AKP Foreign Policy Dragging Turkey In Dangerous Direction

When it comes to foreign policy, the stances of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) on both Syria and the Middle East have damaged Turkey greatly and will continue to do so unless they are changed.
The mentality driving this foreign policy -- constructed largely by Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu and President Tayyip Erdoğan -- has been based on the idea of re-enlivening the former Ottoman Empire. What Ankara envisioned was the coalescing of the spread out, amorphous Arab-Islamic groups throughout the region, under the leadership of Turkey, on a decidedly Sunni axis. The popular movements that rose up against dictatorial regimes throughout the Middle East in past years were seen by Ankara as being the ideal groundwork on which to base these dreams.
But for Turkey, this all turned out to be a strategic breaking point. Turkey was in fact the only country in the region with its face firmly turned towards the West, not only as a member of the Council of Europe but also a country whose most essential state policies were based on the concept of eventually becoming an EU member.
Over the years, Turkey took brave steps forward towards democratization, despite the many entrenched systemic problems it faced. Likewise, it had embraced secularity, despite the problematic way this principle had come into being in Turkey.

These were, in the end, characteristics that had made Turkey of central importance to the Middle East. How could a Turkey that wound up becoming distanced from the democratic values it had once represented -- moving further from the West, and closer to being like any other Middle Eastern country -- maintain its attractiveness for other countries and peoples in the region?

And in fact, this was the greatest mistake made by the top AKP circles when putting together this strategy. Another reality that they appeared to have ignored was that no country other than Turkey was pursuing the return of the Ottoman dream with the vengeance that Ankara was. In fact, for many in the region the Ottoman era did not exactly create warm memories.

Top AKP planners inferred some very incorrect and exaggerated ideas from the warm welcome Erdoğan's “One minute!” outburst -- uttered at the Davos Economic Forum to Israeli President Simon Peres received in Arab countries. In the wake of this outburst, it seems Erdoğan began to see himself as some sort of “caliph,” watching over the Islamic world in his region. In fact, he began to impose this idea and image on his fans as time passed. The real truth was, the whole “One minute!” outburst was nothing more than a loudly voiced objection to aggressive Israeli policies; it happened to come while on stage at an international summit. What people felt sympathy towards was Erdoğan's stance at the time. To then try and turn this sympathy for a stance into a reason for a new kind of leader was fantasy.

The experiment with leadership by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was set to burst the AKP and Erdoğan's balloon. Ankara wound up completely misleading not only Egypt's former president, Mohamed Morsi, but the entire Muslim Brotherhood. Rather than offering up a constructive, all-embracing, harmonious stance on the democratization process unfolding in Egypt, or advising the Egyptian leadership to beware of delicate balances, both social and political, Ankara advised Morsi to “Stand strong.” The result of this “standing strong” of course was the coup that brought Morsi down. In the wake of the coup, condemnations of General Sisi and efforts to turn the problem into ripe ingredients for domestic Turkish politics were not enough to erase the sharp dimensions of the mistakes Ankara had made in Egypt and Morsi in the people's eyes.

The other vivid example of the collapse of AKP plans to build a Sunni axis in the region can be seen in Syria. Ankara's Syrian policy -- constructed on the wildly off-base predictions by the National Intelligence Organization (MİT) that “Assad will be overthrown in a few months” -- is actually one of the essential reasons the Syrian crisis has lasted this long. It needs to be clarified that the AKP in fact holds first degree responsibility for the current situation in Syria.
Even now, new steps are being prepared by Ankara, in hopes of not only camouflaging its responsibility in this mess but also getting people to forget the damage Syrian policy has done to Turkey. This step will involve trying to stick Turkish troops in Syrian territory on the basis of the developments unfolding in Rojava. These are preparations closely linked to the defeat the AKP experienced in the June 7 elections. I will focus on them in more detail in my next column.

CAFER SOLGUN (Cihan/Today's Zaman)