The Five Phases of Turkey's Foreign Policy under the AKP

Once described as stable and predictable, Turkey's foreign policy has turned increasingly inconsistent and unpredictable under successive Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalknma Partisi, AKP) governments. Since the first AKP single-party government took office in late 2002, Turkey's relationship with each of the following has veered from exceptional cooperation to historic crises verging on (if not actually plunging into) hostility, often in quick succession: the United States, the European Union, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Egypt, and Greece. Scholars studying Turkey's foreign policy under the AKP have referred to "paradigm shifts" (Szen 2010), multiple "shifts of axis" (Cornell 2012), frequent "twists and turns" (Cop and Zihniolu 2017), and "dramatic fluctuations" (Iksal and Gksel 2018).