As Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan wrapped up another round of summits with Russian President Vladimir Putin this month, a succession of scenes linger that project the image of a deep shift in Turkey’s strategic direction.

Moments where Erdoğan and Putin gazed admiringly at a Russian Su-57 fifth generation fighter jet or shared an ice cream in Moscow fuelled feverish speculation about a pivot by the Turkish state away from its established partnerships with the European Union and United States and toward authoritarian regimes with a supposedly Eurasian orientation, such as Iran, Russia and China.

In a move to consolidate the vertical authoritarian power Erdoğan seems to hanker after, he has also fostered a confrontational style towards the United States that has put Turkey’s place in the Transatlantic Alliance under strain.

The arrest of several European citizens on spurious charges and the escalation of disputes with Cyprus, Greece and the EU over eastern Mediterranean gas reserves are eroding European goodwill. The EU is maintaining a façade of an accession process with Ankara while subtly redirecting Turkey’s integration path towards more basic access to the European single market.

The image of strategic reorientation projected by the Turkish government has now led to a consensus among analysts, journalists and scholars that Turkey is on a path away from Western institutions towards some kind of vaguely defined Eurasian future.

But below the surface, the foundations of Turkey’s institutional relationship with the United States and EU remain in place. Turkey’s acquisition of Russian S-400 air defence missiles has led to the suspension of its participation in the U.S.-led programme to build and operate F-35 fighter jets, but there are few indications of any move to end Turkish membership in NATO. Even under the leadership of officers and politicians oriented towards cooperation with Russia and China, the Turkish military has shied away from taking steps that would lead to its expulsion from transatlantic structures.

For all the enthusiastic talk of a Turkish strategic pivot among Erdoğan loyalists, the administration and the General Staff maintain deep levels of interaction with NATO. This reluctance to break with an alliance that still provides Turkey with automatic support if it comes under attack from a non-NATO state indicates the limitations of Moscow or Beijing’s ability to fundamentally alter Ankara’s strategic orientation.

Even as the wild gyrations of the Turkish government’s geopolitical manoeuvring leads to analytical whiplash among Turkey watchers, more fundamental economic structures limit Ankara’s scope for a complete break from the institutional architecture that amplifies the influence of its European partners. While debates surrounding relations with the United States are mostly framed in the context of defence strategy, Turkey’s economic and social interdependence with EU member states is so wide-ranging as to blur the boundaries between domestic and foreign policy.

Despite the gradual drift of the Turkish-EU accession process into stasis, a regulatory framework drawing Turkey’s trade, manufacturing and financial services into the EU’s sphere of influence has solidified since the acceleration of European integration in the early 1990s. In 2018 alone, for instance, the EU accounted for 42 percent of Turkish trade, while western nations accounted for 56 percent, according to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The fraught deal to manage migration to the EU from Turkey agreed in 2016 is only the latest variant of decades of agreements that have forced both sides to align their border regimes. Since it came into force in 1996, the Customs Union between the EU and Turkey has oriented the Turkish manufacturing sector towards EU markets. Turkey’s acceptance of the EU’s common external tariff also requires that it signs onto core aspects of the European single market’s regulatory framework.

Turkey’s agricultural, services and financial sectors have had to adjust standards and practices to obtain access to EU markets. Even in an environment where its EU accession bid is barely on life support, this level of Turkish integration into the EU system severely constricts the ability of the Turkish government to make wider trade agreements with other centres of geopolitical power if it hopes to reorient its economy away from an EU it claims to distrust.

In an environment where internal economic instability has helped opposition parties mobilise support against Erdoğan, there are considerable incentives for the government to avoid pushing confrontations with the EU to the point where the institutional framework binding both sides together falls apart.

The extent to which Turkish society is deeply intertwined with EU institutions through trade and migration limits the space for Ankara to follow through on a strategic pivot towards authoritarian alternatives such as China or Russia in ways that analysis entirely through the lens of security strategy often misses. Despite some government supporters pitching supposed alternatives to Europe, there is little sign of willingness in Erdoğan’s inner circle to ditch links with the EU in favour of a deeper relationship with Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union.

At most, the rhetoric and manoeuvring of the ruling factions in Turkey resembles multi-vectorism, a strategic paradigm pursued by Ukrainian presidents who tried to seek economic integration with the EU while also signalling to Russia that they were willing to take its strategic interests into account. Yet as Erdoğan might already be discovering, Ukrainian attempts to play the EU, the United States and Russia off each other only drew these external actors deeper into domestic politics and helped mobilise the opposition.

For Erdoğan, projecting an image of friendship with unreliable authoritarian powers at a time when economic troubles limit Turkey’s ability to move away from the EU risks further mobilising his opponents and raising expectations among supporters that he cannot fulfil. In trying to have his cake and eat it in a geopolitical quest to assert Turkish greatness, Erdoğan may well end up with no cake at all.

© Ahval English

The views expressed in this column are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Ahval.