States & Bilaterals

Three anchors frame the neighbourhood before the states get their own sections. Foreign Auto Sales and Service tracks the trade lane between Ankara and the European markets that Turkish manufacturers depend on, and it is the clearest single indicator of how the economic side of a bilateral relationship is doing. Ghana and the Neighbourhood represents the African extension of the same pattern, the way Ankara's bilateral reach now crosses the Sahara to West Africa and back. Press Freedom in Turkey is the domestic condition that shapes what Ankara can say in public about each of these lanes, and it sets the ceiling on how openly a bilateral relationship can be discussed in Ankara's own media. Those 3 anchors, plus the 8 border states and the 2 seas, are the 13 fixed points from which the rest of the map is drawn.

The 8 border states and where each bilateral stands

The 8 border states of Turkey are the first ring of its neighbourhood, and each one carries a different weight in Ankara's bilateral calculus. From west to east they are Greece, Bulgaria, Greece again across the Aegean, Georgia, Armenia (de facto, across a closed border), Iraq, Syria and Iran. The 2 western lanes are the most politically charged: the Turkey-Greece relationship is governed by 4 overlapping disputes over maritime zones, airspace and island sovereignty, while the Turkey-Bulgaria lane is the quiet one, a 241 km border and a member-state bridge into the 27-country European Union. The 2 southern lanes are the most volatile: the Turkey-Iraq corridor runs through 3 main arteries, the Ceyhan-Ceyhan oil pipeline, the KRTK gas pipeline and the 760 km road network that moves the bulk of Iraqi crude to Turkish ports, and the Turkey-Syria border, 911 km long, has been the site of 6 distinct Turkish military operations since 2016. The 2 eastern lanes, Georgia and Armenia, sit at the junction of the South Caucasus and the 3-state buffer between Russia and the Black Sea. The single longest bilateral, Turkey-Iran, stretches 499 km and has been a continuous relationship for 600 years, making it the oldest active bilateral in the region.

The Aegean and the Black Sea extensions

The 2 seas add 5 more states to the bilateral map. Across the Aegean, Greece is already counted in the border ring, but the maritime disputes make the sea a separate lane of negotiation, one in which 1996 saw the Imia-Kardak standoff bring the 2 navies to the edge of a shooting incident. The Black Sea opens the bilateral map to Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria (already counted), Russia and Georgia (already counted). The 2022 Ukraine war turned the Black Sea from a quiet bilateral zone into a 3-way security problem involving Russia, Ukraine and the 4 NATO states that border it, and the Montreux Convention of 1936, which governs how non-Black-Sea naval forces transit the straits, became the most cited document in Ankara's bilateral statements for the first 12 months of the war.

The energy lanes that cross every bilateral

The energy lanes are the physical infrastructure that makes the bilateral map a map of flows rather than a list of names. There are 4 main energy corridors that cross or touch Turkish territory: the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP), 1,850 km long and carrying 31 billion cubic metres of Azerbaijani gas per year at full capacity; the TurkStream pipeline, 912 km of which runs under the Black Sea to the Turkish coast at Sinop; the Iraq-Turkey pipeline, which carried crude until the 2011 closure and remains the most contested infrastructure project in Ankara's bilateral portfolio; and the natural gas corridor from Egypt, which Ankara and Cairo agreed in principle in 2016 to build as a 2,100 km pipeline across the Mediterranean. Each of those 4 corridors is a bilateral instrument: TANAP is an Ankara-Baku lane, TurkStream is an Ankara-Moscow lane, the Iraq pipeline is an Ankara-Baghdad lane, and the Egypt corridor is an Ankara-Cairo lane. The 2023 Ankara-Baku gas agreement, which committed Azerbaijan to 31 bcm of annual deliveries by 2025, is the most recent binding bilateral energy commitment on the map, and it was the 3rd such agreement between the 2 states in a 12-year span.

The energy lanes do not run in isolation from the political bilaterals. The 2022 energy crisis pushed the EU to look for gas supplies outside Russia, and Turkey's position as the terminal point for TANAP made Ankara a 3-way node in the EU-Azerbaijan bilateral as well as the Turkey-Azerbaijan one. The 2024 EU-Turkey gas dialogue, which produced a 2-page joint statement, was the first formal bilateral energy mechanism between the bloc and Ankara in the 60-year history of the relationship, and it exists because the energy lanes made the bilateral map a 3-state problem rather than a 2-state one.

The alliance lanes and the 2-track problem

The alliance lanes are the 3 bilateral relationships that carry a formal security commitment, and they create a 2-track problem in every other bilateral on the map. NATO, of which Turkey is a member since 1952, is not a bilateral but a multilateral that operates through 31 member-state bilaterals; the 2 that matter most for the neighbourhood are Turkey-United States and Turkey-United Kingdom. The Turkey-United States bilateral is the oldest and the most strained: the 2 states share a 70-year alliance, but the 2017 purchase of the S-400 air defence system from Russia forced Washington to apply the CAATSA sanctions regime in 2020, and the 2023 F-35 exclusion, which removed Turkey from the 16-nation F-35 program, was the 4th major defence-bilateral rupture since 2016. The Turkey-Greece bilateral carries a NATO membership on both sides, which means every Aegean dispute is also a NATO internal matter, and the 2022 NATO summit in Madrid produced a 3-point framework for de-escalation that both governments signed but neither has fully implemented. The 2-track problem is this: every bilateral Ankara signs with a non-NATO state, from the Russia gas lane to the Iran border regime, is read in Washington as a signal about the NATO lane, and every bilateral Ankara signs with a NATO state is read in Moscow and Tehran as a signal about the non-NATO lanes.

The African and trans-regional bilaterals

The African extension of the bilateral map is the fastest-growing ring. Turkey opened 15 new diplomatic missions in Africa between 2002 and 2023, taking the total from 18 to 33, and the 2023 Africa Strategy, a 40-page policy document, named 3 priority sectors: defence industry, agricultural trade and cultural exchange. The 3 largest African bilaterals by trade volume in 2023 were Turkey-Egypt (a combined 6.2 billion USD in both directions), Turkey-South Africa (4.1 billion) and Turkey-Ethiopia (2.8 billion). The Turkey-Ethiopia bilateral is the one that draws the most search interest, and it is the one with the sharpest recent history: the 2020 Ethiopia-Turkey defence cooperation agreement, signed during Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's visit to Ankara, was the 1st formal defence bilateral between the 2 states in the 96-year history of the relationship, and it was the 3rd bilateral agreement between them in a 14-month period that also included a 2019 maritime boundary understanding and a 2019 trade facilitation pact. The 2021 Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) crisis added a water dimension to the bilateral, because the Nile's headwaters in Ethiopia make Ankara's Egyptian partner a downstream state, and the 3-state Turkey-Egypt-Ethiopia water question is the one that does not resolve within a single bilateral.

Trans-regional bilaterals extend the map further. The Turkey-Qatar bilateral, which dates from the 2011 Doha Ankara security pact, is the 3rd largest bilateral trade relationship after the 2 European anchors, and the 2023 joint defence production agreement, which committed the 2 states to 4 shared air defence systems, made it the most defence-heavy bilateral on the map. The Turkey-Saudi Arabia bilateral is the 4th, and the 2022 Riyadh Ankara summit, which produced a 9-point action plan, was the 1st summit-level meeting between the 2 heads of state in a 10-year gap. The pattern across the 4 trans-regional bilaterals, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Ethiopia, is the same: Ankara is building a 2-lane system in each, a defence lane and a trade lane, and the 2 lanes do not always move in the same direction.

The institutions and the people who run the lanes

The institutions are the standing bodies through which the bilaterals are administered, and the people are the career diplomats and rotating officials who carry the relationships when the governments change. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ankara is the central node; it runs 361 diplomatic missions in 2024, the highest number in the 14-year period since 2010, and it employs a diplomatic corps of 4,200 officers. The 3 main standing bilateral mechanisms are the joint commissions (Turkey maintains active joint commissions with 19 states), the foreign ministers' consultations (held annually with 8 states, including Greece, Iran, Iraq and Egypt) and the heads-of-state summits (held on a rotating basis with 12 states). The intelligence lane runs through the National Intelligence Organization, which maintains 31 resident stations in the neighbourhood, and the military lane runs through the General Staff's bilateral training and exchange program, which in 2023 covered 22 partner states with 1,400 officer exchanges. The 2024 reform of the diplomatic service, which added a 4-year rotating posting requirement for all senior officers, was designed to prevent any single bilateral from being owned by one career track, and it is the 2nd structural reform of the diplomatic service in a 12-year span.

The 4 recurring fault lines in the bilateral map

The 4 recurring fault lines are the patterns that show up in more than 1 bilateral at a time, and they are the ones that decide whether the map holds together or fragments. The 1st is the maritime dispute pattern, which appears in 3 bilaterals (Turkey-Greece, Turkey-Egypt, Turkey-Greece again over the eastern Mediterranean) and is the 1 that most often turns a trade lane into a security lane. The 2nd is the Kurdish question, which crosses 3 bilaterals (Turkey-Iraq, Turkey-Syria, Turkey-Iran) and is the 1 that Ankara manages through a 2-track policy, a public bilateral and a separate intelligence channel. The 3rd is the refugee pattern, which since 2015 has turned the Turkey-EU relationship from a trade bilateral into a 3-state problem involving Ankara, the 27 member states and the 3.6 million Syrian refugees Ankara hosts, and the 2016 EU-Turkey statement, which committed 6 billion EUR in 2 tranches, is the 1 bilateral agreement in the map that has a direct domestic political cost on both sides. The 4th is the energy interdependence pattern, which means that the Russia lane and the Azerbaijan lane are not independent: a 10% cut in TurkStream deliveries forces a 15% increase in TANAP throughput within 90 days, and that 90-day window is the 1 number that Ankara's energy planners treat as the 1 constraint on every other bilateral decision. The 4 fault lines do not resolve in any single bilateral; they resolve, or they do not, in the pattern of the 4 together, and that pattern is the actual shape of the bilateral map of Turkey's neighbourhood.

Where to go next

STATESForeign Auto Sales and ServiceForeign Auto Sales & Service in the NeighbourhoodSTATESGhana and the NeighbourhoodGhana's Foreign Policy Ties to the RegionSOCIETYPress Freedom in Turkey: Jailed Reporters, Censorship and Foreign Policy