The Western Condition - St Antony's College - University of Oxford

An ambivalent decade: Three variations in the AKP’s foreign policy
period that the AKP government’s Iranian policy came to be increasingly portrayed within
western foreign policy circles as a ‘litmus test’ of Turkey’s commitment to the US-led western
security alliance. 72 In 2007, in a testimony before the US Commission on Security and
Cooperation in Europe, Soner Çağaptay, a director at the neo-conservative Washington Institute
for Near East Policy, quipped:
It is ironic that every time the U.S. State Department says the right things on how
we are together with Turks in fighting the PKK and we will deliver security,
promising the right things, that same day the Iranians bomb PKK camps. So this
is how you read the news in the Turkish press: front page, big headlines, ‘Iranians
Have Bombed PKK Camps’ -12th page, one column, ‘The U.S. Has Said They’ll
Support against the PKK.’ In this regard Iranians walk the walk and they make it
look as if the Americans are only talking the talk. And that’s a huge problem. 73
Motivated by these developments, the AKP government turned a blind eye to the heavy handed
crackdown on anti-government demonstrations in Iran following its disputed presidential
election in 2009. It also adopted a conciliatory tone on the nature of the Iranian nuclear
programme, emphasising the country’s right to uranium enrichment for civilian purposes. In
May 2010, shortly before the sanctions vote at the UN Security Council, Turkey and Brazil got
Iran to agree to a uranium swap deal, based on the proposal set forth by the P5+1 (US, Britain,
France, Russia, China + Germany) in Geneva the previous year. Hailed as a breakthrough by
Turkish and Brazilian diplomats, the agreement caught western leaders off guard and was
eventually ignored as a ‘delaying tactic’ on the part of the Iranian regime. 74 As a display of its
newfound autonomy and self-confidence, Turkey, a non-permanent member of the Security
Council at the time, voted against resolution 1929 imposing international sanctions on the
Islamic Republic; the only country to do so besides Brazil. This was probably a lost opportunity
on both sides to harness Turkey’s zero problems strategy for the benefit of deflating the world’s
nagging problems, as the Iranian nuclear question certainly is.
We should note that during this period, Turkish foreign policy was also affected by and gradually
came to reflect the changing tone of politics and power relations inside the country. At various
points, the increasingly confrontational rhetoric of a visibly self-assured ruling party, its more
palpable Islamic bias and the seemingly unrelenting ambition of Prime Minister Erdoğan to take all
matters, domestic and foreign, into his own hands, challenged Davutoğlu’s more subtle and
process-driven method. The remarkable fallout between the AKP and the Israeli government after
72 F. Stephen Larrabee, ‘Turkey Rediscovers the Middle East’, Foreign Affairs, 86 (4), 2007, pp. 103 – 114.
73 Quoted in Daphne McCurdy, ‘Turkish – Iranian Relations: When Opposites Attract’, Turkish Policy Quarterly, Vol.
7, No. 2, 2008, p. 96.
74 Only two days before, the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had dismissed the duo’s attempts as futile. David
E. Sanger and Michael Slackman, ‘U.S. Is Skeptical on Iranian Deal for Nuclear Fuel’, New York Times, 17 May 2010.
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