Is Erdoğan NATO’s New Heavyweight?

By Hannah Lucinda Smith

Monday, July 13, 2026

 

Turkey’s broadcasting censor recently issued a new directive to the country’s television channels: There was to be no criticism of NATO on the airwaves. In the run-up to the alliance’s landmark summit, which was held in the Turkish capital of Ankara last week, good vibes were state-mandated, and Turkish journalists were warned that all reports should “fit in with the national security perspective.”

 

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was duly hailed, both at home and abroad, as the leader who managed to bring a reluctant Donald Trump to the summit, and Turkey’s defense industry was touted as the possible answer to Europe’s weapons procurement quandary. On Wednesday, after a brief bout of petulance over his European allies’ criticisms of his attacks on Iran, Trump exited the meeting apparently full of renewed enthusiasm for the alliance that, on multiple occasions, he seemed determined to undermine. NATO’s bureaucrats will be exhaling in relief.

 

There is, of course, a deep irony in the fact that criticism of an organization whose founding principles are the defense of democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law was banned by a state diktat. But observers of Turkey will not be surprised: Under Erdoğan, who has been in power since 2003, the country has descended into near-total autocracy, with opposition figures and critical journalists jailed, media outlets shuttered, and the courts and state institutions wholly politicized.

 

For a period, that illiberal trajectory took Turkey to the outskirts of the NATO alliance, where it was spoken of as an unreliable ally and excluded from the F-35 fighter jet program. Today, because of global circumstances and Erdoğan’s skill in navigating them, it is back at the center. The censor’s decree is a sign of the total foreign policy swivel that has taken place in Ankara over recent years, turning it back toward Europe after a decade in which Erdoğan appeared far more interested in building links with Russia and China.

 

For much of his tenure, Erdoğan was largely uninterested in foreign policy. In the early years, he left international strategy to his chief adviser and foreign minister from 2009 to 2014, Ahmet Davutoğlu, who pursued a policy of “zero problems with neighbors” by building ties with countries in the Middle East and Africa while maintaining Turkey’s traditional alliances in the West. That changed with the outbreak of the Arab Spring revolutions in the early 2010s, when Erdoğan began patronizing Islamist movements, mirroring his lurch toward overt religiosity in domestic politics. For a decade after that, and particularly after ousting Davutoğlu in 2016, he used foreign relations primarily to further his own agenda. In the lead-up to elections, he stoked rows with Europe and launched military campaigns in Syria and the Aegean Sea to ignite and then feed off nationalist sentiments, and to present himself as a strongman who could stand up for Turkey on the world stage.

 

The turning point was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, said Gönül Tol, a founding director of the Turkey program at the Middle East Institute, a Washington D.C.-based think tank. The conflict has allowed Erdoğan to offer his relationship with Vladimir Putin, once a serious concern for NATO, as a mediating tool. It has also refocused the alliance’s attention—away from the domestic behavior of its allies and toward the external threat now facing Europe. Magnifying both of those factors is Trump, whose own wavering commitment to European security has left NATO with few other options.

 

“The international context is in Erdoğan’s favor, and he is playing his cards well,” Tol said. “If you look at the new world we are in, there are conflicts in Ukraine, Iran, the Caucasus, North Africa, and Turkey sits at the center of all that.”

 

Turkey also occupies a strengthened position in the Middle East following the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. When the dictator fled Damascus on December 8, 2024, Russia’s influence in the region collapsed. Where Erdoğan had once been the weaker partner in his relationship with Putin, often forced to concede to the Russian leader, he is now able to exert far greater influence in Moscow. The new Syrian government is ideologically and politically close to Ankara, and it is through Turkey’s support that Russia has been able to maintain a reduced military presence at its base in the Syrian port of Tartus. The war in Ukraine, too, has turned Turkey into an economic lifeline for Putin; the country has served as a transit hub for restricted goods moving in and out of Russia.

 

These developments have allowed Erdoğan to pursue an independent policy on Iran amid the U.S. and Israeli attacks on that country. While Trump and Erdoğan currently enjoy a warm relationship, and Turkey itself was targeted by Iranian missiles in the first weeks of the conflict, the Turkish leader has kept a distance that has prevented him from being sucked into another regional war, and blocked Israel’s plans for Kurdish-led regime change in Tehran. (Syria, too, has resisted Trump’s attempts to bring it into the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon.)

 

Diplomats who dealt with Erdoğan in his early years recall how he used to defer to his foreign ministry and seemed ill at ease in international settings: Foreign policy was never his natural forte. More recently, though, Erdoğan has “learned how to exploit international crises and provide Turkey’s services,” Tol said.

 

He has also been extremely lucky. Today, there is far less of a focus on democracy and human rights in Brussels; it has been overtaken by concerns over European security and efforts to fill the gaps left by Trump’s prevaricating Washington. Turkey, as the second biggest military in NATO and the country occupying the alliance’s eastern flank, has become central to that question.

 

Alienating Erdoğan is no longer an option. He has already proved that he is willing to stall the work of the alliance if he feels it is of benefit to him; in 2022, after the invasion of Ukraine, he used his veto power to stall Sweden and Finland’s accession to the bloc. Such a move could be fatal to NATO in 2026. Whatever Erdoğan is doing domestically, and however that clashes with NATO’s enshrined values, he is guaranteed a warm welcome in Brussels. In the immediate term, that is realpolitik. In the longer term, however, welcoming an autocrat could undermine the alliance: The test will come when Erdoğan’s aims inevitably diverge from NATO’s once again.