The election of the U.S. President Donald Trump played a key role in reigniting the Gulf crisis. The blockading quartet (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain and Egypt) took advantage of the election of a more sympathetic U.S. president to resume the 2013-2014 diplomatic crisis with Qatar, trying to get Doha to agree to their demands. However, divisions within the Trump Administration hindered the quartet efforts to get a much-weakened Qatar to comply. The Defense and State Departments helped balance out the president’s more negative attitude towards Qatar in order to prevent any negative fallout of the U.S. interests in the region.

The article argues that Turkey’s perception of the West has been heavily influenced by its idealized identity. After evaluating the circumstances under which this idealized identity began to weaken, it shows how the images of the US and Europe have started to get compartmentalized and Israel separated from the image of the West. The article explains the relationship between the continuing process redefining Turkey’s “personal identity” and its growing interest in the Middle East. The transformation process that Turkey is passing through is critically important in understanding the way in which Turkey has been affected by the upheavals and is reacting to the new developments in the region. In this vein the article highlights the interaction between power considerations and aspirations to re-define identity at home and abroad.

This paper studies Turkey’s strategic interest in the Syrian conflict in response to the ‘Arab spring’. It examines the impact of the Syrian crisis on Turkish foreign policy at the regional level, including the impact of Turkey’s leadership, ‘Erdoğanism’, during the Arab spring, and the simultaneous shift from an ‘idealist policy’ of ‘zero problems’ in response to the outbreak of changes. Turkey’s ‘strategic depth’ and its idealistic ‘zero problems’ policy shifted with the outbreak of the Arab spring and the Syrian crisis, in particular, which posed a number of challenges both domestically and regionally. Domestic politics, history and leadership have played a significant role in shifting the tactics and techniques of Turkey’s foreign policy in terms of the Syrian crisis. I include an examination of the relationship between Turkey and non-state actors during the crisis. Despite geopolitical interaction between the two countries, Turkey’s foreign policy in Syria has failed to enable the ‘free Syrian army’ to impose a security zone in northern Syria.