Turkey’s Foreign Policy in the Middle East

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of Turkey’s foreign policy toward the Middle East from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to the present day. Its thematic focus includes institutional legacies of imperial rule, Cold War alliance dynamics, ethnic and religious/sectarian politics, and strategies of economic development. It suggests that an analytical focus on identity contestation between competing versions of Turkishness—Republican nationalism and Ottoman Islamism—that prescribe very different foreign policy orientations helps to explain the dramatic shift toward a highly activist role in the Middle East in the mid-2000s. Applying this conceptual framework, the discussion highlights the key influential factors and inflection points shaping bilateral ties with prominent states, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Syria, as well as nonstate actors, including various Kurdish and Palestinian entities.