Rarely has a leader’s trip abroad attracted so much attention as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s state visit to the UAE last week. The Turkish leader’s journey to Abu Dhabi and Dubai was a landmark event which is likely have a profound influence on relations between Ankara and Middle Eastern capitals.

 It wasn’t that surprising after the UAE’s de facto leader Mohammed bin Zayid Al-Nahyan visited Turkey last November, the first high-level trip since 2012. But given the symbolic importance of reciprocity in diplomacy at all levels Erdogan’s visit was a highly significant development in calming regional tensions.

 Turkey and the UAE have been at loggerheads for the past decade. Radically different attitudes to the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011; support of opponents in Libya, Egypt and Tunisia; the boycott of Qatar; and Turkey’s backing of Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups and its opposition to gas exploration in the eastern Mediterranean are just some of the areas of disagreement.

 Dubai’s iconic Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, was illuminated with the colours of the Turkish flag and the words “Hos Geldiniz,” Turkish for “welcome.”

 The former Emirati foreign minister and presidential adviser Anwar Gargash tweeted, “Erdogan’s visit to the UAE … opens a new positive page in the bilateral relations between the two countries.”  But by contrast, in a 2020 interview, Gargash called for Europe to join forces against what he said was Erdogan’s attempt “to revive the Ottoman Empire.”

 In the past Ankara was unhappy with the overthrow of Muhammad Morsi by General Abdel-Fatah al-Sissi in 2013 and set out to support Sunni Islamist groups to counter Iranian backing for Shias in Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen.

 And Turkey accused the UAE of providing financial support to some of the organizers of a failed 2016 military coup against Erdogan’s government. The two countries, in short, have long seen each other as hostile, with Turkey cast as a dangerous bully and the UAE as an arrogant upstart.

 So what has changed?

 Geopolitics and economic interests is the short answer. The perceived withdrawal from the Middle East by the Biden administration, the Abraham Accords signed by the UAE with Israel, and the increasing vulnerability of Abu Dhabi in the face of recent attacks by the Houthi rebels are all factors.

 Following MBZ’s visit last November, the UAE announced a $10 billion fund for investments in Turkey, where the economy has been reeling and inflation last month surged to a near 20-year high. Turkey is in crisis and its national currency having lost 48% of its value in the last year. And Erdogan is facing an election in June 2023.

 For its part, the UAE has been pushing to further diversify its economy away from oil and revive itself from the damage of the Covid pandemic. “It made us understand… that we had to turn back home and let go of certain kinds of engagements in the broader Middle East,” an Emirati diplomat said last autumn.

 In Abu Dhabi Erdogan and MBZ signed 13 cooperation agreements and memoranda of understanding, including a letter of intent on cooperation in the defence industries. The UAE has vowed to double or even triple trade volumes with Turkey in the near future, seeing Ankara as a key conduit to new markets especially in Africa.

 Erdogan has since last year sought to improve ties with regional powers in the face of increasing diplomatic isolation that has caused foreign investment to dry up, particularly from the US and EU. Last month, he said he would also visit Saudi Arabia, the first trip to Riyadh since relations soured over the 2018 murder of Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi inside the kingdom's consulate in Istanbul. 

 Turkey is also seeking to mend ties with Israel, now officially a friend of the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco since the Abraham Accords in August 2020. Israeli President Isaac Herzog is scheduled for an official visit to Turkey in March, despite the fact that Turkey in 2020 threatened to cut ties with the UAE over its normalization deal with Israel.  Ankara’s backing for Hamas in Gaza is likely to lessen under Israeli, Emirati and US pressure.

 This détente comes amid heightened tensions in the region as Iran’s nuclear development progresses, and in the wake of a series of drone and missile attacks on the UAE mostly claimed by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who are backed by Tehran. 

 Relations between Turkey and Iran have also worsened. Turkey maintains close military and trade ties with Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, to Tehran’s annoyance. In Syria, Iran and Turkey are on opposite sides of the fence. Ankara still wants to topple Bashar al-Assad, while Iran sees him as a strategic asset to preserve its influence in Lebanon.

 The overall lesson from Turkish-UAE reconciliation is this: it makes sense for all countries that are used to tense regional relations to take a break from confrontation, using diplomacy and economic power as a means of securing their own interests and projecting their influence. The Erdogan-MBZ meeting is likely to be considered, in future at least, as the end of the period known as the Arab Spring.


 

BY: IAN BLACK