Hedging strategy of Turkey in great power competition

ABSTRACT

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the U.S. and its allies have failed to recruit more states from the developing world to join the Western coalition against Russia and China to defend the liberal international order. As a swing state, Turkey is an example of this trend despite being a NATO ally. Turkey has adopted strategic hedging to avoid taking sides in the U.S.-Russia rivalry and it has been engaging both sides to increase the range of strategic options available to it. The ‘return-maximizing’ and ‘risk-contingency’ measures of hedging have allowed Turkey to cope with competing great powers and the systemic uncertainties simultaneously. The article argues that the Turkey’s hedging against an uncertain future has helped it to extract concessions, elevate its status, preserve the country’s strategic autonomy, and provide regime survival for President Erdoğan despite severe economic problems. However, hedging behaviours have weakened alignment strength between Turkey and its Western allies.

KEYWORDS:

• Turkish foreign policy
• hedging strategy
• great power competition
• regime survival
• Turkey
• United States
• Russia
• NATO

Acknowledgments

A portion of the paper was written during the author’s visiting fellowship at Seoul National University Asia Center (SNUAC). Author’s research visit at the SNUAC has been supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye, 2219-International Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Programme. Author also would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedbacks and comments on the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2024.2352894

Notes

1. Hedging secondary states increasingly avoids taking sides on U.S.-Russia and U.S.-China competition. For the brief discussion on middle power states’ hedging strategy in great power competition see Kara (2023).

2. By adopting non-taking side posture swing states follow ambiguous policies and equally incline towards competing powers to costly entanglements between great powers during the structural power shift. Geopolitical swing states mostly refer to Brazil, India, Indonesia, Turkey, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia. For more on swing state discussion see German Marshall Fund Report (2023).

3. Hungary is another NATO member that resisted NATO’s enlargement and later Sweden’s NATO bid along with Turkey. Similar to Turkey, Hungary was also driven by the interest to get concessions from Russia and the West during the expansion of the transatlantic military alliance. However, Turkish objection had gained more attention due to Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s statement that Hungary will follow Turkey’s lead when it comes to NATO’s Nordic enlargement. Hungary ratified both Finland’s and Sweden’s membership after Turkey ratification of these states’ membership bid to join NATO. See Szakacs (2023).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mehtap Kara

Mehtap Kara is currently a visiting fellow at Seoul National University Asia Center. She received her PhD in International Relations from Eastern Mediterranean University and works as an assistant professor at Bahçeşehir Cyprus University. Kara’s areas of research include IR theories, foreign policy analysis, and international security.