Turkey’s olive branches have prickly effect on Saudis
Grappling with serious economic woes, Turkey is seeking to normalize ties with Saudi Arabia, but some of its fence-mending have badly backfired.
Turkey has taken a number of recent steps that can be seen as efforts to normalize ties with Saudi Arabia: the foreign minister’s attendance of the Islamic summit in Mecca, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Eid al-Fitr phone call to King Salman and Ankara’s condemnation of the Houthi attack on the Saudi Abha airport. It's a good start, but the relationship remains shaky amid the moves that have badly backfired.
For Turkey, a continued flow of capital from the Gulf is crucial at the moment, with its ailing economy facing new threats of US sanctions due to Ankara’s insistence on procuring a Russian air defense system. Moreover, the continuation of open enmity with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates poses fresh hardships to Turkey’s moves in the Middle East and Africa.
Erdogan knows he needs to break this vicious circle, but the Saudis have an expectation from Turkey – to see it in their “family photo” against Iran – in addition to two conditions, namely that Turkey should review its support for Qatar and stop protecting the Muslim Brotherhood.
For much of the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) 17-year rule, Ankara has held Riyadh in high esteem. The AKP got off to a good start in 2006 when King Abdullah visited and signed six agreements with Turkey. Bilateral ties acquired a military dimension in 2013, with Saudi pilots training in central Turkey and Turkey participating in military drills in the Gulf. Relations moved toward “strategic cooperation” in 2015 when Erdogan and King Salman signed an accord in Riyadh. The following year, the two sides agreed to create a bilateral coordination council.
