At a time of growing uncertainty about the future of the international order, middle powers seem to be having a moment. Along with countries such as Brazil, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia, Turkey is trying to capitalize on a geopolitical landscape that is less shaped by the postwar U.S. alliance system and rules-based diplomacy and more by multiple centers of power and transactional relations. Especially since the global financial crisis in 2008, Turkey has pursued closer relationships beyond its traditional Western allies, including with Russia and China. It has also sought to extend its international reach, especially outside the West—Turkey now has the third-highest number of diplomatic missions in the world, trailing only China and the United States. And in conflicts in the South Caucasus, the Black Sea region, and the Middle East and North Africa, Turkey has played an increasingly assertive role.
Turkey’s recent policies in Syria are emblematic of the way a middle power can exert influence in its region, sometimes outmaneuvering seemingly stronger players. Throughout Syria’s civil war, which began in 2011, the Turkish government openly opposed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and provided material support to groups fighting against his rule. It did so even when Assad, backed by Iran and Russia, appeared to have a stranglehold on power, and the conflict itself caused millions of Syrian refugees to flee to Turkey, creating security risks along Turkey’s long southern border with Syria. Yet 13 years later, in December 2024, the Assad regime collapsed. Against all odds, Turkey’s policy had belatedly paid off. Ankara’s adversary is gone, and the victory of Turkish-supported opposition groups has given it a direct line to Damascus. Regional geopolitics remain fragile, and state-building in Syria will be a long and delicate process, but Turkey has established itself as one of the main outside powers with the leverage to shape the country’s future.
Turkey’s Syria policy seems to be yielding results, at least for now. Middle powers such as Turkey do have to pursue their own interests and hedge their bets to survive in a world where upheaval is the norm, great powers cannot be counted on, and global relations are increasingly transactional. Two decades ago, the path to foreign policy success for these countries lay in becoming a good citizen of the liberal international order. Today, “strategic autonomy” is the name of the game. Yet if Turkey and countries in similar positions do not appreciate the tradeoffs of this approach, they risk straining their partnerships, overstretching their diplomatic resources, and diluting their economic priorities. The idea that transactionalism is inherently good for middle powers is a delusion.
Turkish policymakers believe that the move toward multipolarity is generating a new world—one in which Turkey should be an active player. Historically, Turkey’s diplomacy focused on the country’s immediate neighborhood and Western allies. Turkey conducted a large part of its trade with Europe since the early Cold War years and linked its security to NATO when it joined the alliance in 1952.
Today, Ankara’s ties to the non-Western world are growing, and gaining influence across the global South has become a core pillar of Turkey’s strategy. In 2002, the country’s volume of trade with Asian countries, including China and Russia, was only half its volume of trade with the European Union. Two decades later, Turkey’s trade with Asia had surpassed its trade with Europe. Turkey’s trade with African countries jumped more than 50 percent between 2014 and 2024, from $21.2 billion to $33.3 billion. The number of Turkish embassies on the 54-country continent increased from 12 in 2002 to 44 in 2022. As part of a long-term plan to become a power broker in Africa, last year, the Turkish government brought Ethiopian and Somali leaders together for negotiations to end the two countries’ dispute over Ethiopia’s plans to build a port in Somaliland, a breakaway region with its own government in the north of Somalia. Turkish Airlines, the national flag carrier, now flies to 130 countries, branding itself as the company that “flies to the most countries in the world.”
Regional instability and the deterioration of security ties with Western partners have also compelled Turkey to develop domestic defense and aerospace technologies. Large-scale government and private investments have fueled the growth of Turkey’s drone industry. The Bayraktar TB2 drone has been used in various conflicts, including in Libya, Nagorno-Karabakh, Syria, and Ukraine, and is now exported to more than 30 countries. By 2024, Turkey’s total defense and aerospace exports soared to $7.2 billion—a nearly 30 percent increase over the previous year. As of 2023, three Turkish defense contractors are among the world’s top 100 arms revenue earners.
Ankara has expanded its pool of international partners in other areas, too, partly in an effort to position itself as a connector country that supports the flow of investment, transport, and energy between Asia and Europe. In 2012, Turkey became a dialogue partner of the Chinese-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization—an alignment that Turkish policymakers, more for political posturing than out of conviction, occasionally highlight as an alternative to Turkey’s stagnated EU membership bid. Turkey also joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative in 2015, hoping to unite its own Middle Corridor project—which envisions transport infrastructure connecting East Asia to Europe via Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Turkey—with the Belt and Road Initiative in one big transcontinental network. Since 2011, Turkish public-private partnerships have poured around $115 billion into motorways, bridges, ports, and airports to improve Turkey’s segment of that infrastructure. Last year, in its most significant step yet toward alignment with non-Western economies, Turkey applied to join BRICS, the increasingly influential bloc led by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
As it pursues multiple foreign alignments, however, Turkey has not always accounted for the vulnerabilities of its conflicted position. Multipolarity may offer economic opportunity, but it also brings heightened risk. Strengthening partnerships in one region could also come at the expense of ties in another. For Turkey to successfully walk this tightrope, like other middle powers, it will need to operate with self-restraint and a realistic understanding of its limits.
An essential concern for Turkey is economic security. In an increasingly transactional world, middle powers want to work with multiple major powers on an issue-by-issue basis. Yet as the global economy fragments, accelerated by the United States’ escalation of trade and technology wars under President Donald Trump, many countries will also be pressured to pick sides. What makes this balancing act more challenging for Turkey is that it has multiple dependencies on rival blocs. It cannot afford to lose access to Russian gas, Chinese goods, European markets, or the American dollar. On the Russian-Chinese side, Turkey’s economic interest is deepening. In 2024, total trade with these two countries reached $101 billion, accounting for almost 17 percent of Turkey’s overall external trade. Yet these trade ties are highly asymmetric—Turkey’s total exports to Russia and China were only $12 billion last year—which significantly contributes to Turkey’s external trade deficits. Meanwhile, the Turkish economy still needs Western markets and capital to sustain its growth; Turkey exports roughly as much to the EU as it imports and almost 70 percent of foreign direct investment comes from the EU and the United States. Being dragged into a trade, technology, and sanctions war between Western actors and the Russian-Chinese axis could lead to significant economic turbulence for Turkey.
Multipolarity may offer opportunity, but it also brings heightened risk.
Diversifying trade and investment ties may seem to be a good insurance policy for a middle power. But Turkey, in part because of domestic political tumult that generates uncertainty for investors, has so far struggled to convert its hedging strategy into substantial economic gains. From 2019 to 2023, for example, the country attracted about $53 billion in foreign direct investment—much less than the $84 billion that Vietnam, another “hedging middle” country whose economy is less than half the size of Turkey’s, brought in over the same period. Turkey’s economic exposure to rival blocs, moreover, could constrain its room for maneuver. If Turkey chooses to deepen its economic ties with Russia and China, for example, it risks losing much-needed high-quality foreign capital from Western countries.
An effective hedging policy must start at home. To reduce its economic exposure and increase its resilience, Turkey needs a comprehensive industrial policy and strong institutions. The country already has some important advantages: its open economy, lacking in natural resources, has achieved significant market and product diversification, and its entrepreneurs are astute and adaptable. Yet the structure of the Turkish economy reinforces external dependencies. The main problem is that Turkey relies on imports for many high-end products; advanced technologies account for only four percent of Turkey’s manufacturing exports, significantly below the world average of 19 percent. At least until Turkey can become more self-sufficient in this area and alleviate its current economic hardship, the country will need to take extra care not to antagonize the wrong economic partner as it chases other foreign policy objectives.
Turkey’s and other middle powers’ commitment to strategic autonomy is understandable in a world where great powers are becoming increasingly unreliable. But overzealous pursuit of such autonomy is dangerous, too. Turkey suffered the consequences of pushing an independent foreign policy too far in the wake of the Arab uprisings, when it overstretched itself by clashing with both neighboring countries and global partners. It opened diplomatic rifts—or exacerbated existing ones—with Syria after Assad cracked down violently on protesters in 2011, Saudi Arabia after Ankara supported the government of Mohamed Morsi in Egypt in 2012, Egypt after Abdel Fattah el-Sisi took power in 2013, and the EU and the United States over migration, Syria policy, and other issues throughout the decade. As these stalemates dragged on, foreign investment in Turkey declined significantly. The government also had to direct additional resources to security, restricting its fiscal capacity in other areas, and foreign policy decisions became increasingly contentious, feeding political polarization. To ease those pressures, Turkey has dedicated significant diplomatic energy to damage control over the past few years.
Today, Ankara will need to juggle long-term relations with its traditional Western allies with a strategy to engage with the non-Western world. Turkey’s relations with Western countries are in particular need of repair, having become increasingly transactional over the last decade. Rather than working together toward shared goals, the two sides often settle for crude deals. In exchange for Turkey keeping Syrian refugees out of Europe, for instance, the EU provides funds to help offset costs—and, in an unspoken term of the agreement, the EU tolerates the regression of democratic norms in Turkey.
Transactional diplomacy has not advanced Turkey’s most urgent interests.
Complicating Ankara’s transactionalism is the fact that Turkey is not a typical nonaligned country. Even though it is courting institutions such as BRICS or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, it remains a member of NATO, part of the EU Customs Union, a founding member of the Council of Europe, and an EU candidate country. These affiliations place expectations on Turkey, and charting a different course has consequences. After Turkey signed a deal to purchase S-400 missiles from Russia in 2017, for example, it was expelled from NATO’s F-35 fighter jet program. And after years of poor relations with its neighbors and Europe, Turkey was excluded from the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum, a regional bloc that was formally established in 2020.
Transactional diplomacy, moreover, has not advanced any of Turkey’s most urgent national interests. Turkey and the EU, for instance, have been discussing plans to modernize their Customs Union deal for the last decade. The agreement needs an upgrade to better contribute to Turkey’s economic development, green transition, and integration into Europe’s restructured supply chains. But no progress has been made so far. Nor has Turkey managed to negotiate a better process for Schengen visa applications, which have become an extremely unpleasant experience for Turkish citizens who wish to travel and do business in Europe, or to establish a working model for sustained cooperation with its Western partners in Ukraine, the eastern Mediterranean, and Syria.
Progress on these issues may require resetting Turkey’s relationship with the EU, and Turkey could use the transition to a post-Assad Syria to do so. Syrian stability is hanging by a thread, and although Turkey has strong ties with the new government in Damascus, it cannot single-handedly finance the massive reconstruction the country needs. Together, however, Turkey and the EU could do much to support Syria, preventing another exodus of refugees and helping to stabilize the entire Middle East—if both sides change the way they approach their relationship. For Brussels, that would mean treating Turkey as a true security partner, not just as a buffer state that prevents large numbers of refugees from entering Europe. The Trump administration’s hesitance to backstop Ukrainian and European security may be the jolt the EU needs to commit to working with Turkey. Ankara, for its part, will need to recognize that deepening its ties with the non-Western world in ways that antagonize European allies is not sustainable.
The transition to a multipolar world is often perceived as a middle-power renaissance, granting opportunities to countries beyond a few great powers to shape regional and global politics. The way for a middle power to navigate international politics today, the argument has been, is to avoid making restrictive obligations or picking sides. As Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva told the press last month, “I do not want to choose . . . I want to have relationships with the United States, I want to have relations with China. I do not want to have a preference for one or the other.” The return of Trump to the White House would seem to reinforce this way of thinking, as U.S. foreign policy becomes more explicitly transactional, prioritizing deals that serve specific national interests over explicit commitments to alliances and norms.
Yet by embracing flexible partnerships, as Turkey has done with its own balancing act, middle powers may be ignoring significant risks. Particularly for economies as exposed as Turkey’s, careful economic statecraft is vital to limit the fallout of trade and technology wars, supply chain disruptions, and other manifestations of geopolitical uncertainty. An activist foreign policy is not sustainable without strong domestic institutions and a healthy economy to back it up. Autonomy, moreover, can only be pushed so far. Playing all sides can lead to isolation, and pursuing every opportunity for engagement can overstretch countries that simply do not have a superpower’s resources. Turkey and other middle powers may see a transactional approach as an appealing way to get ahead in today’s world. But unless they temper it with realistic expectations, the policy will likely cost more than it yields.
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