President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s recent tour of Kuwait, Qatar and Oman marked another milestone in Ankara’s expanding Gulf outreach. What began two years ago as rapprochement with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) driven by investments is now evolving into a more ambitious agenda that blends trade diplomacy, security cooperation and political posture.
In fact, Erdoğan’s visit to Kuwait City and Muscat not only sought to elevate underdeveloped security and economic ties, but it also sought to project Turkey politically in the region as both a stabiliser and a voice of conscience, notably in the aftermath of the fragile Gaza ceasefire and post-Assad Syria’s reconstruction needs.
While Doha is already a convinced audience due to deep strategic and ideological ties to Turkey’s ruling AKP, it remains to be seen whether the entirety of the GCC fully adheres to Ankara’s self-proclaimed regional role, one that has risen alarm bells in Israel and could be viewed with circumspection in Abu Dhabi and Riyadh.
Trade diplomacy as a cornerstone of Turkish foreign policy
Geopolitical competition in the Middle East and Africa, opposed ideological views on the Muslim Brotherhood, and diplomatic blunders such as the 2018 assassination of Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul’s Saudi Consulate had soured Ankara’s ties with major Arab states like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Egypt.
Battered by poor economic management and needful of a foreign policy shift, Erdoğan turned the page on such fraught relations by visiting Saudi Arabia and the UAE in 2023, achieving headline-grabbing deals like Riyadh’s $3bn purchase of Akinci drones and Abu Dhabi’s pledge to invest $51bn in Turkey.