Turkey’s foreign policy under president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has gone through a number of turns since 2003, characterized by the country’s leader continuously taking stock of domestic and global dynamics whilst navigating between the U.S. and Europe, Russia, Eurasia, and the Middle East.
After coming to power in 2003, Erdogan followed an internationalist foreign policy for nearly a decade, maintaining Ankara’s traditionally good ties with Europe, the U.S., and Israel at the time. With Turkey’s European Union (EU) accession process coming to the de-facto end––with Arab uprisings starting next door in the Middle East––Erdogan switched to a pro-Muslim Brotherhood foreign policy in 2010–11. Turkey’s ties with the West frayed in this era.
However, the failures of the Brotherhood regionally, coupled with successive economic crises in 2018 and 2020, led Erdogan to pivot—once more—almost a decade later.
Since then, Turkey’s foreign policy has become transactional in nature, driven by a middle-power identity, and shaped by hard power politics, including Ankara’s famed drones.
Deserving special analysis under this rubric—and lying at the core of Ankara’s hard power approach to international relations—is Turkey’s drone program. This program was essentially born of frustration, in a sense. Having purchased from Israel drones with limited capability in the late 1990s, Turkey was later rebuffed in efforts to purchase more advanced American drones.
Accordingly, Ankara turned to its own resources. Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI), a government-owned enterprise, developed a domestic prototype, the ANKA, which struggled to achieve operational capability in 2010–12, but provided adequate reconnaissance capabilities by 2016. A domestic breakthrough came from the privately-owned Baykar firm, whose scion Selcuk Bayraktar, one of Erdogan’s sons-in-law, designed and demonstrated a small drone in 2005, won a contract for 19 mini-drones the following year, and a mass production contract for the TB2 model in 2012, finally achieving precision strike capability with the latter by 2015. The Turkish military was employing dozens of TB2s and ANKAs between 2015 and 2017, and began exporting them in droves by early 2017.
By 2020, those drones enabled Turkey to outmaneuver Russia and other powers as a shaper of events on the ground in multiple regional conflicts, such as in Syria, Libya, and the South Caucasus. This approach also enabled Turkey by 2020 to significantly decrease Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) operations on its territory, and to inflict increasing casualties against PKK fighters and leadership in Iraq and Syria. Most recently, Turkish-made drones have been cited by Ukrainian leaders as a critical tool against the Russian invasion, memorialized even in a patriotic song called “Bayraktar” that was shared on the Ukrainian army’s official Facebook page in early March 2022.
Turkish drones have their limitations, however. As stand-alone systems, current systems—the pioneering ANKA, the flagship TB2, and the Kargu “Kamikaze Drone”—are of middling quality compared to U.S. drones.
However, Turkey’s systems are still desired globally. Take, for instance, the TB2 which is “utilitarian and reliable—qualities reminiscent of the Soviet Kalashnikov AK-47 rifle that changed warfare in the twentieth century. A set of six Bayraktar TB2 drones, ground units, and other essential operations equipment costs tens of millions of dollars, rather than hundreds of millions for the [U.S.-made] MQ-9,” as a June 2021 Wall Street Journal article put it.
In fact, and taking the big picture view, the drones embody today’s Turkey—a middle-income economy and a middle-power that often falls in the middle of global indicators: Turkey’s drones are not super high-tech, but they are affordable and they get the work done. This also means they are available to other middle-power, and other middle-power-aspirant nations.
In 2017, Ankara began exporting the TB2, and within five years it had sold drones to nearly two dozen countries, including allies and partners in Europe (Albania, Poland, and Ukraine); Central and South Asia (Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, and Turkmenistan); Africa (Ethiopia, Libya, Morocco, Somalia, and Tunisia); the Gulf and the Levant (Qatar, Iraq); and the Caucasus (Azerbaijan, considered by Ankara to be its closest ally). Although these arms deals have been driven by a combination of mercantilism and geopolitics, they have almost always involved countries in which Turkey has a strategic interest. For now, the drones have provided Ankara with a network of allies across Eurasia, Africa, and Middle East.
However, this “drone diplomacy” is not without limitations. As noted above, since 2017 Turkish producers have sold drones to nearly two dozen customers across a broad geographical area. The image of a drone-empowered revisionist Turkey upsetting regional balances has incentivized rivals—namely Greece, Egypt, Israel, the UAE, Cyprus, and France—to form an informal alliance to push back on Turkey around the East Mediterranean.
What is more, Turkey’s drone sales often come with no end-user agreements, creating problems. For instance, in 2002 Ethiopia came under the spotlight for causing civilian casualties with its Turkish-built drones, although the drones were credited with ending an offensive by Tigrayan rebels.
Nevertheless, after years of go-it-alone unilateralism—which brought Turkey a growing number of regional adversaries and frayed its alliances with the United States and Europe—Ankara has been able to leverage its Bayraktars and other drones to transform its international profile.
Soner Cagaptay is a Beyer Family Senior Fellow and director of its Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
