Bitter Frenemies Between Turkey and Russia

Bitter Frenemies Between Turkey And Russia

It will crumble soon enough; the United States doesn’t need to fear their partnership.

It is true that Turkey is drifting away from the West. But it is still too early to say that it is ready to join forces with Russia, particularly in the Middle East. As Turkey and the United States bicker over Turkey’s purchase of an S-400 air defense system from Russia and its cooperation with Moscow in Syria, it is fair to ask whether Turkey and the West are heading for a real separation.

Russia appears to be doing the same. As both look for more influence in the region, their relationship will be at times cooperative and at times competitive. Turkey is recalibrating its foreign and regional policy at a time when the Middle East is undergoing a major transformation.

As the relationship between Turkey and Russia shifts, the West should keep in mind that the two countries’ geopolitical aspirations are largely incompatible, and that cooperation today does not imply cooperation tomorrow. For example, Moscow and Ankara were on the brink of military confrontation late in 2015 after Turkey shot down a Russian jet. Less than a year later, they had mended ties and decided to cooperate on Syria and a range of other issues, including defense and nuclear energy.

More than any shared ideological convictions, it is the geopolitics of the Middle East, souring relations with the United States, and the nature of leadership in Ankara and Moscow that have played a central role in shaping Turkish-Russian relations.

First, given Russia’s military involvement in the Syrian civil war in 2015 and its determination to keep President Bashar al-Assad in power, some form of engagement between Russia and Turkey, Syria’s next-door neighbor, was almost inevitable. That engagement has swung between combative and collaborative over time, but the two sides seem to have settled on cooperation in the second half of 2016. By then, Russia virtually controlled northern Syria west of the Euphrates. Turkey has thus had to rely on Russian consent to undertake military operations along its border, first against the Islamic State and then against Syrian Kurdish forces.

Second, the health of Turkish-U.S. relations has a direct impact on Turkey’s friendliness with Russia. When Ankara and Washington are close, Turkey’s appetite for exploring ties with Russia as a geopolitical hedge shrinks. But when Turkey is frustrated with the West—as it is now over U.S. support for Syrian Kurdish forces—it finds in Russia a sympathetic ear.

In conclusion, Turkish-Russian relations have a personal dimension. The heads of both countries play a decisive and oversized role in foreign policy, and they have established a personal rapport with each other. Although strains in both countries’ relations with the West are long-standing, both leaders have an interest in magnifying them. To be sure, the personal quality of the relationship makes it fragile, since there are still few institutional ties between the countries to support the fledgling partnership. Yet both leaders seem likely to stay in power for the time being, and both seem likely to remain suspicious of the West.

Given the structural factors in Russia and Turkey’s deteriorating relations with the West, it is hard to imagine either country turning on a dime, even after Putin and Erdogan are gone. The damage in Turkey’s relations with the West, after all, will already have been done. And if Turkey does implement the S-400 system and the United States enacts heavy sanctions on Turkey in return, Turkey could come to depend on Russia even more for defense.