Turkiye’s Defence Industry: Which Way Forward?

In this final report produced as part of a joint project with the IISS, experts from the Center for Foreign Policy and Peace Research outline a broad range of foreign-policy approaches that Turkiye could pursue, the impact each would have on the country’s defence industry, and which equipment areas they think the country should prioritise. Turkiye’s defence industry is directly impacted by the country’s foreign-policy orientation, and now finds itself at a critical juncture. Decisions taken in the next few years will shape the future of its armaments sector for decades to come. There are two crucial issues for poli­cymakers to assess: which countries should be Turkiye’s closest partners, and which defence-industrial sectors should be prioritised. There are broadly five possible foreign-policy direc­tions that Ankara could take. Each has its own historical roots, whether recent or more distant. The five direc­tions can be categorised as ‘Isolationist’, ‘New Horizons’, ‘Shifting Course’, ‘Hedging’ and ‘Return to the West’. An Isolationist approach would be the most damag­ing for Turkiye’s defence industry, placing it in a simi­lar bracket to those of Iran and North Korea. Because the industry is highly integrated into the Western defence-industrial ecosystem, severing relations with Western partners would severely reduce the country’s defence-industrial capacity. A New Horizons approach would build on the engagement with the Global South – principally the Middle East, Africa and Asia – that began in the mid-1960s and has been built on, more recently, by military diplomacy and defence exports. It is highly likely that this will remain a strand of Turkish policy going forward. By Shifting Course, Turkiye would turn away from Western allies and move closer to Russia, China or both. However, this would yield little defence-industrial benefit. Through a Hedging approach, Ankara would adopt a more nuanced stance, between East and West. This would carry echoes of Turkiye’s foreign policy in the 1920s and 1930s. However, given that the international political environment has further bipolarised in the last few years, increasingly divided between two blocs led by the US and China, this approach would be very dif­ficult, particularly in the defence sector.