ABSTRACT
The Syrian civil war that started in 2011 boosted flows of refugees and jihadist militants to Turkey, where the resulting political turmoil weakened the “soft power” emanating from its once-exemplary combination of Islam and democracy, but ironically boosted the standing of former Turkish Prime Minister and current President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. By 2017, though, critical Turkish policy errors had bolstered the presence of the Islamic State (IS), anti-IS Kurdish combatants, and foreign forces on its southern doorstep, including Syrian regime-backers Russia, Iran, and Lebanon’s Hezbollah as well as the US, forcing leading Justice and Development Party (AKP) politicians, including Erdoğan, to virtually abandon idealist and Islamist foreign policy goals that came to include and even center on Bashar al-Assad’s ouster. Ankara reverted to traditional hard-power calculi, not only establishing military buffer zones extending into northern Syria but also pursuing a somewhat contrary course of renewed rapprochement with Moscow, one that morphed into the ongoing, albeit often tense, joint Astana process of negotiating an end to the Syrian rebellion and a new peace.
