The State of Strategic Hedging: Turkey’s Foreign Policy and Relations with Russia

Abstract

This article analyzes the multidimensional nature of Turkey’s foreign policy and its relations with Russia in the 2010s and the early 2020s through the prism of strategic hedging concept. Previously, many scholars pointed to mostly different elements of balancing in Ankara’s foreign policy behavior. However, since the late 2010s, Turkey has systematically positioned itself as a power aspiring for significant strategic autonomy in international affairs, for which reason researchers had to look for new analytical approaches to describe its behavior in the international arena and relations with its neighbors. The concept of strategic hedging allows analyzing more accurately Turkey’s multidirectional foreign policy, which does not correspond with the classical models of behavior typical of middle powers, especially those engaged in military-political alliances with the United States. The article argues that due to a complex of international and domestic reasons Turkey has been trying to combine different types of balancing and, more importantly, hedging. This strategy enables Turkey not only to retain but also to enhance its strategic autonomy in international relations. In this strategy Russia has become an important source of Turkey’s strategic autonomy while the crisis in Ukraine, with all its negative impact on Turkey, has opened up new opportunities.