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Asian Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, vol.13, no.4, pp.592-603, 2019 (ESCI)
This article analyses Turkey's foreign policy in the Middle East and the Gulf region. It argues that Turkey's activism in the first decade of the 2000s enabled it to put into play its soft power in the region and the new principles of its foreign policy under Ahmet Davutoglu made it one of the major countries in regional politics. This has radically changed with the advent of the Arab Uprisings. Turkey has found itself a party to the civil war in Syria and lost its major ally, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, after 2013. Thus it has been largely isolated in the region. The article will underline the ideological and geopolitical reasons for this isolation. It will look at the pro-Muslim Brotherhood stance of the AKP government which played a major role in straining this relations with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and the re-emergence of 'the Kurdish threat' from Turkey's south across the Syrian border which has led to the securitisation of its foreign policy.