Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This chapter interrogates the central paradox of Turkish foreign policy under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: the rhetoric of “strategic autonomy” versus the practice of authoritarian symbiosis. Since the early 2010s, Erdoğan has projected the image of a Turkey liberated from Western tutelage, charting an independent course in a multipolar order. Yet closer examination reveals that foreign policy has become an extension of regime maintenance, personalized decision-making, and transactional bargaining rather than a coherent strategy of autonomy. Erdoğan’s relationship with Vladimir Putin epitomizes this shift. While once adversarial, their post-2016 partnership deepened through asymmetric interdependence in energy, arms, and regional conflicts, most visibly in the controversial S-400 purchase that undermined NATO solidarity. Similar logics shaped Ankara’s embrace of Azerbaijan during the Second Karabakh War, where pan-Turkic solidarity fused with lucrative reconstruction contracts for regime-linked firms. Erdoğan’s oscillating ties with Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt likewise demonstrate how foreign alignments are subordinated to domestic vulnerabilities, financial necessity, and personal enrichment, with U-turns justified through shifting nationalist and Islamist discourses. The chapter argues that what is labeled “strategic autonomy” is better understood as a survivalist foreign policy: flexible, reversible, and driven by authoritarian imperatives. Rather than securing Turkey’s sovereignty, this approach entrenches dependence on illiberal partners, erodes institutional credibility, and isolates Ankara from its Western allies. Erdoğan’s foreign policy is thus less a coherent doctrine than a mode of neo-patrimonial governance, where external relations become instruments of crony capitalism, regime consolidation, and nationalist spectacle. The result is a Turkey trapped between autonomy as myth and dependency as practice.</jats:p>