Is Turkey's Foreign Policy Really Sunni?

One of the criticisms that the Turkish government gets these days, both at home and abroad, is that it follows a "sectarian" foreign policy. According to this claim, Ankara looks at the Middle East with exclusively "Sunni eyes," and thus blindly sides with fellow Sunnis in both Syria and Iraq. 

Not only media commentators, but also political actors as prominent as Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, himself a Shiite, have recently raised this criticism. According to Maliki, posters of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan held by Sunni protestors in Iraq were enough evidence of Turkey's "sectarian extension" into his country. The dictator of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, has also condemned Turkey in the past year and a half for Ankara’s support for "terrorists," which he sees as a product of a Sunni axis of evil.

However, there is something strange about Turkey's "Sunni sectarianism." It seems to have appeared suddenly a little less than two years ago, even though its supposed masters, Erdogan and Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, have been in power for more than a decade now.

In fact, until two years ago, Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) government was criticized for being too close to Iran, the main Shiite power in the region, and to its key ally, the Assad regime in Syria. As part of Davutoglu’s famed "zero problems with neighbors" foreign policy, Ankara had gradually established very warm ties with both Tehran and Damascus and signed many agreements, including the much-discussed nuclear swap deal with Iran in May 2011. A month later, Turkey even voted against sanctions on Iran in the United Nations Security Council, disappointing its longtime ally, the United States. All of this was quite discomforting for the Western capitals that wanted to isolate Iran and Syria, and many warned about Turkey’s "axis shift." Some observers were even commenting on the rise of an "Iran-Turkey-Syria axis."