The Limitations of Turkey's New Foreign Policy Activism in the Caucasian Regional Security Complexity

Abstract

A panoramic outlook on the present global system shows that the US has been failing to preserve its global preponderance against the rise of new contenders from Asia. Turkey's new foreign policy demeanor under the AKP government reflects this shift of global power from the West to the East leaning on both of these two poles (especially Russia and the US) thereby aims at creating a 'zero-problem' situation with the neighboring Caucasian states. Yet this strategy has not achieved its goal mainly due to the ongoing debates not only between Moscow and Washington but also between Azerbaijan and Armenia in the Caucasian Regional Security Complexity. This work tries to read all these developments by applying insights from the neoclassical realist standing and argues that there are two main hindrances to the plan's success: the dynamics of the current global system and the security complexity of the Caucasus region.