet space (PSS). In particular, during the 1990s, a favourable political climate contributed to Russia negotiating all the ceasefire agreements that followed the violent ethno-conflicts that erupted in several states of the post-Soviet Union era.
In its latest iteration, which manifested itself more clearly between 2019 and 2021, Turkey’s foreign policy around Libya has been part of three interlinked policies.
After over a year of tensions, the European Union (EU) has offered an olive branch to reset relations with Turkey and relaunch bilateral cooperation on specific crucial dossiers. Although profound divergences between the two persist, realpolitik seems to have prevailed in Brussels as Turkey remains a strategic player in the enlarged Mediterranean region, especially in the Eastern Mediterranean.