Swedish and German forces are conducting what appears to be the first joint rehearsal of their rapid-reinforcement plans for the Baltic island of Gotland. The exercise is another step in Sweden’s defense planning for an island whose position in the middle of the Baltic gives it an outsized strategic importance for controlling access, protecting the Baltic states, and maintaining NATO’s freedom of movement in a region where Russian military activity remains a persistent concern.

The exercise, Silver Wotan 2026, running between September 14-23, brings together Swedish and German forces across the land, maritime, and air domains. The scenario is built around a Swedish request for allied assistance, with German forces moving personnel and equipment across the Baltic before integrating with Swedish units already defending the island. The operation is testing the entire process of getting allied combat power to Gotland, protecting it during the movement to Visby, and rapidly incorporating it into the island’s existing defensive network.

A video shows troops coming ashore on Swedish CB90 fast assault craft, a type that German soldiers are also trained to operate:

A rapid deployment of German and Swedish forces to Gotland island is being carried out today. Units from and are rehearsing the swift reinforcement of the strategic island in order to ensure the security of the Baltic Sea.#SilverWotan#NATO pic.twitter.com/A0r3LF8XUP

— Försvarsmakten (@Forsvarsmakten) September 18, 2026

The strategic importance of Gotland has grown considerably following Sweden’s accession to NATO in March 2024, which was a direct response to the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Located approximately halfway between mainland Sweden and the Baltic states, the island occupies a central position in the Baltic Sea, close to the maritime approaches to the Gulf of Finland and within reach of the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. Its location gives forces operating from Gotland a potentially significant position from which to conduct surveillance, air defense, and maritime operations, while also making the island an important part of the wider network connecting NATO’s northern and eastern members.

At the same time, Gotland sits within an extremely complex littoral environment, where shallow waters, islands, narrow maritime approaches, and the proximity of multiple states can make both offensive operations and defensive planning more difficult. The region has also been shaped by longstanding Swedish concerns about Russian clandestine activity, including intelligence gathering and other forms of covert or deniable activity. The complexity of the Baltic operating environment can make such activities harder to detect and attribute, adding another layer of uncertainty alongside the more conventional military challenges facing the region.

Geography has long made Gotland important to Swedish defense planning, but its significance has taken on a broader dimension since Sweden joined the alliance. NATO has described the island as strategically important to its freedom of maneuver in the Baltic, while Swedish officials have highlighted its potential role as a hub for military operations and logistics in the region.

The current exercise is designed around the practical difficulties of reinforcing such a position.

Military equipment is being transported by sea to Visby, Gotland’s principal port, including by commercial ferry. In Visby, Swedish and German personnel are securing the harbor and conducting the reception of the arriving force. Among the equipment being moved are air defense systems, while Swedish forces are also operating coastal defense systems armed with anti-ship missiles.

Meanwhile, publicly available flight-tracking data showed German Luftwaffe transport aircraft, including at least one Airbus A400M airlifter, apparently involved in the effort. The commercial airport at Visby has long also been used for military activities related to Gotland and the wider Baltic region.

”A rapid deployment of German and Swedish forces to Gotland island is being carried out today” https://t.co/z6oLs1LCT4 pic.twitter.com/n18MdST6r1

— Jamming (@balticjam) September 18, 2026

The movement is supported by Swedish and German naval forces and other aircraft, creating a scenario in which the maritime transit, protection of the port, air operations, and subsequent movement of troops and equipment ashore all form part of the same military problem. Once ashore, the arriving forces have to be moved into position and integrated with Swedish units already responsible for defending the island.

The Swedish Gotland Regiment, P 18, provides the core of the island’s permanent military presence. The regiment, Sweden’s youngest and smallest, has been rebuilding its capabilities since Sweden began expanding its military presence on Gotland. Its forces form the basis of the ground-defense structure into which allied reinforcements would be incorporated.

Swedish coastal defense capabilities are another important element of the drill. Land-based anti-ship missiles provide the island with a means of threatening hostile surface vessels operating in the surrounding waters, giving the defense of Gotland a direct connection to the wider maritime battle for the Baltic. During Silver Wotan, Swedish and German forces are also conducting anti-surface warfare activities alongside the broader reinforcement operation.

Germany is contributing more than 500 troops to the exercise, part of approximately 2,000 Bundeswehr personnel involved, including elements from the army, navy, and air force. The German Luftwaffe has deployed Panavia Tornado aircraft for surveillance, while German naval forces are participating in the maritime component, and German ground personnel are involved in the reinforcement and security activities on Gotland.

The exercise scenario is particularly relevant against the backdrop of Russia’s continuing military presence in the Baltic region.

Russia maintains major military infrastructure in Kaliningrad, including naval, air, missile, and air defense capabilities, while the Russian Baltic Fleet operates from bases in the region. Kaliningrad’s position between Poland and Lithuania gives Moscow a significant military foothold inside the NATO area, while Russian forces and military infrastructure elsewhere along the Baltic add to the complexity of operating and reinforcing allied territory in the region.

The security environment around the Baltic has also deteriorated considerably since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. NATO has increased its surveillance and military activity in the region, including the launch of Baltic Sentry in January 2025 following a series of incidents involving critical undersea infrastructure. The alliance has subsequently expanded efforts to monitor maritime activity and protect infrastructure and sea lines of communication.

Swedish authorities have stressed that Silver Wotan was planned in advance and is not being conducted in response to a specific imminent Russian threat. The exercise nonetheless reflects the operational environment in which Swedish and NATO planners now have to consider the possibility that maritime and air movements across the Baltic could be monitored, disrupted, or contested.

The exercise also builds on a series of increasingly large Swedish-led activities designed to test the reception of allied forces on Swedish territory. During Aurora 26 earlier this year, more than 18,000 troops from 13 countries participated in operations across Sweden, including the deployment of allied forces to Gotland alongside the Gotland Regiment and Swedish Home Guard. NATO described that activity as an emergency deployment intended to test the reinforcement of the island.

Silver Wotan places a more concentrated emphasis on the Swedish-German relationship and on the movement of an allied force into the island’s existing defensive structure.

Germany’s participation is also consistent with its growing military role in the Baltic and along NATO’s northeastern flank. Berlin is already providing forces for NATO’s forward defense in Lithuania and has increasingly emphasized the ability to move German forces rapidly across northern Europe in support of allied operations.

For Sweden, meanwhile, Gotland has become one of the clearest examples of how NATO membership has changed the country’s defense planning. The island remains a Swedish responsibility, but its location means that what happens there has consequences well beyond Sweden’s territorial defense.

A defended and adequately supplied Gotland provides NATO with a strategically positioned base for surveillance and defensive operations in the Baltic, while the ability to reinforce it demonstrates that the alliance can maintain access to the island even as the surrounding maritime and air environment becomes more contested.

The exercise comes as European allies are being forced to plan for a NATO in which the United States may provide less of the conventional military weight it has supplied for decades. The Pentagon is reviewing the size and posture of U.S. forces in Europe, including the forces and capabilities Washington would make available in a European crisis, while NATO’s top commander has said further U.S. troop withdrawals should be expected as European allies build up their own conventional capabilities.

At the same time, the alliance now describes Russia as its most significant and direct security threat, citing military activity alongside airspace violations, sabotage, cyber operations, and other forms of hybrid pressure. There are also growing concerns that Russia could try something in the Baltics, while it continues to step up its gray-zone activities regardless. NATO officials have warned that Russia could rebuild enough military capacity to pose a more serious conventional challenge to the alliance before the end of the decade.

There are escalating warnings from Poland that Russia is preparing to widen its war against Ukraine, with "accidental" missile and drone strikes on NATO territory.

Such a move – Russia falsely claiming air strikes that hit NATO allies happened by accident – would be designed to…

— Deborah Haynes (@haynesdeborah) September 18, 2026

For Sweden and Germany, the Silver Wotan exercise is a practical test of how quickly European forces can reinforce and defend one of the Baltic’s most strategically important positions. As the security environment grows more contested and Europe prepares for a future in which U.S. forces may not be as readily available, the ability to move allied combat power across the region and integrate it into existing defenses is becoming an increasingly important part of NATO’s deterrence.

Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com

The post German Forces Surge Onto Baltic Island In First-Of-Its-Kind NATO Drill appeared first on TWZ.

Read in English here

La semana pasada, el 4 de septiembre, la Asamblea General de las Naciones Unidas aprobó una propuesta africana para un nuevo mapa mundial, que muestra el tamaño real de los países en relación con los demás. Su objetivo es corregir la visión del mundo moldeada por el mapa mundial ampliamente utilizado basado en la proyección de Mercator, creada por Gerardus Mercator, un cartógrafo flamenco del siglo XVI. El problema con el mapa de Mercator es bien conocido; por ejemplo, muestra a la isla de Groenlandia con el mismo tamaño que el continente africano, ¡a pesar de que África es 14 veces más grande que Groenlandia! En pocas palabras, los mapas de Mercator exageran enormemente el norte del mundo —los Estados Unidos y Europa— mientras que reducen África y la mayor parte de Asia. Tampoco trata con benevolencia al resto del hemisferio sur. Sudamérica, que tiene casi tres veces el tamaño de Europa, parece comparable a esta en un mapa típico de Mercator.

Aunque no existe ninguna razón geográfica por la que el hemisferio sur deba ser más pequeño que el hemisferio norte, los cartógrafos lo hicieron significativamente más pequeño porque tenía muy poca masa continental más allá de los 40 grados y, por lo tanto, se recortó. Esto significó que, en la mayoría de los mapas de Mercator, debido a que los cartógrafos occidentales recortaron gran parte del hemisferio sur, el ecuador quedó significativamente desplazado hacia abajo. El doble efecto de comprimir las zonas ecuatoriales, donde se encuentra gran parte de África, y desplazar el ecuador hacia abajo hizo que el norte del mundo, particularmente Europa y América del Norte, parecieran mucho más grandes de lo que realmente son. Por lo general, en la mayoría de los mapas de Mercator, el hemisferio norte parece el doble del tamaño del hemisferio sur, aunque ambos hemisferios son idénticos en tamaño.

Cualquier mapa, ya sea de Mercator o de cualquier otra proyección, presenta el problema de que se puede ser fiel al tamaño o a la forma, pero no a ambos. Se trata de un problema fundamental que surge al proyectar una superficie tridimensional sobre una hoja de papel bidimensional. No hay forma de hacerlo sin distorsiones. Solo un globo terráqueo puede representar fielmente la Tierra tridimensional. Pero entonces, ¿qué hacemos cuando queremos reproducir detalles geográficos para nuestros lectores en libros o artículos?

Las distorsiones evidentes de la proyección de Mercator y su enfoque eurocéntrico dieron lugar a varias alternativas, particularmente entre los cartógrafos de la izquierda amplia o progresista. Otros, especialmente en los Estados Unidos y Europa, se han opuesto a ella, argumentando que el tamaño no importa y que no les molesta que se les muestre mucho más grandes de lo que realmente son. Sin embargo, muchos discreparon e intentaron desarrollar proyecciones alternativas. La proyección de Gall-Peterson, que contó con el respaldo del gobierno socialdemócrata alemán de Willy Brandt, es una de esas proyecciones. La proyección de Hobo Dyer, que se encuentra en el dominio público global —lo que significa que cualquiera puede usarla sin pagar regalías—, es otra. Finalmente, las Naciones Unidas han puesto fin a las guerras de los mapas, con una victoria rotunda a favor de la moción presentada por las naciones africanas para utilizar mapas de área igual. La votación fue de 164 a favor de la moción, con los Estados Unidos como único voto en contra.

El objetivo del mapa de Mercator era facilitar la navegación de los barcos en mar abierto, donde ya no es posible orientarse reconociendo diversas características topológicas, como ríos, colinas, aldeas, pueblos, etc. En mar abierto, si identificamos nuestra ubicación en un mapa de Mercator y el destino al que deseamos llegar, podemos viajar en línea recta, tal como se muestra en el mapa. Conserva la dirección, lo que significa que, si trazamos un rumbo en un mapa de Mercator, podemos fijar nuestro rumbo según él. Es por eso que los países marítimos utilizaban proyecciones de Mercator para la navegación cuando contaban con pocos instrumentos, más allá de la brújula y el sextante, para determinar su ubicación con respecto a su destino.

Es importante señalar que la dirección que se muestra en el mapa no es la ruta más corta entre el punto de partida y el destino.

El camino más corto entre dos puntos en la superficie del globo terráqueo es el arco del gran círculo que va desde su ubicación hasta su destino. Una línea recta en un mapa bidimensional puede parecer la distancia más corta, pero no lo es, ya que no toma en cuenta la curvatura de la Tierra. En pocas palabras, el precio que pagamos por convertir una superficie curva en una plana y bidimensional es que distorsionamos la forma de la superficie. Estiramos ciertas áreas y encogemos otras. En una Tierra plana, la distancia más corta sería la que indica su brújula, pero no así en una esfera.

Anteriormente, los barcos utilizaban las estrellas y el sol del mediodía para estimar dónde se encontraban y hacia dónde debían dirigirse. Fijar un rumbo hacia su destino utilizando un mapa de Mercator y una brújula resultaba mucho más sencillo que tratar de adivinar dónde se encontraba en un océano desierto, sin puntos de referencia, y cambiar constantemente de rumbo en busca de una ruta más corta. La línea constante en el mapa se denominaba “línea de rumbo”, y seguirla ayudaba enormemente a los navegantes. Los mapas de Mercator eran populares en Europa, particularmente en Europa occidental, ya que, aparte de los árabes, eran las principales naciones marítimas.

Mientras que los árabes se enfocaban en el comercio, particularmente en el Océano Índico, los europeos occidentales se dedicaban no solo a la pesca, sino también, fuera de temporada, a la piratería, las incursiones y el saqueo de otras naciones. Los vikingos, importantes figuras románticas en Hollywood, eran particularmente brutales, ya que combinaban el saqueo con el comercio de esclavos. Por supuesto, como todos los piratas, una vez que se alcanza el poder, se puede convertir ese poder marítimo en conquista. Los hombres del norte, o nórdicos, conquistaron Francia y más tarde Inglaterra, y son conocidos por nosotros como normandos. No muy diferentes de las Compañías Holandesa y Británica de las Indias Orientales, que comenzaron con el comercio y la piratería y más tarde establecieron imperios coloniales.

No es de extrañar que los reinos marítimos de Europa occidental, para quienes la guerra, la pesca para alimentarse y la caza de focas, morsas, etc., con el fin de obtener grasa y pieles, constituían las principales fuentes de riqueza, se centraran mucho más en la navegación y la construcción naval. Esto significaba que los barcos construidos para el agitado Océano Atlántico contaban con ciertos avances de los que carecían los barcos árabes e indios, aunque la brújula, el astrolabio, los mapas astronómicos y otros instrumentos náuticos procedían todos de Asia.

Los barcos de Europa occidental contaban con cañones montados en cubierta, lo que les permitía disparar “andanadas”, es decir, disparar múltiples cañones simultáneamente, a diferencia de los cañones montados en la proa y la popa. Esa es una de las principales razones por las que un puñado de países de Europa occidental pudo aprovechar los océanos para, primero, hacerse con el comercio marítimo y, más tarde, construir sus imperios coloniales. A diferencia de los fuertes fijos, los barcos actuaban como fuertes flotantes, lo que proporcionaba a los europeos una movilidad en las guerras navales de la que carecían las fortificaciones terrestres estáticas.

Como muestra la monumental obra de Needham sobre la ciencia y la tecnología chinas, muchos avances náuticos en la construcción naval y la navegación procedían de China. Los siete viajes de los barcos de Zheng He en el siglo XV (1405-1443), que partieron de China, el sudeste asiático y la India, y recorrieron la costa árabe hasta África, demostraron que los chinos habían construido enormes barcos y una poderosa armada. En aquella época, se encontraban muy por delante de Europa y de los árabes, tanto en la construcción naval como en los buques de guerra. Las diferencias internas entre la aristocracia terrateniente y los comandantes navales condujeron a la destrucción de la armada y a la prohibición de construir cualquier buque de alta mar.

Aunque la India suministraba a los árabes la madera necesaria para la construcción naval y en algún momento contó con una poderosa armada, cedió el comercio de alta mar a los comerciantes árabes. Ni China, ni la India, ni los árabes consideraban que la armada tuviera importancia militar. Como dijo un emperador mogol: “Los océanos son para los comerciantes, no para nosotros, los guerreros”. Las divisiones de castas en la India también llevaron, en un momento dado, a prohibir a las castas superiores emprender viajes oceánicos. La travesía del Kala Pani, siempre prohibida por los brahmanes, no se respetó de manera estricta. La India experimentó una gran expansión marítima en el período budista, no a través de la guerra, sino mediante el comercio y la labor de proselitismo de los monjes budistas. Tras el resurgimiento del hinduismo en el sur, el tabú que prohibía a las castas superiores viajar a través de los océanos se aplicó de manera más estricta, dejando los océanos en manos de comerciantes y mercenarios. Por ejemplo, las principales flotas de los reyes indios – ya fuera el rey de Calicut, también conocido como Samundri o Zamorin, o Shivaji – dependían de comandantes navales y buques mercenarios, muchos de ellos al mando de árabes.

Como demuestra la historia, los mapas, el comercio marítimo y la guerra están íntimamente relacionados. Los viajes marítimos y las guerras navales confieren a los mapas una importancia estratégica. No es simplemente la ubicación de las fronteras de cada país lo que importa, sino también su visión estratégica del mundo. Podemos observar cómo esto se está manifestando actualmente en Bab el Mandeb y en el Golfo Pérsico. Un vistazo rápido a un mapa habría convencido a los líderes estadounidenses de que Irán cuenta con una clara ventaja estratégica en el Estrecho de Ormuz, al igual que los hutíes en el Mar Rojo y el paso hacia el Canal de Suez. Descuidar los océanos repite los errores que cometió Asia en una época diferente, errores de los que ha aprendido. Debemos tener esto presente también hoy en día.

Prabir Purkayastha es el editor fundador de Newsclick.in, una plataforma de medios digitales. Es activista en favor de la ciencia y del software libre.

Este artículo fue elaborado por Globetrotter.

Lee en español aquí

On September 4, the United Nations General Assembly adopted an African proposal for a new world map, which shows countries’ true size relative to one another. It aims to correct the view of the world shaped by the widely used world map based on the Mercator Projection, created by Gerardus Mercator, a 16th-century Flemish cartographer. The problem with the Mercator Map is well known; for example, it shows the island of Greenland as the same size as the African continent, even though Africa is 14 times the size of Greenland! Simply put, Mercator maps greatly exaggerate the global north – the US and Europe – while shrinking Africa and most of Asia. Nor does it treat the rest of the Southern Hemisphere kindly. South America, nearly three times the size of Europe, looks comparable to it on a typical Mercator map.

Though there is no geographical reason the Southern Hemisphere should be smaller than the Northern Hemisphere, mapmakers made it significantly smaller because it had very little landmass beyond 40 degrees and was therefore cropped out. This meant that on most Mercator maps, because Western mapmakers cropped out much of the Southern Hemisphere, the equator was significantly displaced downward. The double whammy of squeezing the equatorial areas, where much of Africa lies, and shifting the equator down made the global north, particularly Europe and North America, seem much larger than they actually are. Typically, on most Mercator maps, the Northern Hemisphere looks twice the size of the Southern Hemisphere, though the two hemispheres are identical in size.

Alternatives to the Mercator projection

Any map, whether Mercator or any other projection, has the problem that you can be true to either size or shape, but not both. The problem is a fundamental one of projecting a three-dimensional surface to a two-dimensional piece of paper. There is no way of doing this without distortions. Only a globe can truly represent the three-dimensional earth faithfully. But then what do we do when we want to reproduce geographical details for our readers in books or articles? 

The blatant distortions of the Mercator projection and its Eurocentric approach gave rise to several alternatives, particularly among broad-left or progressive cartographers. Others, particularly in the US and Europe have opposed it, arguing that size does not matter and that they were comfortable being shown much bigger than they actually are. But many dissented and tried to work out alternate projections. The Gall-Peterson projection, which was backed by the German social democratic government of Willy Brandt, is one such projection. The Hobo Dyer projection, which is in the global commons, meaning anybody can use it without paying royalties, is another one. Finally, the United Nations has ended the map wars, with a resounding victory for the motion moved by the African nations for using equal area maps. The voting was 164 in favor of the motion with the US casting the only nay vote.

Read more: US votes against UN resolution promoting maps reflecting Africa’s true size

The objective of Mercator map was for ships navigating in open seas, where we can no longer navigate recognizing various topological features, rivers, hills, villages, towns, etc. On the open ocean, if we identify where we are on a Mercator map and the destination we want to reach, we can travel in a straight line, as shown on the map. It conserves direction, meaning if we plot a course on a Mercator map, we can set our course by it. That is why ocean-going countries used Mercator projections for navigation when they had few instruments beyond the compass and the sextant to determine where they were relative to their destination. 

It is important to note that the direction shown on the map is not the shortest path between where you start from and your destination. The shortest path on two points on the surface of the globe is the arc of the great circle from where you are to your destination. A straight line on a 2-dimensional map may look like the shortest distance, but it is not as it does not account for the Earth’s curvature. Simply put, the price we pay for converting a curved surface to a flat 2-dimensional one is that we distort the shape of the surface. We stretch certain areas and shrink others. On a flat earth, the shortest distance would be what your compass shows, but not on a sphere.

Earlier, ships used stars and the midday sun to estimate where they were and where they needed to go. Setting a course to your destination using a Mercator map and a compass was much easier than trying to guess where you were on an empty ocean with no landmarks and constantly changing course for a shorter route. The constant line on the map was called the thumb line, and following it greatly helped the seafarers. Mercator maps were popular in Europe, particularly in Western Europe, because, apart from the Arabs, they were the major ocean-going nations.

Trade and piracy in the colonial era

While the Arabs focused on trade, particularly in the Indian Ocean, Western Europeans focused not only on fishing but, in the off-season, on piracy, raiding, and looting other nations. The Vikings, major romantic figures in Hollywood, were particularly brutal, combining loot with slave trade. Of course, like all pirates, once you become powerful, you can convert that ocean power into conquest. The northern men, or Norsemen, conquered France and later England, and are known to us as Normans. Not very different from the Dutch and the British East India Companies, starting with trade and piracy and later establishing colonial empires.

Not surprisingly, the ocean-going kingdoms of Western Europe, for whom war and fishing for food and hunting seals, walrus, etc., for blubber and skins were major sources of wealth, focused much more on seafaring and shipbuilding. This meant ships built for the rougher Atlantic Ocean had certain advances that Arab and Indian ships did not, though the compass, astrolabe, astronomical maps, and other nautical instruments all came from Asia.

Western European ships had deck-mounted cannons, which allowed them to fire “broadside,” meaning multiple cannons firing simultaneously, unlike the front- and rear-mounted cannons. That is one of the major reasons a handful of West European countries could use the oceans to first capture the ocean trade and later build their colonial empires. Unlike fixed forts, ships acted as floating ones, giving Europeans mobility in naval wars that static ground fortifications lacked.

Ocean navigation and development in Asia

As Needham’s monumental work on Chinese science and technology shows, many nautical advances in shipbuilding and navigation came from China. Seven voyages by Zheng He’s ships in the 15th century (1405-1443), which traveled from China, Southeast Asia, India, and down the Arab coast to Africa, showed that the Chinese had built huge ships and a powerful navy. At that time, they were well ahead of Europe and the Arabs, in both shipbuilding and warships. Internal differences between the landed aristocracy and the naval commanders led to the navy’s destruction and a ban on building any oceangoing ships.

Although India supplied the timber necessary for shipbuilding to the Arabs, and once had a powerful navy, it ceded the oceangoing trade to Arab merchants. Neither China, India, nor the Arabs saw the navy as militarily important. As one Mughal Emperor said, Oceans are for traders, not us, the warriors. Caste divisions in India also led, at one point, to barring upper castes from undertaking ocean voyages. Crossing Kala Pani, always forbidden by the Brahmins, was not strictly followed. India saw major maritime expansion in the Buddhist period, not by war but through trade and proselytizing Buddhist monks. After the revival of Hinduism in the South, the taboo against upper-caste travel across oceans was enforced more strictly, leaving the oceans to traders and mercenaries. For example, the major fleets of the Indian kings, whether the King of Calicut, also known as Samundri or Zamorin, or Shivaji, relied on mercenary naval commanders and ships, many commanded by the Arabs.

As history shows, maps, ocean trade, and war are intimately connected. Ocean voyages and naval wars make maps strategically important. It is not simply where each country’s borders lie that is important, but also how it strategically views the world. We can see this currently playing out in the Bab-al-Mandeb and the Persian Gulf. A quick look at a map would have convinced US leaders that Iran has a clear strategic edge in the Strait of Hormuz, just as Ansar Allah do in the Red Sea and the passage to the Suez Canal. Neglecting the oceans repeats the mistakes Asia made in a different age, mistakes from which it has learned. We need to bear this in mind today as well.

Prabir Purkayastha is the founding editor of Newsclick.in, a digital media platform. He is an activist for science and free software. 

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Cette semaine, Caroline De Camaret reçoit Hadja Lahbib, commissaire européenne à l'Égalité, état de préparation et gestion des crises. Elle tire les leçons d'un été de feux inédit, alerte sur les menaces hybrides et défend le projet européen face à la poussée des extrêmes.

Tous les yeux et les oreilles étaient tournés vers le Parlement européen de Strasbourg ce mercredi 16 septembre à l'occasion du traditionnel discours sur l'État de l'Union de la présidente de la Commission européenne, Ursula von der Leyen. Un discours fleuve – le sixième du genre – sur les grandes orientations de sa politique européenne pour l'année à venir. 

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Unlike the British “Brexit”, with which journalists are so eager to compare this referendum, Iceland’s “Nei” signifies not a vote to leave the EU, but a vote against resuming accession negotiations for full-fledged membership. Fishing sovereignty, currency independence, and the reluctance to become a «donor» to the EU budget carried more weight than the arguments […]

Problem

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s offer this week of “associate membership” for Canada was received rapturously in the European Parliament. But member states, noting that the EU treaties say nothing about “associate membership”, have already tempered expectations, as has the Canadian ambassador to the EU. Make no mistake, “associate membership” does not mean that Canada will join the single market or become bound by EU directives anytime soon. The offer is currently a rhetorical gesture that, without a legal definition, risks meaning nothing at all, or becoming an expanded version of CETA, the EU-Canada trade deal in force since 2017, rather than a genuine new form of partnership.

Solution

As the United States estranges its allies, the EU has an opportunity to position itself as an alternative geopolitical anchor. New forms of association could help the EU build the capacity to act as a genuine world power. But to succeed, “associate EU membership” must be narrow but deep. Narrow in that it stops short of single market access or freedom of movement (not because it is undesirable but because it is currently unworkable); deep in that it can provide the basis for a unique alliance on security, defence and resilience—and offer a template for co-operation with other allies.

To prevent the proposal from landing dead on arrival, the commission should quickly define what associate membership means, with a timetable and clear objectives. This would also reassure candidate countries that others are not jumping the queue, and distinguish the offer from the “associate membership” Friedrich Merz, Germany’s chancellor, has pitched for Ukraine as a waiting room for accession.

To carry real weight, associate membership must address the pressures driving Canada into the EU’s arms in the first place. Security, defence and resilience are where both sides depend the most on America, where both sides face similar threats, and for which they can get public buy-in. Easy wins exist in low-friction defence-institutional steps, such as deeper Canadian participation in PESCO, the EU’s defence-cooperation scheme; an administrative arrangement with the European Defence Agency; and a role in future EU security missions.

But the boldest step would be to make Canada a full member of the EU’s defence technological and industrial base. This would bind Canada into Europe’s security architecture and give EU members access to Canadian expertise and industrial capacity for joint development and procurement. France’s protectionist zeal will be an obstacle; its EU ambassador this week pushed for tougher “Made in Europe” rules that would restrict non-EU firms’ access to defence funding. However, if Germany, the Nordics and the Baltics put their combined weight behind associate memberships, they might just bring the French on board.

Context

The war in Ukraine, America’s treatment of its allies and rising global instability have prompted EU states to explore association models that offer their neighbours and allies closer ties without watering down EU membership itself. In her State of the European Union speech, von der Leyen invited Canada to become the bloc’s first “associate member”, but the commission has yet to explain what that would mean in practice.

Source

It is rarely a good sign when European politicians open their speeches by quoting Charles Dickens. So alarms should have sounded the moment European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen declared this to be the best and the worst of times at the start of her State of the European Union address on September 16.

Things went downhill from there: the EU leader painted a picture of the region that stands in complete contrast to the general experience of its people, amounting to a summary of the bloc’s worst achievements.

“Von der Leyen has achieved the feat of not mentioning a single measure to help Europeans cope with the soaring cost of living across Europe, at a time when an ever-growing number of people are now forced to choose between housing, food and transport,” said Manon Aubry, Co-President of The Left in the European Parliament.

“Fiscal sustainability” and concern for businesses

In the lengthy address, von der Leyen laid out what she considered the EU’s successes, including raising military spending by almost 80% over the past five years and “reducing dependence” on Russian fossil fuels. However, this interpretation does not correspond to what people are experiencing, as outlined by The Left in a dedicated dossier. Growing military spending benefits only the arms industry. And attempts to replace cheaper Russian gas have essentially boiled down to committing to more expensive and environmentally devastating US LNG imports.

While recognizing growing energy prices, von der Leyen offered no tangible response to this problem plaguing EU households. On the other hand, she demonstrated notable concern for businesses, signaling the continuation of eroding labor and environmental protections along the lines implemented by right and far-right parties at the EU level.

Read more: Peter Mertens: “Don’t be afraid, seize the opportunities of 2026 with both hands”

The likelihood of maintaining the status quo was also noticeable when von der Leyen turned to the deadly wildfires that hit Europe this summer, devastating communities from Belgium and France to Spain and Greece. Trade unions and progressive analysts have warned for years that fire preparedness is severely impaired by a lack of planning and, specifically, shortages of firefighters. Yet there was no commitment in the address to invest more in essential public service workers. Instead, the EC President referred to the ongoing need for overall “fiscal sustainability” – meaning Europeans should expect no relief from austerity programs.

“The best of times is clearly reserved for billionaires, multinational energy companies, and war profiteers,” remarked Member of the European Parliament Marc Botenga from the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB-PVDA). “The other side of the coin for workers: austerity and rising prices.”

The EU’s failed foreign affairs policy

Based on the vision tabled by von der Leyen, there is also little to look forward to in Europe’s international and trade policy. “It’s hard to think of an area where the EU has been more inactive and less effective than in foreign affairs,” The Left wrote, referring to the union’s ongoing disregard of international law in relation to the genocide in Gaza and its approach to the Trump administration. 

“The President has praised Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen, she has stood with Trump as he bombed Tehran and the European Commission has sided with the USA as they brought the global economy to a standstill in the Strait of Hormuz,” the progressive bloc warned.

The EU’s relationship with the US has continued to be one of submission, with elected regional leaders going to great lengths (unsuccessfully) to appease Donald Trump. Even when the region announced it would stand firm against US threats – in Greenland or on tariffs – this did not translate into practice.

In the context of von der Leyen’s speech, this boiled down to announcing Canada would become the “first associate member of the EU” and listing trade agreements signed with India, Mercosur, and Indonesia – met by the people of these countries with understandable concern.

Read more: Indian left opposes free trade agreement with EU, calls it “wholesale surrender” of country’s economic interests

Von der Leyen’s speech showed no sign of breaking with disdain towards nations outside the West. In addition to continuing animosity toward China, it offered a glimpse into plans involving countries rich in critical materials. The EC President announced the launch of a European Corporation on Critical Raw Materials – designed to secure and stockpile supplies for Europe’s industry and defense – with obvious implications for mineral-rich territories like Ukraine, Greenland, and several African countries. For the more skeptical listeners, this also carried weird echoes of the East India Company.

The State of the EU’s vision, it goes without saying, comes with further promises of an even stricter migration framework – on the pretext of situations like the one experienced in Ceuta earlier this year – that allow the erosion of basic human rights like asylum. Von der Leyen’s speech pledged even more finances for Frontex and suggested that outsourcing migration enforcement to third countries will continue, as endorsed by recent EU legislation.

“This policy of externalizing migration control has contributed to grave human rights violations, arbitrary detentions and systematic violence against people on the move,” The Left warned, calling for a union rooted in solidarity rather than violence and militarization.

The Leipzig drone episode shows how jumping the gun turns suspicion into a weapon: NATO intelligence found no Russian trace, yet Berlin keeps insisting otherwise — and the real question is no longer who is to blame, but why Germany needs this narrative at all. “In war, truth is the first casualty.” (Aeschylus) Imagine getting […]

Alors que Donald Trump avait menacé mercredi de rompre les échanges commerciaux avec les Vingt-Sept en réaction à son projet de faire du Canada le premier pays "membre associé" de l'Union européenne, le Premier ministre Mark Carney a vanté jeudi devant les eurodéputés la perspective d'un partenariat renforcé avec Bruxelles, estimant que le Canada et l'UE sont "plus forts ensemble".

Alors que Donald Trump avait menacé mercredi de rompre les échanges commerciaux avec les Vingt-Sept en réaction à son projet de faire du Canada le premier pays "membre associé" de l'Union européenne, le Premier ministre Mark Carney a vanté jeudi devant les eurodéputés la perspective d'un partenariat renforcé avec Bruxelles, estimant que le Canada et l'UE sont "plus forts ensemble".

After the US officially admitted it deployed weapons into outer space earlier this week, Russia and China expressed concerns, calling it a threat to international peace and demanding the immediate stoppage of all such activities.

During a regular press conference on Tuesday, September 15, Guo Jiakun, official spokesperson of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said that “China opposes any arms race in outer space or any attempt to weaponize it and turn it into a warzone.”

He further said that “China stands for the peaceful use of outer space and keeping it safe” and urged the US to “stop expanding military build-up in outer space, and uphold global strategic stability with concrete actions.”

Russia’s Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova said that the US weapons deployment is a threat to international security and puts a question mark on the stability in outer space. 

“Russia has for many years been consistently drawing the attention of the global community to the grave consequences for international security that Washington’s destructive course may lead to,” Zakharova said.  

She said her country seeks “urgent practical measures to prevent arms race in outer space” and reiterated Russia’s push for a “multilateral legally binding instrument banning the deployment of weapons in outer space.” 

Though it has long been a subject of speculation, a couple of US military officials, earlier this week, admitted that its military is operating weapons deployed in outer space.  

The admission was made by US Air Force Secretary Troy Meink on Monday during a conference. He said that the US “has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action.”

Meink’s statement was substantiated by US Space Force chief Douglas Schiess, who a day later, on Tuesday, said that in the coming years the US is even planning to increase the number of orbital weapons already used by the members of his military unit.

Urgent need of legal prohibitions

Underlining the threat that the deployment of weapons in outer space poses, several countries, including Russia and China, have been calling for an international treaty to prevent any arms race in outer space for decades now.

The existing instrument, the UN Outer Space Treaty (1967) makes clear that “outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claims of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.”

It also prohibits the deployment of “nuclear weapons, or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or stationing them in outer space in any other manner,” but it says nothing about the deployment of conventional weapons, despite declaring it should be used for peaceful purposes only.

None of the US military officials spoke about the nature of weapons deployed by the US in outer space.

Though only a handful of countries have the technological capability to explore outer space in any significant way, several countries have used satellites for military and war purposes for decades now.

The US has a dedicated space force which has recently held exercises related to possible military conflicts in space.

The deployment of weapons and claims of exclusivity, apart from increasing possibilities of an arms race between the existing powers in space; the US, Russia, and China, may also make the rest of the world more insecure.

Zakharova said that Russia is planning to submit a proposal for the creation of an international instrument legally prohibiting all weapon deployment in outer space during the upcoming annual UN General Assembly session.

She asked for more countries to join the Russian initiative and co-author the treaty document.

Senior U.S. Air Force leaders in Europe say NATO allies are increasingly looking to participate in the development and employment of collaborative combat aircraft (CCAs), even as several of those same countries pursue their own indigenous fighter and drone programs. American commanders say they are looking forward to CCAs expanding the alliance’s overall capacity, and are already pushing for such systems to work together from the outset.

Speaking yesterday at the Air & Space Forces Air, Space and Cyber Symposium that TWZ is attending, Lt. Gen. Jason T. Hinds, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, U.S. Air Forces Africa, and NATO’s Allied Air Command, and Chief Master Sgt. Joshua J. Wiener, USAFE-AFAFRICA’s command chief, discussed how the command is preparing for an eventual European role in the U.S. Air Force’s planned fleet of hundreds of CCAs.

The issue is particularly significant for USAFE, which operates a fraction of the fighter force it maintained in Europe during the Cold War, even as many of its NATO allies contend with shrinking fleets of crewed combat aircraft. This comes against a backdrop of deepening tensions with Russia and the emergence of new kinds of threats. Autonomous aircraft that can augment crewed fighters could provide the alliance with additional combat mass without requiring a corresponding increase in the number of crewed aircraft and personnel permanently based in Europe.

“I’m excited about what CCAs have in store for the Air Force,” Hinds said, pointing to recent comments from the Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink, including the aim of having at least 500 CCAs in service by 2032.

He added that European interest in these kinds of platforms is already growing.

“I think you’re going to see a lot more interest from other nations inside Europe about what is America doing with CCAs and how they can join this party, if you will,” Hinds said.

Germany is “heavily involved,” he said, while Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands are also showing interest.

In the case of Germany, we have previously explored how that country is looking to procure CCAs by 2029. Sweden, too, recently unveiled a concept for a high-end, stealthy CCA-type drone, while the Dutch are looking to become more closely alligned with U.S. Air Force CCA efforts.

USAFE is currently using two broad operational scenarios to explain to allies how CCAs could fit into NATO’s force structure.

The first is defensive. A CCA could operate as part of an integrated air and missile defense network, potentially engaging one-way attack drones or cruise missiles without the need for expensive crewed fighters.

The second is offensive. In that scenario, autonomous aircraft could help suppress or destroy integrated air defense systems and potentially attack fielded forces during an effort to repel a hostile incursion into NATO territory.

Allies are interested in both missions, Hinds said, and want the ability to incorporate CCAs into their own force designs. Interestingly, only yesterday, Anduril shared photos of its YFQ-44A Fury configured with air-to-ground weapons, underscoring the fact that the CCA could take on an air-to-ground role in the future in addition to its current air-to-air focus.

That kind of interest has already prompted work at the NATO level. Hinds pointed to a study by the Joint Air Power Competence Center, the alliance’s airpower think tank based in Kalkar, Germany, examining how NATO members could employ CCAs in a modular fashion, including issues such as sustainment, training, and exercises.

“It was a pretty long paper, but the nations wanted it,” Hinds said.

Initial experimentation is expected to take place in the United States, but European experimentation could follow, including by Sweden and potentially other NATO members.

At the same time, European countries are not simply waiting for an American CCA to arrive.

The United Kingdom has launched its own Storm Fighter CCA program. Germany is pursuing a separate loyal-wingman effort, while the United Kingdom, Italy, and Japan are meanwhile jointly embarked on the Global Combat Air Program, or GCAP, which is intended to produce the Tempest next-generation crewed fighter and associated uncrewed systems.

The proliferation of national programs raises an obvious question: How does NATO prevent a growing fleet of autonomous aircraft from becoming a collection of incompatible national systems?

Hinds said the answer starts with commonality.

“The first and foremost thing is we want to strive for commonality,” he said. “Commonality means we don’t even have to worry about interoperability.”

Where common equipment is not possible, however, USAFE wants interoperability built into national systems from the beginning.

“Interoperability by design” is the preferred approach, Hinds said, with NATO data standards and other requirements incorporated before a system enters service rather than retrofitted later.

The good news for USAFE is that NATO already has extensive experience establishing common standards for interoperability, covering everything from tactics and procedures to communications, datalinks, weapons employment, and other technologies. That existing framework gives the alliance a foundation for integrating increasingly diverse national systems without requiring every member to field identical equipment.

Hinds did warn that some countries have previously acquired equipment that was not compatible with NATO systems, leaving them with the choice of paying to modify their own equipment or forcing the alliance to adapt its systems around it.

That problem becomes particularly important as autonomous aircraft are connected to increasingly complex sensor and weapons networks. Even more important is the requirement for a baseline command-and-control network for CCAs themselves, allowing different platforms to manage them seamlessly.

The ability to share and control CCAs across a complex battlespace is already emerging as both a major opportunity and a significant integration challenge. The U.S. Air Force and Navy, for example, have made clear that their respective CCAs are being developed with the ability to be controlled seamlessly across services, pointing toward a future in which autonomous aircraft need not remain tied to the service or platform that launched them.

Hinds described a potential kill chain in which an F-35 detects a target, passes the information to another node in the network, and a ground-based system operated by another NATO country ultimately launches the weapon.

In such an architecture, the aircraft, sensor, command-and-control network, and weapon do not necessarily have to belong to the same country.

As an example, Dutch F-35s, operating in Europe, have used a data-exchange system to transmit targeting coordinates to Israeli-made PULS (Precise and Universal Launch System) rocket artillery. The system, developed by Lockheed Martin is known as Keystone, and you can read more about it here.

USAFE is making “significant advances” in areas including cross-servicing, cross-loading, and cross-flying allied aircraft, Hinds said, all of which are intended to make multinational operations more seamless.

The same philosophy applies to weapons.

“We want to have all the fires, right? Whether it’s U.S. built or built inside European nations,” Hinds said.

That could prove increasingly important as European countries expand domestic production of missiles, drones, and other weapons alongside their aircraft programs.

The growth of GCAP and other European defense programs comes amid broader debate over how much Europe should depend on U.S. military equipment.

But Hinds rejected the idea that allies developing indigenous aircraft and autonomous systems necessarily signals a move away from American equipment.

“No, I don’t,” he said when asked whether allies were moving away from U.S. systems.

Instead, Hinds characterized the trend as an expansion of the transatlantic defense-industrial base.

Sweden was one example he cited. The country, which recently joined NATO, continues to produce new military equipment, including Gripen fighters, while those aircraft are already being operated by NATO members.

Swedish Gripens are currently leased to Hungary, and other countries are considering the aircraft, Hinds said.

The broader trend toward co-manufacturing and co-production is also something he welcomed.

“I’m seeing a lot of discussions about co-manufacturing and co-production, and I welcome those discussions as well,” Hinds said.

That approach could become increasingly important as NATO tries to expand its available combat power without relying exclusively on additional U.S.-built platforms.

For USAFE, the objective is to ensure that whatever aircraft NATO countries develop or purchase can plug into a common architecture, sharing data, receiving targeting information, drawing on common logistics networks, and contributing weapons effects across national boundaries.

For a U.S. Air Force command that has spent decades trying to cover Europe with far fewer fighters than it once had, hundreds of autonomous wingmen, whether American-built or allied, could provide a significant way to generate additional combat mass.

Senior U.S. Air Force officials are now working to ensure that the networking, weapons integration, logistics, and command-and-control architecture will be in place once those aircraft start to come online.

Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com

The post How The USAF Is Preparing For European Allies To Join The Collaborative Combat Aircraft Club appeared first on TWZ.

The left’s capacity to build knowledge, organization, and struggle was a central theme at this year’s ManiFiesta, introduced during a discussion of Peter Mertens’ new book, “The Last Days of the Old Normal“. In the context of Europe’s ongoing armament, these questions are crucial not only for progressive movements in core countries but also for those building alternatives in Central and Eastern Europe.

The festival featured several sessions examining developments in Central and Eastern Europe, including an intervention by Ukrainian sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko on the class character of the Ukraine war. Another session – “East of the former wall: the AfD, the industrial crisis, and the war economy” – brought together Markéta Juřicová of the Czech party Levice, Orsolya Haboczki from the Hungarian progressive movement Szikra, German Bundestag representative Cem Ince from Die Linke, and Member of the European Parliament Marc Botenga from the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB-PVDA). 

They discussed how the growth of the far right in core EU countries is interacting with events eastwards – and what lessons Western left movements can learn from their Eastern counterparts.

Read more: ‘Ukraine is no longer a sovereign country,’ says sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko

As Juřicová and Haboczki pointed out, while movements in the West are worried about the popularity of parties like the Alternative for Germany (AfD), many nations in Central and Eastern Europe already have experience with far-right participation – even leadership – in government. More than 15 years of Viktor Orbán’s rule in Hungary, Haboczki noted, offers an important lesson on far-right governments’ economic agendas and tactics. As the Orbán administration used identity issues to capture opposition parties’ attention, it channeled resources into the hands of the local bourgeoisie and served transnational capital by securing huge state subsidies, she said. 

Right-wing parties in Eastern Europe also look to their international peers for inspiration. In the Czech Republic, Juřicová said, the far right “loves” the AfD, picking and choosing many of the same topics the German group campaigns on. The discussion signaled this is particularly important to recognize as the growth of extreme right parties is fueled largely by popular dissatisfaction with mainstream parties’ programs. 

Read more: Far-right victory in German state elections shocks the center

Ince emphasized this was the case in Germany, where a large share of AfD votes came from those believing the party would bring upheaval compared to the status quo, marked by massive job losses and cuts to welfare. But while European progressives recognize this, they still struggle to incorporate it into their programs, recent experiences show. Instead, many of them ponder attempts to prevent the far right from seizing institutional power by providing support to establishment parties, failing to shape a concrete alternative to both the mainstream and the extreme right.

In Central and Eastern Europe, the work of progressive parties is further complicated by the need to rebuild credibility after decades of vilification of socialism and austerity measures implemented by liberal options, Haboczki added. 

Read more: “We cannot eat grenades once the grains no longer grow:” European peace movements organize against militarization

While recognizing workers’ material concerns in Central and East Europe is imperative for building local alternatives, the panel showed, it will also be necessary to build region-wide partnership to challenge topics dominating the narrative in Germany, Belgium, and other core countries.

Militarization stands out among these topics, Botenga and Ince outlined in their interventions, though its implementation might differ by sub-region. Botenga added that German industry stands to gain the most from European armament, yet these gains will not trickle down to the working class – meaning the left in the region can find in anti-militarism a common cause to rally around. 

Ince echoed these observations by emphasizing that, even as their profit lines stand to gain from billions of euros directed towards rearmament, German companies continue to shift significant parts of their operations to countries including Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic – making most of eroded workplace protections and labor rights. This shows that the left across Europe must work together to protect workers’ interests everywhere, building a joint struggle for peace and civilian industry, he indicated.

La présidente ⁠de la Commission européenne ​Ursula von der Leyen a émis mercredi l'hypothèse que le Canada devienne le premier "membre associé" de l'UE, ​dans un contexte de détérioration marquée des relations entre Ottawa et Washington. En réaction, Donald Trump a menacé de rompre les échanges commerciaux avec l'UE.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at the podium Photographer: Dati Bendo © European Union

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen used her State of the Union address on Wednesday (16 September) to make the case for a more independent Europe, confronting war, economic competition, AI disruption and climate change — while proposing Canada become the EU’s first associate member.

Opening her #SOTEU speech with Charles Dickens’ “best of times, worst of times”, von der Leyen described a Union stronger but also more exposed to external threats.

“The state of our Union is the strongest it has ever been,” she said, while acknowledging it could feel “as precarious as it has ever been”. “Europe has chosen to forge its own path. And a stronger, independent Europe is now emerging.”

Competitiveness and energy

Von der Leyen called kickstarting Europe’s economy her “number one priority”, promising faster permitting, less red tape and further integration of the Single Market.

The Commission will propose a new Banking Package and create a European Corporation on Critical Raw Materials to secure supplies needed for chips, batteries, clean technology and defence.

With high energy costs weighing on European industry, von der Leyen called for faster electrification and investment in grids, renewables and nuclear power to reduce dependence on imported fossil fuels.

Climate after a 'summer of truth'

After a summer of fires, drought and extreme heat, von der Leyen promised a climate resilience framework focused on 100 of Europe’s most vulnerable territories, alongside a Climate Insurance Alliance, European Heatwave Plan and Water Initiative.

She also floated a future European Firefighting Fleet, declaring that Europe “can, must and will stay the course” on its climate targets.

AI: Opportunity and threat

AI was presented as both an economic opportunity and an emerging security threat. Von der Leyen warned that advanced models could enable hacking “on a level we never thought possible” and pledged closer cooperation with Canada, the UK and others on AI security.

At the same time, Europe will expand computing capacity and push AI into health, transport, agriculture, manufacturing, defence and space. “Above all, we want AI with human agency,” she said.

Jobs, housing and social rights

The Commission plans a Quality Jobs Act before the end of the year and a European Care Deal, alongside measures tackling housing pressures.

Von der Leyen said technological change must benefit workers, while strongly defending women’s rights and Europe’s social model.

PHOTO  European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at the podium Photographer: Dati Bendo © European Union

Canada moves closer

One of the biggest surprises came with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in the chamber.

Von der Leyen proposed an “Alliance for the Future” spanning technology, defence, energy, critical minerals, AI and the Arctic — before going further.

“I would like to work with you on opening the door for Canada to be the first associate member of the EU,” she told Carney. “We share one ocean, one set of values, one way of seeing the world.”

Security, defence and Ukraine

With drone incursions, cyberattacks and sabotage raising security concerns inside the EU, von der Leyen proposed a new European security strategy and an Emergency Security Protocol for incidents falling below the threshold of armed aggression.

She also wants to establish a European Security Council and strengthen joint European defence capabilities.

Ukraine faces what von der Leyen called the “toughest winter of the war”. She promised humanitarian and energy support, stronger air defences and deeper defence-industrial cooperation with Kyiv.

Borders, democracy and children online

The Commission will propose an Emergency Response Framework for exceptional migration crises and strengthen Frontex, while launching a Mediterranean Youth Skills and Jobs initiative.

Von der Leyen also announced an EU KIDS ACT, including no social media for under-13s and restrictions for children under 15, followed by a broader Digital Fairness Act.

Political groups draw battle lines

EPP leader Manfred Weber backed the focus on AI, defence and competitiveness but pushed against restrictive climate policies. “Climate change is a reality,” he said, arguing Europe needed “innovation and not bans.”

S&D leader Iratxe García Pérez demanded that von der Leyen turn “words into action”, backing climate investment, housing and worker protections while warning that simplification must not become deregulation.

Renew Europe leader Valérie Hayer made a pointed appeal for the Parliament’s pro-European majority, as the EPP has increasingly worked with parties further to the right on some legislation. “There’s only one possible majority. It’s our pro-European majority,” she said. “We need to do more. We need more Europe, and we need it more quickly.”

Greens/EFA co-chair Terry Reintke accused EU leaders of failing to respond urgently enough to extreme heat and wildfires. “We are in the middle of a climate emergency,” she said, demanding stronger Green Deal implementation while insisting: “We are not powerless. Europe is strong, and Europe can be even stronger.”

ECR co-chair Patryk Jaki struck a sharply different note, attacking the Commission over bureaucracy, energy costs and industrial competitiveness. Europe, he argued, was “as weak as it’s ever been.”

Von der Leyen closed on the central theme running through the speech: European sovereignty in an increasingly hostile world.

“The fate of Europe,” she said, “must remain in the hands of Europeans.”

Summary

• Europe still expects Turkey to pick a side. It has refused, and a post-Erdogan government would refuse too.
• Turkey has become an embedded outsider: a middle power that builds strategic autonomy from inside the Western system—because that is where its leverage comes from.
• Ankara has now tools of its own: troops abroad, a $10bn arms industry, partners in the global south, a geography everyone needs and channels to actors Europeans cannot reach.
• Yet it still needs NATO for its security, Europe to buy its exports and fund its factories, and Western technology to power its best weapons.
• Europe should stop trying to resolve the contradiction and learn to capitalise on it. It should deepen cooperation where interests converge, tie benefits to reciprocal obligations and withhold access when Ankara acts against fundamental European interests.

At the NATO summit he hosted in Ankara this July, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, gifted visiting heads of state a peculiar souvenir: a Turkish-made revolver, loaded with live ammunition. Several delegations were left wondering how one declares an unregistered firearm at customs.

It was a fitting emblem: a gift no one could quite accept, from an ally no one can quite place. At the summit itself, Turkey had never looked more central to the alliance. The Ankara Summit Declaration called for “a stronger Europe in a stronger NATO”, reaffirmed Article 5 and placed European support for Ukraine at the heart of the alliance’s future. With NATO’s second-largest armed forces, an expanding defence industry and control of the Black Sea’s southern gateway, Turkey looked indispensable.

Look closer though and the picture is less tidy. This is still the NATO ally that bought Russia’s S-400 air-defence system, the EU candidate country whose membership negotiations have effectively collapsed, and the Black Sea power that arms Ukraine while maintaining extensive ties with Moscow. It is also, thanks to Erdogan’s close relationship with US president Donald Trump, an ally with unusual leverage over Washington at a time of strained transatlantic relations.

Turkey is neither drifting away from the West nor it is coming home. It has become an embedded outsider: a middle power that has learned to build strategic autonomy from inside the Western system rather than by leaving it. NATO still guarantees its security, Europe still buys its exports and funds its factories, and Western technology still powers its best weapons. But none of that buys alignment with Western preferences any more.

European policymakers have often treated this contradiction as a problem to solve. Their debate has revolved around whether Turkey can be “anchored” in the West or prevented from “drifting” towards Russia, China or the Middle East. Both approaches assume that Ankara must eventually pick a geopolitical home. It has chosen not to. Nor is this likely to change after Erdogan. A post-Erdogan government could be more democratic and predictable, but it would still be unlikely to abandon defence autonomy, regional activism or Turkey’s desire to balance among larger powers.

This paper argues that Europe should stop trying to resolve this contradiction and instead learn to capitalise on it. Turkey’s autonomy can frustrate Europeans, but it has also produced capabilities and relationships that Europe itself lacks. Its ability to maintain channels to Moscow helped it broker the Black Sea Grain Initiative and prisoner exchanges while continuing to arm Ukraine. Its military presence and political networks in Syria give it influence that few European states can match. Its growing defence industry could also make it an important partner in Europe’s rearmament.

It is true that the same autonomy sometimes works against European interests. In the eastern Mediterranean, Turkey’s assertiveness has brought it into direct conflict with EU member states Greece and Cyprus. Elsewhere, its balancing between Russia and the West has sometimes undermined European objectives.

The more useful question for Europe therefore is not whether Turkey can ever be a reliable ally, but when its autonomy serves Europe and when it cuts against it. The answer is managed interdependence: deepen cooperation where interests converge, tie the benefits of cooperation to clear and reciprocal obligations and withhold these benefits when Ankara acts against fundamental European interests. The aim is not obedience. It is to make Turkey’s autonomy pay for Europe more often than it costs.

Under Erdogan: An old instinct transformed

Turkey’s pursuit of greater foreign-policy autonomy did not start with Erdogan. Since the early republic, Turkey’s Western alignment has coexisted with suspicion of Western intentions.

The young republic pursued Westernisation after fighting a war of independence against European powers. It developed close ties with Soviet Russia after the war, but Soviet pressure later helped justify Turkey’s integration into the US-led Western bloc, culminating in NATO membership in 1952. But alliance membership did not end tensions with the West. The Cyprus crisis, the 1974 military intervention and the subsequent US arms embargo reinforced Turkey’s conviction that it could not always rely on its allies.

Erdogan inherited this impulse, but he also transformed it. Over more than two decades, his governments have expanded Turkey’s geographical ambitions and given them a neo-Ottomanist flavour at home. Turkey has become more willing to use force abroad and built the institutions needed to sustain a more autonomous foreign policy. Erdogan has also added a personal style of decision-making and an ideological vocabulary. His slogan “the world is bigger than five” calls for reform of the UN Security Council. The term “precious loneliness”, coined in 2013 by his then foreign policy adviser Ibrahim Kalim, casts Turkey’s regional isolation as the price of moral consistency.

This transformation unfolded in four broad phases:

European integration

In the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) first years in power, from 2002 to roughly the end of that decade, Erdogan and his government were celebrated in the West as reformists. They used the EU accession process to modernise the economy, pursue political reforms and curb the military’s influence over civilian politics. Ankara also expanded trade and diplomacy across its neighbourhood, presenting this activism as complementary to its Western orientation.

Closer ties with Europe accompanied an economic boom. Turkey’s GDP rose from roughly $241bn in 2002 to $775bn in 2008, while GDP per capita tripled. Foreign investment surged after accession talks opened in 2005, from about $900m in 2002-04 to nearly $12bn a year in 2005-08. EU member states accounted for roughly three-quarters of inflows by 2008.

Regional ambitions and civilisational mission

From the late 2000s through the Arab uprisings, Ankara became more ambitious in its neighbourhood. Foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s “zero problems with neighbours” doctrine reflected a growing belief that Turkey’s history, location and political model gave it a distinctive regional role. Economic growth and mediation underpinned this confidence, while construction companies, television dramas, Turkish Airlines, diplomats, religious institutions and development agencies extended the country’s soft power.

However, the Syrian civil war, Egypt’s military coup and the regional backlash against the Arab uprisings upended this strategy. Soft power gave way increasingly to hard power and regional rivalry.

“Precious loneliness”

The decisive turn came between 2015 and 2020. The collapse of the peace process with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and a failed coup attempt of July 2016 fed a sense of geopolitical isolation and a more combative foreign policy. As Turkey grew more authoritarian, with executive power consolidated in the presidency, the country launched several external military operations in Syria, Iraq and Libya, and expanded its overseas military presence across the Middle East. It also cultivated closer economic and defence ties with Russia to reduce dependence on the US and Europe, both of which were becoming increasingly concerned about Turkey’s democratic backsliding and regional activism.

Turkey’s purchase of Russia’s S-400 systems in 2017 became the clearest symbol of this rupture. It led to Turkey’s removal from the F-35 programme—the US-led fighter-jet project for which Turkish firms were supplying components—in 2019 and to American sanctions in 2020. This purchase showed that Ankara was prepared to defy its allies when it believed core security interests were at stake.

Anti-Western sentiment rose significantly during this period. Many Turks blamed the US for the failed coup attempt and for supporting Kurdish forces in Syria affiliated with the PKK. The post-coup crackdown, along with the 2017 constitutional referendum, helped create a national security state and concentrated decision-making even more in the presidency.

Military interventions in Syria and elsewhere during this period also created their own momentum. The armed forces, intelligence services, defence companies and the state bureaucracy acquired the skills and experience to sustain overseas operations, cooperate with non-state partners and convert military involvement into diplomatic leverage.

Transactional re-embedding

By the end of 2020, Ankara concluded that its assertive posture had become counterproductive—it had alienated Western allies and Middle Eastern governments alike, thereby helping create an anti-Turkey alignment across multiple fronts. Intensifying great power rivalry and the fragmentation of the West also made Turkish leaders more anxious about being left out in the cold in a tumultuous world. The recalibration was also economic: a currency crisis at the end of 2020 left Ankara in acute need of external capital—Western and Gulf alike—and de-escalation on both fronts was the price of access to it.

From 2021, Ankara therefore sought to repair ties with former regional rivals, from Saudi Arabia to Greece, and pursued a pragmatic reset with Europe and America—while preserving its autonomy.

Turkey’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine captured this shift. Ankara condemned the invasion, supplied Kyiv with drones that proved highly effective early on, refused to recognise Moscow’s annexations, and invoked Montreux’s wartime provisions to close the Straits to belligerents’ warships, which mainly constrained Russia’s Black Sea fleet. It saved its neutrality for the economic sphere, declining to join Western sanctions and casting itself as mediator, keeping Moscow close.

Donald Trump’s return to the White House created another opportunity to reboot ties with the Western system. Erdogan and Trump share a disdain for liberal Europe and a preference for flexible, transactional and personalised diplomacy. Close ties between the two presidents and their inner circles also facilitated dialogue on Gaza, Caucasus, Ukraine and Syria, with a surprising degree of alignment on many of these files.

Ankara increasingly saw its military leverage and geography as the basis for strategic autonomy—a foreign policy built on cultivating ties across rival centres of power so that no single relationship became indispensable and none foreclosed another. It sought closer defence-industrial ties with European states without abandoning its domestic production. It normalised relations with Gulf monarchies while retaining military or political networks in Libya, Syria, Palestine and Somalia. It renewed dialogue with the EU while prioritising bilateral ties with individual member states. Even as a NATO member, it flirted with membership of BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

In August 2026, Turkey joined Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement—a trilateral mutual-defence pact dubbed in the media as a “Muslim NATO” that commits the three states to Article 5-like security guarantees. Building on a 2025 Saudi-Pakistani accord, the pact signals Turkey’s ambition to make regional security arrangements of its own, even as it remains in NATO. However, the new pact so far lacks the integrated command, joint planning and shared threat perception that would make it a functioning alliance rather than a political declaration.

The Mecca agreement aligns with Turkey’s ambition to keep a foot in several camps. Many in the country’s ruling elite see a larger role in the Middle East and on the world stage as Ankara’s natural destiny. Meanwhile, where previous US presidents saw Turkey’s regional ambitions as disruptive, the Trump administration came to view Ankara as a useful and capable regional partner.

Turkish foreign policy under Erdogan has not travelled a simple path from pro-Westernism to anti-Westernism and back again. Ankara has rebuilt its foreign policy repeatedly around the needs of the ruling far-right nationalist coalition at home and what a changing international order permits abroad. The re-embedding since 2021 is no exception: it did not reverse Turkey’s pursuit of strategic autonomy, but relocated it. Ankara now seeks that autonomy from inside Western structures, because that is where the leverage lies.

Beyond Erdogan: Different versions of autonomy

Although Erdogan’s dominance at home is a reality, in 2024, the opposition alliance led by the Republican People’s Party swept local elections, taking Istanbul, Ankara and most major cities—its best showing since 1979. The following March, Istanbul’s mayor Ekrem İmamoglu, the opposition’s presidential candidate and the man most likely to beat Erdogan, was arrested on corruption charges widely seen as politically motivated. Two decades of Erdogan rule have narrowed political space, but they have not closed it.

So what would change in foreign policy in a post-Erdogan Turkey? A successor could reset relations with the West and rebuild institutions. But a new government would not rethink the fundamentals—that Turkey must keep its freedom of action, arm itself and depend on no single power. Those assumptions no longer rest on one man’s decisions. They rest on an elite consensus, underpinned by a domestic defence industry, bases across three continents and Turkey’s own geography—and reinforced by a fragmenting international order that makes autonomy look like a necessity.

Public sentiment also seems to embrace an independent foreign policy. Turks might be split over Erdogan and domestic governance, but they largely agree on autonomy and avoiding unconditional alignment with any single outside power. Ukraine makes this point clearly. In a 2022 Kadir Has University survey, 52% of respondents wanted Turkey to remain impartial and 50.7% wanted it to mediate. Only 21.5% backed sanctioning Russia and 20.8% backed supporting it. In spring 2024 polling by Pew Research Center, a plurality of Turks (46%) said Turkey was providing the right amount of support to Ukraine.

The Iran war reveals a similar picture. A MetroPoll survey in March 2026 found that 68.1% wanted Turkey to remain neutral between Iran and the US, compared with 22.6% favouring support for Iran and 2.1% for the US and Israel. Neutrality won among the voters of every major party. This was no affection for the mullahs; rather, Turks fear a collapsing Iran would send refugees across the border, give the Kurdish insurgency new momentum, disrupt the Turkish economy and embolden Israel.

The argument at home is therefore about the methods, not autonomy itself. The opposition parties criticise the AKP-MHP government’s rhetoric and self-inflicted isolation, yet they treat maritime jurisdiction, the Aegean and Cyprus as national issues. In the 2022 Kadir Has survey, half or more of every major party’s supporters named maritime jurisdiction and the militarisation of Aegean islands among Turkey’s main problems with Greece.

A 2022 Carnegie study that interviewed opposition foreign-policy figures found the same. Most favoured repairing relations with the US and EU, restoring the foreign ministry’s authority, reducing personal diplomacy, and resolving the S-400 dispute to reopen the path to the F-35 programme. They also wanted no confrontation with Russia, no concessions on Turkey’s maritime claims, and no American weapons for Syria’s Kurds.

A post-Erdogan Turkey would therefore be a different kind of embedded outsider, not a former one. Democratisation and a return to institutional decision-making would make Turkey more predictable. But Ankara would still likely pursue diversified partnerships, its own arms industry, regional influence and the ability to say no to allies.

Turkey no longer treats the West as a complete strategic home or a reliable guarantor of its interests. Yet Russia, China, Iran and the Gulf cannot replace the security, markets, technology and institutional ties it draws from NATO, Europe and America. Turkey thus hedges from the inside. Europe cannot end that, and no Turkish government would tolerate the attempt. Its only realistic aim is to keep the hedge bending westward.

What Turkey is embedded in

Turkey today is rarely described as a European power. Yet it is still a NATO member and, technically, an EU candidate. It is also a partner for Europe and the US on critical regional issues ranging from containment of Iran to counter-terrorism and support for Ukraine.

But Turkey’s Western embeddedness goes much deeper than institutions. Its economy, private sector, defence industry and society are tightly integrated with the West, particularly Europe. These connections constrain Turkish autonomy, but they also enable it: the markets, technology, capital and security relationships Turkey draws on to project power remain disproportionately Western.

Economic embeddedness: Europe as market and regulatory ecosystem

The EU remains the centre of gravity of the Turkish economy. The customs union, in force since 1996, goes far beyond an ordinary free-trade agreement. It removed tariffs and quantitative restrictions on industrial goods and required Turkey to align with important parts of EU customs, commercial, competition, intellectual-property and technical legislation.

The numbers remain striking despite political tensions. The EU accounts for 42.7% of Turkey’s goods exports and 35.3% of its imports, with volume reaching €217.6bn in 2025. Services trade added €42.1bn in 2024.

Trade volumes understate the depth of integration. Turkish factories are embedded in European production networks, supplying the automotive, appliance, machinery, textile and electronics industries while relying on European capital goods, technology, standards and intermediate inputs. By mid-2025, Turkey reported that it had aligned 24,597 national standards with European standards, a harmonisation rate of 99.5% with the European Committee for Standardisation and the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardisation systems.

European capital has been equally important. Turkey received roughly $200bn in foreign-equity inflows between 2003 and 2025, with around 60% originating in the EU. The West as a whole, including the US, UK and Canada, supplies roughly 70% of Turkey’s foreign direct investment.

Ankara has tried to diversify, towards Russia, the Gulf and, above all, China. It joined the Belt and Road Initiative in 2015, applied to BRICS in 2024 and courted Chinese manufacturing, including electric vehicle manufacturer BYD, whose $1bn plant in Turkey will benefit from access to the EU market. But China has not emerged as an alternative to the EU. Chinese firms treat Turkey as high-risk and stayed out of the top 20 sources of foreign investment in 2024. Turkey runs a large trade deficit with Beijing and competes with it for influence in Africa and Central Asia, while Beijing’s treatment of its Uyghur population remains a source of tension.

No partner has been able to match Europe’s market, investment stock and dense supply chains. Ankara’s economic autonomy therefore has limits. It can diversify eastwards, but the capital, technology and markets on which much of its industry depends remain Western. That dependence is sharpened by chronic macroeconomic fragility—high inflation, a weak lira and reliance on external financing—which has repeatedly forced Ankara to seek Gulf and Western capital, setting a hard ceiling on its autonomy.

This dependence also comes with a political irritation. Through the customs union, Turkey aligns with relevant EU regulations but has no say in making them. The agreement is also outdated, excluding services, digital commerce, public procurement, agriculture and climate regulation. The European Commission proposed negotiations to modernise it in 2016, but the European Council has yet to approve a mandate.

This captures a contradiction in Turkish foreign policy. Ankara seeks privileged access to the EU economy while demanding political distance from Brussels. Yet much of its industrial power, export capacity and ability to attract investment still depends on its position at the edge of Europe.

Security embeddedness: Inside NATO’s architecture

Turkey’s security ties with the West are deep. A NATO member since 1952, Turkey has the alliance’s second-largest military after the US and critical infrastructure including the Incirlik air base, where US nuclear weapons are widely believed to be stored; the Kurecik early-warning radar system that covers the Middle East; the Allied Land Command headquarters in Izmir; and forward bases at Konya and Istanbul. Turkey and its territory are therefore woven into a NATO security architecture that stretches from the Middle East to Europe’s eastern flank.

Despite the on-and-off crises with America and a more ambivalent policy towards Russia than most European allies, Turkey’s relationship with NATO is not dormant. Not only has Ankara recently hosted the NATO summit, it has also continued to support NATO’s collective defence missions, including participating in the Baltic Air Policing in 2006 and 2021. After the summit, Turkey agreed to do so again in 2026, even as it maintains cordial relations with Moscow. And while Turkey has worked hard to reduce its military dependence on its allies, many of its high-end programmes still depend on Western engines, components, certification, financing and export access.

Yet embeddedness has not meant deference or loyalty. For example, when Sweden and Finland sought to join NATO, Ankara used its veto in the alliance as leverage—delaying ratification until it had extracted commitments on the PKK and, from the US, approval of a major F-16 sale. Turkey capitalises on its position in NATO as much as it upholds the alliance.

Social and political embeddedness: A diaspora and a stalled accession

Turkey’s political relationship with Europe is weakest precisely where its institutional ties are deepest. Ankara applied to the European Economic Community in 1959, signed the Ankara Agreement in 1963, became an EU candidate in 1999 and opened accession talks in 2005. Those negotiations have now effectively collapsed: only 16 of 35 chapters were opened and just one closed before the process froze. In 2018, the EU General Affairs Council noted that accession talks had come to a standstill, stopping short of formal suspension, but freezing the opening or closing of any new chapters. In 2025, the European Parliament reaffirmed this, on the grounds that Turkey’s strategic importance cannot offset its democratic backsliding and divergence from European norms.

Yet neither side has formally ended the process. Turkey remains a candidate, receives pre-accession funding and participates in EU programmes like Erasmus and Horizon Europe. It is also in the European Political Community and has expressed a desire to be part of a future European security architecture.

Turkey’s European embeddedness is also demographic. Since the 1960s, migration has created communities whose lives span Turkey and Europe. At the end of 2024, around two million Turkish citizens held valid residence permits in the EU, excluding naturalised citizens and second generation Turks born in Europe. Germany alone is home to about 2.6 million people of Turkish background, the country’s largest single-origin immigrant community. Belgium, Britain, France, the Netherlands and Sweden also have sizeable Turkish communities.

Turkey’s European diaspora connects Turkish cities and regions to European labour markets, schools, businesses, media and political parties. They also make Europe an arena of Turkish domestic politics: governments and opposition parties campaign among overseas voters, while disputes about nationalism, religion, Kurdish identity and democratic rights spill into European public life. Europe is therefore not just an external actor but an extension of the political debate in Ankara.

Turkey’s political estrangement from the EU can also obscure the continued attraction Europe holds for many Turks. In a spring 2025 survey commissioned by the EU delegation to Turkey, 58% said they would support EU membership in a referendum and 66% said membership would bring more advantages than disadvantages. Visa-free travel, higher living standards and employment opportunities were the most frequently cited benefits. Similarly, Pew found in 2024 that 56% supported EU membership, rising to 66% among those under 35. Polls show mixed motivations for supporting Turkey’s accession to the EU, with younger, urban and educated Turks consistently aspiring to European legal and political standards even as faith in accession has eroded.

Migration creates another form of interdependence between Turkey and Europe. Turkey hosts a large refugee population and sits on major migration routes from the Middle East and Asia into Europe. European governments have relied on Turkey as a buffer, most explicitly through the 2016 EU-Turkey migration deal. Meanwhile, Ankara has periodically used refugee flows as political leverage, but it has also come to rely on EU funds to manage migration. Neither side can manage migration sustainably without the other.

The instruments of autonomy

Turkey’s distinctive position among middle powers lies not only in its aspiration to act independently but in the tools it has built to do so. It is one of the few middle powers that treats military force as a routine instrument rather than an exception, and the only one that has turned the resulting hardware into a diplomatic currency.

Five tools carry Turkish influence abroad: an expeditionary military, a strong arms industry, a geography that charges rent, an apparatus for soft power and a habit of brokering other people’s wars. Each has widened Ankara’s room for manoeuvre, but each also reveals the limits of Turkish autonomy.

An expeditionary military

What changed under the AKP was less Turkey’s appetite for military activism abroad than how it used force. Before the Arab uprisings, Turkish deployments took place largely within NATO and UN frameworks. But over the past decade, Ankara has increasingly acted unilaterally to advance its own security interests, using forward bases, long-term deployments and partnership with local armed actors. Syria, Libya, Iraq and the Caucasus region each show a version of the method.

In Syria, four cross-border operations between 2016 and 2020 created a belt of Turkish-controlled territory in the north, governed through the Turkey-backed Syrian National Army. Ankara’s presence also helped preserve an opposition-controlled enclave in Idlib, from which Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) emerged and eventually overthrew Bashar al-Assad, in December 2024. Turkey has since become the most important external backer of Syria’s new government, signing a defence accord in August 2025 to train, equip and advise the army Damascus is rebuilding out of former rebel factions. Ankara’s leverage nonetheless has limits: it has not yet converted this partnership into permanent bases beyond the north, constrained by Israeli red lines and Damascus’s own wariness of overdependence.

Turkey has similarly intervened militarily in Libya since 2020, when it helped prevent warlord Khalifa Haftar’s forces overrunning the internationally recognised government in Tripoli. The intervention has shifted the military balance and entrenched a Turkish security presence, which Ankara subsequently converted into economic and political leverage—against the will of competitors like Cyprus, Egypt, Greece and the UAE. However, Turkey has recently repaired relations with Egypt and opened channels to actors in eastern Libya.

In Iraq, Ankara’s footprint has proved more durable, driven primarily by its campaign against the PKK. A network of forward operating bases across the north has hardened into a de-facto security belt along the border. And despite renewed efforts to resolve the Kurdish question—such as PKK founder Abdullah Ocalan’s 2025 call to disarm and the party’s subsequent dissolution—Ankara is unlikely to dismantle that presence in the near future.

Beyond those, Turkey maintains bases in northern Cyprus, facilities in Qatar, and a training base in Mogadishu. Turkey’s regional footprint today is far larger than it was two decades ago.

Defence

Turkey’s expanding defence industry provides the material foundation for this more assertive foreign policy. Once a buyer of US weapons systems, Turkey has spent the last three decades building its capacity to produce a range of high- and low-end systems, from armed drones and navy vessels to armoured vehicles, missiles, tanks and artillery shells.

Defence and aerospace exports reached $10.05bn in 2025, a dramatic hike from $248m in 2002. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute ranked Turkey the 11th-largest exporter of major arms for 2021-25, with five Turkish firms—MKE, ASELSAN, Turkish Aerospace, Baykar and Roketsan—entering its global top 100 in 2025. Many of their systems have been battle-tested in Karabakh, Libya, Syria and Ukraine. In the early phase of the Ukraine war, Baykar’s TB2 “Bayraktar” drones gained particular prominence and have since become a symbol of Turkey’s defence-industrial rise. This transformation in the defence industrial base has given Ankara capabilities and relationships in Africa, Central Asia and Europe it did not possess two decades ago.

Greater autonomy, however, is not self-sufficiency. Turkish officials boast that the domestic share of defence production has risen from about 20% in the early 2000s to roughly 80%. But that figure conceals continued dependency on imported technology in propulsion, power transmission, advanced materials and aviation components. For example, Turkey’s flagship fifth-generation fighter-jet, the KAAN, relies on imported engines, as its indigenous turbofan is still in development. Altay tanks entered production with a South Korean power pack, pending integration of the domestic BATU engine and transmission. Imported engines and export licences have also complicated both production and sales of systems such as the Firtina howitzer.

One way Turkey has sought to overcome these constraints has been by embedding itself into the European defence base. In 2025, Baykar and Italy’s Leonardo formed LBA Systems, a fifty-fifty joint venture headquartered in Italy to build unmanned systems, while Baykar outright bought Italian aerospace company Piaggio Aerospace, with its production lines inside the EU. Also in 2025, Turkish Aerospace agreed to supply Spain with Hürjet trainer jets in a €2.6bn deal, which includes substantial production in Spain. These are co-production arrangements inside European supply chains.

Turkey’s defence-industrial autonomy is therefore uneven. It is strongest where companies have accumulated design experience and domestic supply chains, and weakest where production depends on complex propulsion or externally controlled components. And while the industry’s rise has reduced the ability of any single country or supplier to block Turkish military action, its most ambitious programmes still depend on Western technology, certification, finance and markets. This captures the logic of the embedded outsider. Turkey has built greater autonomy not by leaving Western industrial networks, but by using domestic production, offset agreements and selective partnerships to improve its bargaining position within them.

Connectivity

Ankara has not created its own geography, but it has learned to monetise it. Turkey sits between Central Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Russia, astride important trade and energy routes. It is crisscrossed by several energy pipelines despite producing little energy itself. And regional disorder only makes Turkey’s location more valuable.

Azerbaijani oil and gas cross Anatolia through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and the Southern Gas Corridor. Russian gas reaches Turkey and south-eastern Europe through Blue Stream and TurkStream, while Iranian gas enters from the east. Expanding liquefied natural gas terminals give Ankara access to seaborne supplies from America, Qatar and elsewhere.

Turkey has also invested in logistics and connectivity. The Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway connects Turkey to the trans-Caspian Middle Corridor, linking Central Asia and China westwards. Ankara regards the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, which bypasses Turkey, as a geopolitical challenge. It has instead backed the $17bn Development Road, linking Iraq’s al-Faw Grand Port through Turkey to Europe. Instability in the Strait of Hormuz has given a boost to this project. This eastward reach also has an institutional home: Turkey leads the Organization of Turkic States, a bloc spanning Azerbaijan and Central Asia that hopes to turn the corridor’s unique geography and ethnic ties into standing political influence.

Soft power

Turkey’s ambitions are also supported by an extensive cultural and diplomatic network. It now operates 255 diplomatic missions, up from 163 in 2002, with the number of African embassies rising from 12 to 44 in this period.

In addition to its diplomatic corps, there is the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency, the Turkish Maarif Foundation, the Presidency of Religious Affairs, the Yunus Emre Institute and the state broadcaster TRT World. All of those are active in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Turkish Airlines has also become an unusually effective instrument for connectivity and visibility. The Antalya Diplomacy Forum now serves as a flagship venue to showcase Turkey’s ambition to convene international actors, modelled after the Munich Security Conference, India’s Raisina Dialogue and Russia’s Valdai Discussion Club.

Perhaps Turkey’s most effective soft power, however, is one the state neither built nor controls. In 2024, Turkish producers exported more than 300 television dramas to over 150 countries, earning over $500m a year and reaching close to a billion viewers. They have made Turkey’s language, cities and lifestyle familiar across the Balkans, Middle East, Latin America and parts of Africa. The state has since moved to harness this success: TRT’s own historical epics carry a more explicit neo-Ottoman message abroad, while per–episode export subsidies introduced in 2026 aim to bend the commercial sector toward promoting Turkey’s image.

Meanwhile, humanitarian aid, education, religion, media, commerce and defence partnerships reinforce the conservative government’s “civilisational” narrative, placing Turkey at the centre of a wider historical and cultural world. Turkey’s overseas network promotes Palestinian rights and positions Turkey as a natural leader of Muslim nations. Erdogan’s slogan that “the world is bigger than five”, referring to the UN Security Council, captures this ambition.

Yet Turkey’s economic fragility sets a hard limit on its ambitions. Inflation peaked at 85.5% in October 2022 and, despite the return to orthodox monetary policy after the 2023 election, remained above 32% in mid-2026. A volatile lira and persistent inflation make it harder to finance reconstruction in Syria, sustain long-term influence in Africa and compete with other powers. Technological dependence, weak institutions and personalised decision-making reinforce these constraints.

Mediation

Mediation became a signature of Turkish foreign policy in the mid-2000s. Under the Davutoglu doctrine of “zero problems with neighbours”, Ankara presented itself as a country able to speak simultaneously to the West, the West’s regional adversaries and the Muslim world. Ankara facilitated indirect talks between Syria and Israel in 2008, engaged in Balkan diplomacy and, alongside Brazil, negotiated a nuclear fuel-swap with Iran in 2010. Also that year, Turkey and Finland launched a UN Friends of Mediation group.

That premise collapsed with the Arab uprisings. Ankara’s support for Syrian opposition and the Muslim Brotherhood, along with its feuds with the Arab Gulf monarchies, Egypt and Israel, made Turkey increasingly party to the region’s conflicts rather than a neutral mediator. As it expanded its regional entanglements, the nature of its mediation efforts changed. From 2017, Ankara worked with Russia and Iran through the Astana process on ceasefires and de-escalation deals in Syria even while backing the opposition on the ground. In Libya in 2020, Turkey participated in the Berlin process as a stakeholder while its troops were deployed in Tripoli. Ankara was not mediating because it stood outside these conflicts, but because it was embedded in them.

From the 2020s, Turkey’s mediation rested on a different foundation. Its leverage came from its higher international profile and its unique access to regional conflicts, such as in Gaza and Ukraine.

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Turkey has hosted several rounds of negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian officials, facilitated prisoner exchanges and, with the UN, brokered the Black Sea grain deal in 2022. None ended the war, but the grain agreement kept a critical maritime trade route open for almost a year and demonstrated the value of Ankara’s working relationships with both Moscow and Kyiv.

In the final round of negotiations leading to the Gaza ceasefire, Turkey used its relationship with Hamas to convince the armed group to sign the US-brokered agreement with a specific clause for disarmament. Ankara provided political guarantees that helped bring Hamas to the table, but its involvement also led Israel to veto a greater Turkish role in a multinational peacekeeping force in Gaza.

Turkey’s comparative advantage in mediation therefore does not come from neutrality but access. Its willingness to maintain relationships across geopolitical divides can make Ankara frustrating for its Western allies. But it is also precisely what allows Turkey to reach actors that Europeans and Americans sometimes cannot.

What it means for Europe

For Europe, the instruments described above could be assets or liabilities, depending on where and how Turkey uses them. The three case studies that follow trace that variation. In Ukraine and Syria, autonomy generates outcomes Europe wants—grain corridors, prisoner exchanges, a check on Russian and Iranian influence—that a more compliant ally could not have delivered. In the eastern Mediterranean, the same autonomy cuts the other way, pitting Turkey directly against two member states. Together, the three cases leave Europe with a question: how to channel an autonomy it can influence but cannot switch off.

Ukraine: Pro-Kyiv, but not anti-Moscow

Ankara’s position is often summarised as “pro-Ukraine without being anti-Russia”—a formulation that frustrates European allies but has proved durable. Turkey recognises Ukraine’s territorial integrity, including Crimea, and built a substantial defence relationship with Kyiv before the full-scale invasion, selling it Bayraktar TB2 drones and agreeing joint production. It was also among the few NATO states willing to provide strategically significant military technology before February 2022.

At the same time, Ankara refused to join Western sanctions, kept extensive ties with Moscow and described Russia’s aggression in cautious language. After the invasion, it invoked the wartime provisions of the Montreux Convention, closing the Straits to belligerent warships—a move that limited escalation while also constraining NATO’s naval access.

Ankara’s access to both capitals produced results, though not a ceasefire. In 2022, Turkey brokered the Black Sea grain deal with the UN and has facilitated several prisoner exchanges. But it has also been a key conduit for trade with Russia, the flipside of its balancing act.

Ukraine shows the embedded outsider at work: Turkey supports the principles and institutions that protect its own security while reserving the right to diverge from the broader Western strategy. While this balancing is self-interested, it has at times served Ukrainian or European interests.

Syria: Access without capital

Syria offers the clearest demonstration of Turkey’s embedded-outsider role in practice. After more than a decade of cross-border operations, troop deployments, intelligence work and local patronage, Ankara entered the post-Assad period with leverage few external powers could match: close access to President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government, influence over armed groups in the north, control of border routes, a substantial military presence, and a strong hand in debates about reconstruction and refugee returns. Assad’s fall also weakened Turkey’s rivals, Iran and Russia, and opened up space for Ankara to expand its political and economic influence.

Yet Syria remains a work in progress. Turkey met its core security objective—blocking a PKK-linked autonomous zone along its border—and deepened its leverage in Damascus, but it has neither established a new order nor reaped the economic benefits of its patronage.

Syria’s battered economy is one constraint. Ankara can reopen trade routes, repair energy links and position its companies for reconstruction, but it cannot finance Syria’s recovery alone; that will depend on external capital, European and Gulf support and governance reforms.

Israel is another problem. It remains deeply suspicious of an enlarged Turkish role and has attacked sites earmarked for Turkish military installations. Turkey, in turn, views Israeli support for Syria’s Druze and Kurdish minorities as an obstacle to state consolidation. The Turkish-Israeli rivalry, sharpened since 2024 by Gaza and in the contest for Syria’s new government, increasingly structures the regional order into rival camps: Ankara’s Sunni grouping on one side and an Israel-Greece-Cyprus bloc on the other.

Syria is therefore where Turkey’s embedded-outsider status could pay off most—and where its limits show most clearly. Ankara has access, military leverage and relationships Europe cannot easily reproduce, but not the financial resources and institutional capacity to rebuild Syria on its own. Its ability to shepherd the transition depends, paradoxically, on the very Western relationships it has sought to loosen.

The eastern Mediterranean: Autonomy that backfires

The eastern Mediterranean shows the other side of bounded autonomy. Turkish hydrocarbon exploration in waters claimed by Greece and Cyprus triggered EU sanctions in 2020, and contested maritime claims between the three countries remain. This is potentially the most dangerous flashpoint in Turkey’s relations with the EU.

The dispute predates Erdogan. It is rooted in the unresolved conflict in Cyprus and competing interpretations of maritime jurisdiction in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean. Ankara rejects Greek claims that islands close to the Anatolian coast should generate extensive maritime zones, and resists any arrangement it sees as restricting Turkey’s access to the open sea. Successive rounds of UN-led negotiations—including a 2004 referendum and the 2017 talks at Crans-Montana—have failed to produce a settlement.

These longstanding trilateral disagreements have sprawled into a regional confrontation. Offshore gas exploration around Cyprus has repeatedly stoked tensions over the past decade, while closer defence and energy ties between Cyprus, Greece and Israel have reinforced Ankara’s sense of encirclement.

Tensions peaked in 2020, when Turkish and Greek vessels came close to direct conflict. The EU subsequently imposed targeted sanctions linked to Turkish drilling activities. At that time, the German former chancellor Angela Merkel became personally involved in shuttle diplomacy between Ankara and Athens and helped avert a military confrontation. But since Merkel left office, no European leader has had the same standing with Erdogan or mounted a comparable sustained effort to address the underlying political dispute.

As long as Cyprus remains divided, Ankara is unlikely to abandon its insistence that Nicosia cannot unilaterally develop the island’s hydrocarbon resources without agreement on how Turkish Cypriots will share in them. Ankara is also unlikely to accept any Greek extension of territorial waters from six to twelve nautical miles in the Aegean—a step the Turkish parliament declared a casus belli in 1995—on grounds that it would sharply curtail its own access to the open sea. That suggests a limit to punitive conditionality by the EU. Targeted sanctions may raise the price of Turkish actions, but by themselves they are unlikely to change Ankara’s position on an issue it regards as a core national interest.

But Europe has not yet seriously tested sustained diplomacy aimed at the source of the dispute. The EU should invest political capital in a renewed Cyprus settlement process, working alongside the UN and encouraging a negotiated arrangement between the island’s two communities. It should not approach the conflict simply as a dispute between a member state and an outside power. The EU cannot easily present itself as a neutral actor when Cyprus is itself a member state, but it can provide incentives, pressure Nicosia into talks, and use diplomatic weight and the prospect of deeper Turkey-EU integration, with security guarantees for Cyprus, to support a settlement. Without progress on Cyprus, the island will remain a perennial obstacle to a more functional relationship between Turkey and Europe.

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The three case studies show the uses and limits of Turkish autonomy. In Ukraine, Ankara worked both sides without breaking with either, creating access Europe could use. In Syria, Turkish power created leverage but not the resources to consolidate it. In the eastern Mediterranean, autonomy produced confrontation, while European sanctions contained some of the immediate costs without resolving the political dispute that generated them.

A European strategy for the embedded outsider

Europe’s Turkey policy swings between two illusions: that Ankara can be brought back to the Western alignment of the 1990s, or that it is lost and can only be contained. A country this entangled with Europe yet so determined to act alone fits neither.

The alternative is managed interdependence. It begins from two facts: first, Turkish autonomy is here to stay—no future government will return to unquestioned Western alignment; second, autonomy stops well short of independence—Turkey still relies on NATO for ultimate security, Europe for markets, capital, technology and regulation, and America for advanced defence cooperation and regional deterrence.

Europe should use that dependence without trying to eliminate Turkish autonomy. It should make Western cooperation valuable enough that Ankara keeps its forces interoperable, honours common rules and avoids partnerships that damage allied security.

There are limits to this policy. Ankara is unlikely to agree to Greek or Cypriot maritime claims, but it could be open to a UN-led settlement or a deal dividing hydrocarbon resources. Europe should push for that instead of settling for the status quo, even at the cost of having to pressure Cyprus into a new framework or resumption of UN-led talks.

The reality is that European leverage on the eastern Mediterranean is limited, and punitive measures will not change the Turkish calculus. In order to build leverage, Europe first has to define a credible endgame in the conflict and try something new: positive engagement with Ankara aimed at a durable settlement to the frozen conflict. A good place to start would be a pan-Mediterranean conference, inviting Turkey, to set out the disputes and the case for diplomacy. Following that, the EU could work with the UN to push Cyprus and Turkey back to the table, either for a final settlement on Cyprus or a resource-sharing deal on hydrocarbons. 

On the broader agenda with Turkey, the EU should pursue separate, self-contained deals across defence, trade, regional security, migration and mobility. Cyprus can block some of these deals, but in the end can be persuaded by other member states to agree to a more pragmatic approach in return for security guarantees. Each deal should exchange concrete benefits for defined obligations with clear monitoring so that cooperation no longer rests on personal ties between leaders.

The return of Donald Trump somewhat complicates this strategy. Erdogan’s direct relationship with Washington can reduce the immediate cost of ignoring Brussels by giving Ankara another route into the Western system. But transatlantic uncertainty also cuts the other way. Turkey likes to hedge and understands that Trump’s America is a risky player—and that Europe is a good hedge against US volatility. As Europe assumes more responsibility for its own defence and Washington becomes less predictable, Turkey’s military capacity, geography and defence industry become more valuable to Europeans. The result is mutual leverage rather than European dependence alone. Ankara has alternatives to Brussels, but Europe also has assets—market access, industrial integration, finance and regulation—that Washington cannot replace.

Integrate Turkey into European defence

This is where Turkish and European interests overlap most obviously. Europe is rearming; Turkey has factories, a fast-growing arms industry and capabilities relevant to Europe’s eastern and southern flanks. Excluding Turkey entirely from emerging defence-industrial arrangements would be self-defeating.

Yet that is roughly what has happened. In 2025, the EU launched its most ambitious defence effort to date—ReArm Europe, including SAFE, a €150bn joint-procurement instrument. SAFE is open in principle to candidate countries such as Turkey, but deeper participation requires a separate bilateral agreement with the EU, and Turkey has yet to conclude one. Cyprus and Greece have made clear that they view such access through the prism of their own security disputes with Ankara, and this is another way unresolved conflicts in the eastern Mediterranean constrain Europe’s ability to draw Turkey more deeply into its emerging defence architecture.

Turkey should be let in. Europe should use the linkage constructively: greater Turkish access to European defence programmes should accompany sustained de-escalation with Greece and progress on Cyprus, rather than being treated either as an unconditional entitlement or as a permanent exclusion.

EU institutions and member states should pursue this at different levels. The Commission and Council should create pathways for Turkish participation in EU-level defence instruments where political and security conditions are met. Meanwhile, individual member states should expand bilateral procurement, co-production and supply-chain partnerships with Turkish firms on a project-specific basis. Access should be conditional: tied to end-use guarantees, IP protection, sanctions compliance and limits on transferring jointly developed technology to third countries. Kept modular and reversible, such projects give Ankara a stake in interoperability and give Europe access to Turkish capacity without waving away its political and security concerns.

Modernise the customs union

Economic interdependence is Europe’s strongest lever and Turkey’s main reason to stay close. Yet the existing customs union is outdated and ill-suited to a world of supply chain fragmentation, US tariffs, Chinese overcapacity, digital trade and climate regulation. It covers goods and little else—no services, no digital trade, no public procurement and almost no agriculture—besides having weak dispute mechanisms.

Modernisation of the customs union should be at the centre of the Turkey-EU relationship. An expanded agreement would deepen supply-chain integration, attract investment, support green and digital transitions, and pull Turkish regulation closer to that of the EU. And by helping the EU’s industrial competitiveness, it would strengthen its hand against both China and America.

Modernisation should proceed in stages, with access to new sectors tied to measurable compliance and stronger dispute settlement. The objective is not more trade for its own sake. It is to make the dependence run in both directions.

Build coalitions in the neighbourhood

Turkey is now central to many crises in the Middle East, and there is room for Ankara and Brussels to work together more closely. But this does not have to be a single regional bargain. A more realistic model is a portfolio of issue-based coalitions.

In Iraq, both want stronger state institutions, better energy and transport links, reduced dependence on the Strait of Hormuz and Iranian-backed militias out of the military and politics. In Lebanon, both want functioning state institutions and reconstruction while containing escalation with Israel. In Libya and Somalia, maritime security, migration, energy and political stabilisation all provide areas for cooperation.

In the South Caucasus, Europe should continue to support Turkish-Armenian normalisation, the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process and the east-west transit corridor. On Iran, Ankara’s rivalry with Tehran and diplomatic access to it are useful: both Europe and Turkey want neither an Iranian hegemon nor an Iranian collapse.

Cooperate on migration

The 2016 migration deal reduced a complicated relationship to cash for border control, punctuated by political threats. Europe treats Turkey as a wall; Turkey periodically opens a door in it to make a point. This has delivered no more than short-term containment.

A more durable framework should distribute responsibilities more evenly between Turkey and Europe. It should combine joint border management with sustained refugee protection, greater EU financial support for Turkish municipalities and host communities and expanded resettlement from Turkey to EU member states. Any large-scale return to Syria should be voluntary and depend on improvements in security, housing, documentation, ability to earn a living and protection from persecution. Achieving that will require the EU to do more than simply leave returns for Turkey to manage: it should jointly monitor conditions on the ground, while helping finance reconstruction of civilian infrastructure Syria needs to improve those conditions.

The EU should also make legal travel easier for Turkish citizens: faster visa processing for students, academics, businesspeople, and families, alongside expanded educational and professional exchanges. The point is to replace money-for-containment with better mobility, giving Turkish citizens a reason to care about Europe while reducing Ankara’s ability to weaponise migration.

Make conditionality targeted, not existential

Managed interdependence cannot ignore Turkey’s authoritarian turn. Politicised courts, jailed political opponents and hollowed-out institutions render commercial deals less reliable and foreign policy less predictable.

But Europe’s response has often produced the opposite of what it intended. Keeping Turkey at political distance has not reversed democratic backsliding. It has instead weakened constituencies invested in European integration, reduced the EU’s influence over domestic reform and recast the relationship as an increasingly transactional exchange between governments. The lesson is not to abandon conditionality, but to use it more precisely and consistently.

Europe’s experience with Viktor Orban’s Hungary offers a partial lesson. It demonstrates the value of linking material benefits to specific institutional and rule-of-law conditions, and that different policy areas can be treated separately. But Turkey is not an EU member. It has an independent, regional presence, relationships beyond Europe and no obligation to submit to European courts. The EU’s leverage therefore is much narrower.

Conditionality should therefore be specific, proportionate and tied to the area of cooperation concerned. Instead of making the broader relationship contingent on an open-ended judgment about Turkey’s political trajectory, the EU should tie access to particular benefits to transparent and measurable commitments. Serious rule-of-law violations might affect access to EU financing or progress in areas requiring high levels of regulatory and judicial trust. Coercive actions abroad might trigger restrictions on particular defence-industrial partnerships or targeted measures against the individuals and entities responsible. Measures should have clearly defined triggers and, equally importantly, a clear route to reversal when the triggering behaviour stops.

This approach also requires distinguishing between the Turkish government and Turkish society. Measures intended to constrain the government should not unnecessarily restrict students, researchers, businesses, municipalities or civil society organisations whose interaction with Europe sustains the social foundations of the relationship. Visa access, academic cooperation, municipal partnerships and civil society programmes should therefore be insulated, as far as possible, from political disputes between Ankara and European governments.

Conditionality also has limits when disputes concern interests that Ankara defines as fundamental to sovereignty or national security. In such cases, increasing the cost of Turkish behaviour may signal European resolve without producing a change in policy. Conditionality works best when it creates incentives for a negotiated adjustment, not when it becomes a substitute for diplomacy. Europe therefore needs to pair credible costs with equally credible benefits and a political route back to cooperation.

Keep the accession question open

Managed interdependence is not a substitute for democracy, nor does it require pretending that Turkish accession is imminent. It is a framework for organising relations in the space between joining and walking away. But that raises the question of what should happen to Turkey’s candidate status. Three options are on the table.

Re-opening accession negotiations is unrealistic: the talks have been at a standstill since 2018 and there is neither consensus for a fresh start nor much value in pretending membership is approaching. Formally closing the process would be worse. It would remove one of the last institutional links between the two, weaken pro-European constituencies inside Turkey and make cooperation harder without resolving a single underlying dispute.

The better course is to leave candidate status legally intact but politically dormant and build the cooperation around it. However, the relationship should not be called a “privileged partnership”. This term, floated in some European capitals in the past, remains toxic in Turkey as Ankara sees it as a demotion that in practice would close the accession door forever. The substance is more important: a deep and differentiated partnership of managed interdependence that both sides have reason to maintain, with the formal question left open.

Turkey would remain outside the EU’s political core but get closer where interests align: NATO planning, Ukraine and Black Sea security, defence production, trade, energy, migration, mobility and Syria. In return, Europe would demand greater predictability, sanctions compliance, institutional accountability and adherence to agreed rules.

Disagreement would persist over Cyprus, the eastern Mediterranean, Israel, aspects of the regional order, and Turkey’s continued relations with Russia and China. Managed interdependence is not designed to erase those differences, but to prevent them from bringing down the wider structure of cooperation.

Europe’s choice is not between restoring the Turkey of the past and accepting permanent divergence. It is between an interdependence left hostage to crises and personal bargains, or one organised around common projects, reciprocal obligations and enforceable conditions. A successful strategy would give Turkey room to act as a middle power while making Western cooperation more valuable than the alternatives.

Neither home nor away

Over the past two decades, Turkey has gone from aspiring to regional influence to building the capabilities to exercise it—military deployments, overseas bases, defence exports, economic networks and diplomatic channels. The paradox is that much of this autonomy rests on continued integration with the West. Turkish embeddedness is the platform Turkish autonomy runs on. Ankara has learned to operate in the space between alliance and independence, sufficiently autonomous to shape regional crises, yet sufficiently embedded that the West cannot easily exclude it.

There are limits to this model. Turkey might be able to disrupt arrangements it opposes, but it has been less successful at building durable regional arrangements of its own. That asymmetry is the opening for Europe. A Turkey that can obstruct but not construct needs partners for what it wants to achieve—reconstruction money in Syria, advanced technology for its defence programmes and markets for its exports. Europe has been slow to use this leverage because it keeps looking for a different kind of relationship: an ally that agrees, or an adversary it can hold at arm’s length. Turkey is neither.

Europe needs to stop waiting. It should start using the interdependence that already exists around common projects and enforceable terms. This will not eliminate the contradictions at the heart of the relationship. It will instead turn those contradictions into a framework for bargaining, making cooperation possible without requiring alignment and disagreement manageable without producing rupture.

Acknowledgments 

We are grateful to Jana Puglierin and the Re:Order team at ECFR for encouraging us to take on this project and for helping shape the original idea, and to Angela Mehrer for her coordination throughout. Thanks also to Jeremy Cliffe and the ECFR publications team for their guidance on the initial proposal and outline, and to Nastassia Zenovich whose work on the maps was essential. We would also like to thank the many officials, experts and practitioners who shared their insights with us on an off-the-record basis; their perspectives informed the argument in important ways. Finally, we are especially grateful to Taisa Sganzerla for her thoughtful and incisive editing, which sharpened both the structure and the argument of the paper. 

About the authors

Aslı Aydıntaşbaş is an associate senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and a fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, where she also directs the Turkey Project. Before joining the foreign policy community, Aydintasbas had a long career in journalism, including writing a Global Opinions column for the Washington Post. She has covered wars in the Middle East and lived in New York and Istanbul, holding positions at Milliyet, Cumhuriyet, and CNN Turk. She is a regular commentator on the Middle East and Turkey and her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, among others. Her recent publications include “Turkey’s search for a new Middle East order” and “Turkey’s post-American hesitation” on the impact of the Iran war. She has also recently written “Here is how one country may have solved a violent uprising” and “Trump, don’t repeat Churchill’s mistake” for the New York Times. 

Evren Balta is a professor of international relations at Özyeğin University in Istanbul. She is also academic coordinator of the TÜSİAD Global Politics Forum, co-director of the Democracy Lab at Özyeğin University, a permanent member of the North South Futures Forum and a member of the Global Scholars Network on Identity and Conflict at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. She is also affiliated with the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC. She is the author or co-author of several books, including “The American Passport in Turkey: National Citizenship in the Age of Transnationalism”, which received a Best Book Award from the American Sociological Association. She holds a PhD in political science from The Graduate Center, City University of New York, an MIA from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and an MA in sociology from Middle East Technical University.

This paper is part of the Re:Order project and was made possible with support from Stiftung Mercator, but does not necessarily represent its view.

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