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Erdogan Continues to Play Both Sides

11 Aug 2022
By Colin Chapman FAIIA
Vladimir Putin And Recep Tayyip Erdogan (2020 03 05)
Source: Kremlin, Wikimedia, https://bit.ly/3PhIa8r.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan met with Vladimir Putin in Sochi this week. As the two nations agreed to boost cooperation, Turkey once more finds itself balanced precariously between Russia and the West.

While many eyes in Australia and the Asia Pacific have been on the staged military rehearsal in the Yellow Sea of a possible, but unlikely, Chinese invasion of Taiwan, a most unusual meeting was taking place half the world away in President Vladimir Putin’s glittering taxpayer-funded palace at Sochi on Russia’s black Sea coast.

For more than four hours, Putin played host to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, president of Turkey, in what was, by all accounts, a very friendly meeting that led to an economic pact between Ankara and Moscow – in clear breach of sanctions the West is imposing on Russia following the invasion of Ukraine. It was perhaps no coincidence that the Sochi meeting took place on the very weekend that the first bulk grain carrier left the Ukrainian port of Odesa since war commenced on 28 February. The difficult deal was brokered by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and Erdoğan and will bring some measure of relief to the millions nearing starvation in Africa.

The deal was very much in Ankara’s interest. Under the agreement, Turkey is hosting a joint centre where Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish, and United Nations representatives will work to ensure the safe transit of Ukraine’s exports to world markets. Turkey depends heavily on Russia and Ukraine for grain. Russia accounted for 56 percent of Turkish grain imports in 2021 at US $2.24 billion, while imports from Ukraine amounted to $861 million.

It is obvious to any student of geopolitics that Turkey, while a member of NATO, also needs to maintain a relationship with Russia, the vast nuclear power to its immediate north. It is equally obvious that Putin’s Kremlin nurses the singular desire of forcing splits in NATO, with one priority being to persuade Erdoğan to lead his country out of the bloc. Putin has so far failed in this aim, but he can chalk up a different win: Turkey is no longer likely to join the European Union.

Little is known about the content of the Sochi discussions – there was no transcript of the meeting issued to reporters – but they did produce a joint statement saying they had agreed to “boost cooperation in the transport, agriculture, finance, and construction industries.” Significantly, they also agreed to deepen trade and energy ties and Turkey is to pay for Russian gas partly in roubles, a clear breach of the Western sanctions which Ankara does not respect.

Even before the Sochi meeting, Erdoğan has been regarded as a maverick by much of the West. This latest deal is being regarded with great suspicion in many Western capitals, not least in Brussels, where European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen is leading the charge to sustain EU unity in support for Ukraine.

The London Financial Times quoted six Western officials, who declined to be named, expressing concern at the pledges made by Erdoğan and Putin at the Sochi meeting. An EU official said the 27-nation bloc was monitoring Turkey-Russia relations “more and more closely.”

It seems that a finance ministers meeting in Washington became alarmed when they caught wind of a leaked document from Moscow suggesting ways countries could help Russia evade sanctions by passing transactions through certain Turkish banks. Of course, there are many other countries that offer Russia a similar loophole, such as the oligarchs’ latest bolthole in Dubai, but the United Arab Emirates is not a member of NATO. We can expect some pressure on Western companies to pull out of Turkey — corporations such as BP, Coca-Cola, Ford, Unilever, and Bosch have major interests there.

It is unlikely that the growing angst about Turkey in Western intelligence circles and treasuries will lead to action. The EU is at the tail end of its summer break, and there seem to have been no significant meetings or movement in Brussels. Washington is preoccupied with the surprise passage through the Senate of President Joe Biden’s $750 billion climate change and healthcare bill, now likely to be signed into law within days, a significant victory for Biden just when he needed one. London, an outlier in this debate, has a caretaker government unwilling to take decisive action as Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss slug out a tedious contest to persuade 160,000 Conservative party members to pick a successor to Boris Johnson, the results of which will be known on 5 September.

Of one thing we can be sure: despite the angst, Turkey is not about to be booted out of NATO. What is equally certain is that every global strategist worthy of the name will be watching the Turkish opinion polls. General elections for the presidency and the 600-member Grand National Assembly must be held by 18 June next year, which means they could be held any time when Erdoğan thinks he will win.

Before assessing Erdoğan’s chances, we should try to better understand Turkey’s unusual predicament which has been created by a combination of its geography, history as the heart of the old Ottoman empire, and economics. While no longer the power it was under Ataturk, strategically Turkey straddles the entrance from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean at the strait of Bosporus. Much of Eurasia, including Russia, is dependent on the shipping route.

In 2009, my old friend the American futurist George Friedman predicted in his acclaimed New York Times best seller, The Next 100 Years, that “by 2020 Turkey would be a surging, fairly stable economic and military power in a sea of chaos.” There is still chaos to Turkey’s south in Syria and Iraq. Turkey, a secular, predominantly Muslim state, and a promising and burgeoning economy when George Friedman wrote, is now suffering inflation approaching 80 percent, and a currency that has lost almost two thirds of its value in the last few years. Turkey has also become less secular— as the author Robert Kaplan said “When Erdoğan assumed control, he gave power to a wave of Islamism.”

Turkey may be allied with the West through NATO and has provided arms for Ukraine to use against Russia while condemning the Russian invasion, but it has retained cordial relations with Putin. The Russian leader was the first to congratulate him for surviving an attempted coup in 2016. Erdoğan is grateful to Putin for continuing to supply much of the gas that provides 45 percent of Turkey’s energy needs. Russia’s nuclear power provider Rosatom has signed a contract to build a nuclear plant at Akkuya in southern Turkey, to be commissioned and run by Rosatom for several decades – a model Putin is seeking to replicate in other countries in Asia and Africa.

It is notable that Putin and Erdoğan feature in the first two chapters of Gideon Rachman’s excellent book on the new line of autocrats that now appear to dominate the world. They seem to respect each other, as autocrats tend to do. But they will always have a bumpy relationship as Erdoğan seeks to “play” both Russia and the West or, to borrow a phrase from a failed would-be autocrat, Boris Johnson, “having your cake and eating it.”

Erdoğan must be cautious. More Russians may take vacations in Turkey now that Russian airlines can fly them to Mediterranean resorts where tourists can use a Russian credit card but accepting payment in roubles will do little to reduce Ankara’s surging debt. Between now and the election, Turkey may have to seek a bailout from a reluctant IMF. But China and South Korea have joined Qatar and the United Arab Emirates in a $28 billion currency swap with Ankara, which Turkey is hoping Saudi Arabia will also join.

Erdoğan is a wily operator, who has shown some skill in managing his international connections while also imprisoning some of his more vocal opponents at home. A wise man or woman would not bet against him winning another five-year term.

Colin Chapman FAIIA is editor-at-large of Australian Outlook and a fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. He was president of AIIA New South Wales. Colin is a writer, broadcaster, and public speaker who specialises in geopolitics, international economics, and global media issues. He has held executive positions at the BBC and Financial Times.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Licence and may be republished with attribution.