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There is a paradox at the heart of Turkish opposition politics that grows more consequential with each passing year. Parties that present themselves as Türkiye's pathway to democratic renewal and Euro-Atlantic reintegration are, by virtually every meaningful measure, less equipped to navigate the contemporary international environment than the government they seek to replace.
This is not merely a matter of resources or incumbency advantage. It reflects a deeper intellectual failure—a refusal to recognize that the world has fundamentally changed, and that the mental frameworks guiding opposition foreign policy were built for a reality that no longer exists.
When the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) first came to power in November 2002, the international order operated under a set of assumptions that now seem almost quaint. The post-Cold War liberal consensus was still dominant. Euro-Atlantic institutions were expanding eastward with optimism.
Democracy promotion was treated as both a moral imperative and a strategic instrument. Humanitarian intervention had found new legitimacy. The European Union was still credible as a transformative power, capable of reshaping neighboring states through the magnetic pull of accession.
The United States remained the uncontested architect of global order, and multilateralism was the operating system of international relations.
That world is gone. What has replaced it is an environment defined by strategic competition, the return of great power rivalry, the weaponization of economic interdependence, and the normalization of force as a tool of statecraft.
Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 did not create this transformation but merely crystallized it. The shift had been building for years: in the annexation of Crimea, in the Syrian war's brutal lessons about sovereignty and intervention, in the South China Sea's contested waters, in the slow erosion of arms control architecture, in the transactional turn of American foreign policy that preceded and outlasted any single administration.
Türkiye sits at the epicenter of this transformation. To its north, a land war reshapes European security calculations. To its south, a fractured arc stretching from Libya through Syria, Iraq, and into the Persian Gulf generates continuous instability.
To its east, competing regional powers like Iran, the Gulf states, an assertive Russia press against Turkish strategic interests. The Eastern Mediterranean has become a theater of overlapping claims, energy rivalries, and naval posturing. The Caucasus has proven itself a live conflict zone, not a frozen one. No country in NATO's membership faces a more complex and immediate strategic environment. And no country's foreign policy requires a more sophisticated security intelligence framework to navigate it effectively.
One might expect opposition parties to respond to this transformed environment by cultivating genuine expertise, investing in a new generation of strategic thinkers, engaging with contemporary security literature, and fostering dialogue with active policymakers in allied capitals.
Instead, the dominant tendency has been precisely the opposite: a retreat into the institutional comfort of the past.
The main opposition parties have cultivated foreign policy advisory structures populated heavily by retired ambassadors, former undersecretaries, and ex-officials whose formative professional experiences belong to a different era. This is presented as a virtue experience, institutional knowledge, the weight of diplomatic careers.
In reality, it is a significant liability. Diplomatic experience is not self-refreshing. A career built navigating the foreign ministries of the 1990s and early 2000s provides little reliable guidance for understanding the strategic calculus of 2025. The alliance relationships have changed.
The threat perceptions of partner governments have changed. The domestic political constraints shaping foreign policy decisions in Washington, Berlin, Paris, and London have changed profoundly.
The retired official who spent decades cultivating relationships within a particular institutional framework naturally tends to interpret current developments through that framework. He reaches for analogies from his own experience.
He advises based on a diplomatic architecture that has been substantially dismantled or transformed. And the party that relies on his counsel receives intelligence that is not so much wrong as it is chronologically displaced, accurate for a world that no longer operates by the same rules.
This is not a criticism of individuals. Diplomatic careers produce genuine expertise and wisdom. The problem is structural: when advisory frameworks are not deliberately refreshed, when there is no systematic effort to bring in analysts who have been formed by the post-2008, post-2014, post-2022 security environment, institutions become prisoners of their own institutional memory.
The Turkish opposition, in its foreign policy posture, is substantially reasoning from memory rather than from current intelligence.
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The problem is compounded by a second failure that is perhaps even more fundamental: the colonization of foreign policy discourse by the logic and incentives of domestic political competition.
When a party's foreign policy statements are primarily calibrated to signal opposition to the government, to appeal to particular constituencies, to differentiate itself within a competitive electoral landscape, the result is a foreign policy that serves domestic purposes while failing as actual foreign policy.
No episode illustrates the opposition's disorientation more vividly than the reaction of certain Turkish opposition figures to the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024. While the collapse of a regime that had presided over the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and driven millions into displacement was greeted across the region and beyond as a moment of historic reckoning, segments of the Turkish opposition responded with something closer to lamentation than relief.
The reasoning, such as it was, ran along familiar lines: Assad represented a secular order; his fall risked empowering radical forces; the instability created opportunities for actors hostile to Turkish interests.
It revealed a foreign policy mind still operating in the paradigm of the 1990s state-centric order, in which the preservation of recognized governments, however brutal, was treated as inherently preferable to the uncertainties of transition.
It revealed an inability to process how profoundly the Syrian conflict had already transformed Türkiye’s strategic position, and how the demographic, military, and political consequences of twelve years of Syrian war had reshaped Turkish domestic politics, defense posture, and regional relationships in ways that made any return to the pre-2011 status quo not merely unlikely but meaningless as a policy objective.
There is also a deeper irony here that opposition figures appear not to have registered: mourning Assad places them, on this particular issue, in implicit alignment with Tehran and Moscow, the very powers whose regional influence Turkish opposition rhetoric otherwise presents as threatening. The foreign policy of nostalgia produces strange bedfellows.
Here lies perhaps the most important piece of context that Turkish opposition thinking consistently fails to incorporate: the fundamental shift in what Western governments actually prioritize in their bilateral relationships.
The narrative that structured Turkish opposition foreign policy for years was essentially that a democratically reformed Türkiye, with stricter rule of law institutions and a normalized relationship with civil society, would be a more valued partner for the European Union and the United States.
Invest in democratic credentials, and strategic partnerships will follow. It is an appealing narrative, and in another era, it had genuine traction.
That era has passed. The transformation is not rhetorical; it is operational and budgetary. European governments are now allocating historic increases in defense spending. NATO is undergoing its most significant strategic recalibration since the Cold War.
The European Union is constructing a defense industrial architecture that would have been inconceivable a decade ago. The United States is restructuring its alliance commitments around hard capability contributions and strategic reliability. In this environment, what allied governments need from Türkiye is not primarily democratic certification.
Türkiye, under its current government, has demonstrated, however contentiously, that it possesses and is willing to deploy these assets. Türkiye's mediation in the early phase of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, its management of grain corridor negotiations, its leverage over Swedish and Finnish NATO accession are all currencies of contemporary strategic relevance.
One need not endorse the AK Party's domestic governance record to recognize that its foreign policy has operated with a sophisticated awareness of what the current international environment rewards.
The uncomfortable implication for allied governments is straightforward: when they compare an incumbent Turkish government that speaks the language of contemporary security politics fluently, however transactionally and however manipulatively, with an opposition that continues to speak the language of the early 2000s liberal internationalism, the calculation runs against the opposition.
Foreign governments do not choose their interlocutors on the basis of internal Turkish democratic debates. They choose based on who can deliver what they need in a transformed strategic environment.
None of this is to suggest that the Turkish opposition's democratic concerns are illegitimate or strategically irrelevant. The opposition needs, in the first instance, an honest reckoning with the transformed international environment, not as a rhetorical move, but as a genuine intellectual exercise.
The opposition’s current trajectory, relying on retired officials whose formative experience predates the current era, structuring foreign policy discourse around domestic political differentiation, and assuming that democratic credentials remain the primary currency of international relevance, is not merely an electoral liability.
It is a disservice to the intellectual preparation that Turkish statecraft will require, from whoever governs, in the years ahead.
Foreign partners have already drawn their own conclusions. The Turkish opposition has not yet drawn theirs.
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