Turkey's global strategy

After nearly a decade in power, Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP) has grown increasingly confident in its foreign policy, prompting observers to wondered aloud whether the country might be leaving 'the West', forcing that group to confront the question 'who lost Turkey?' This is to cast Turkey's role, and its emerging global strategy, in unhelpful binary terms. Turkey's emerging role reflects the changes in the world politics whereby power is becoming decentred and more diffuse, with established blocs replaced by more fluid arrangements that loosely bind states on the basis shifting interests. Understanding Turkey's evolving global role can shed light on the emergence and orientation of other rising powers, and for the West, the challenge will be to shed the bloc mentality that remains pervasive, and reconceptualise an international order in which independent states become assets rather than inconveniences.