Abstract:

Turkish foreign policy is usually described as a balancing act between NATO and Russia, a formulation that treats the position as a skill rather than a structure. This analysis argues that Turkish leverage derives specifically from non-alignment, and that the 1936 Montreux Convention demonstrates the mechanism precisely: Ankara can regulate naval access to the Black Sea impartially only because it is not a belligerent, so any full alignment would destroy the function that makes it valuable. Its worth to NATO is that it speaks to Moscow, and its worth to Moscow is that it sits inside NATO, and neither can be consolidated without erasing the other. The analysis then examines the cost, which is rarely counted. The S-400 purchase bought strategic independence and produced expulsion from the F-35 programme, sanctions, a system that was never made operational and cannot legally be resold, and a decade of degraded air power. It closes by asking whether the position is now eroding.

Main Article:

A state that everyone can rely upon has allies. A state that nobody can rely upon has customers. The second position pays better and lasts less long, and the difference between the two is the whole of Turkish strategy.

Begin at the water, because everything else follows from it.

The Bosphorus is a channel roughly thirty kilometres long and at its narrowest under a kilometre wide, running through the middle of a city of sixteen million. Around 2.9 million barrels of oil pass along it each day, close to three percent of all seaborne crude [1]. Every warship that Russia wishes to move between its Black Sea fleet and the Mediterranean must pass through it, and through the Dardanelles beyond.

Since 1936, under the Montreux Convention, one government decides who may pass. Not NATO, not the United Nations, not a treaty body. Ankara.

When the war in Ukraine began, Turkiye invoked the convention and restricted the passage of warships, including barring Russian vessels based outside the Black Sea from transiting into it. The move was welcomed in Western capitals and calibrated carefully enough not to rupture relations with Moscow [2].

Now examine why that was possible, because it is the mechanism this entire analysis rests on.

A neutral gatekeeper can close a gate to everyone. A belligerent cannot. Had Turkiye been a party to the war, the convention would have permitted passage rules to be read entirely differently, and its authority over the straits would have become a matter of dispute rather than administration. The impartiality was not a moral posture. It was the operating requirement of the asset.

That is the shape of the whole position, and it repeats in every file.

Consider the ledger held by the Western alliance. Turkiye borders Syria, Iraq, Iran and the Black Sea, and is the geographic hinge of four theatres at once. It fields one of the largest armies in the alliance. It hosted the NATO summit of July 2026, at which the American president became the first to visit the country since 2015 [3]. Its drone industry has reshaped several wars. And it retains a working channel to Moscow that no other member has, which is precisely why it was able to broker grain shipments out of a blockaded sea.

Now consider the ledger held by Moscow. Russia supplies roughly forty to forty five percent of Turkish gas imports, in an economy that imports about seventy two percent of the energy it consumes [4][5]. TurkStream, opened in 2020, is now the last Russian gas route into Europe. The Akkuyu nuclear plant on the Mediterranean coast is a Rosatom project of around twenty billion dollars, four reactors, roughly a tenth of Turkish electricity, with reactor lifetimes and fuel supply chains measured in decades [5][6]. Turkiye did not join the Western sanctions regime. Its ports have handled Russian crude throughout, and this month a cargo of gasoline moved in the opposite direction, into a country that until recently exported five million tons of the stuff a year [7].

Set the two columns beside each other and the logic becomes visible.

The value of Turkiye to NATO is that it talks to Russia. The value of Turkiye to Russia is that it sits inside NATO. Neither of those assets can be consolidated into a firm alignment, because consolidating either one destroys the other. A Turkiye that broke with Moscow would be a normal member state with a good army and a difficult neighbourhood. A Turkiye that broke with the alliance would be a middle power with an energy dependency and no security guarantee.

Its bargaining position exists in the space between, and it exists only there.

This is usually written up as clever statecraft, and the admiration is understandable. But almost nobody counts the invoice, and the invoice is substantial.

In 2019 Turkiye took delivery of the Russian S-400 air defence system. The United States removed it from the F-35 programme, in which Ankara had been a manufacturing partner and had reportedly already paid around 1.4 billion dollars, and in December 2020 imposed sanctions on the Turkish defence procurement agency, making Turkiye the first member of the alliance ever penalised under that legislation [8][9].

Consider what was acquired for roughly two and a half billion dollars. A system that was never made operational and now sits in storage. A system that cannot be integrated into allied air defence networks. A system that cannot be sold, because the end user certificate forbids resale without Russian consent, and because the buyers approached have declined [10]. In exchange, an air force flying ageing aircraft, now falling back on around forty four Eurofighter Typhoons, twenty of them new from Britain at roughly 10.7 billion dollars, while the domestic fifth generation programme remains years from serial production [8][10].

Reporting suggests Ankara may now dismantle the system to unlock a return to the F-35. That reporting comes from specialist defence outlets rather than from either government and should be treated as unconfirmed [10].

What is confirmed is that the door remains shut. At the July summit the American president announced the sanctions would be lifted, saying he did not want to sanction friends [3][11]. But two separate statutes govern this, and removing the first does nothing to the second. The fighter transfer is barred until the Secretaries of State and Defense jointly certify to Congress that Turkiye no longer possesses the system. On 22 July the State Department informed Congress that those conditions had not been met [8][12].

So the position is not free. Ankara purchased the right to be unreliable, and it has been paying the instalments for seven years.

Which raises the question that any honest treatment has to confront. Is the position holding?

There is a serious case that it is not. Analysis published in June argued that the balance has been shifting westward, noting that Akkuyu has slipped repeatedly because suppliers fear sanctions exposure, that Turkiye is now working with the United States and South Korea on a second nuclear plant at Sinop which had been expected to go to Rosatom, and that the fall of the Syrian government in late 2024 stripped Moscow of the influence that had made Erdogan court Putin in the first place [13].

That case deserves weight. If Ankara no longer needs Russian acquiescence to run its Syria policy, one of the two pillars of the arrangement has weakened considerably.

The counter is that the entanglement is physical rather than diplomatic. Pipelines and reactors are not repositioned by a change in circumstances. A gas dependency of forty five percent and a nuclear plant with a hundred year design life are commitments that outlast the governments that made them, and they will constrain whatever Turkiye wishes to do for as long as they exist.

Both things are true, and the resolution is a matter of timescales rather than of who is right. The diplomatic room is widening. The physical dependency is not.

Here is the general principle, and it applies to any state considering this route.

Strategic ambiguity is not a permanent condition. It is a position that must be continuously purchased, because its value depends on both sides believing you might defect, and that belief has to be renewed by conduct that damages your standing with each of them in turn. Every renewal costs something real. The S-400 was one payment. The refusal to sanction was another. Each was rational in isolation and each narrowed the range of what could be bought afterwards.

The state that nobody can trust collects rent from everybody. It also has no recourse when the terms are changed, because the argument that a reliable ally can make has been deliberately surrendered.

Ankara has run this position with more skill than any comparable capital, and it has extracted a great deal from it. But the straits will still be there when the arrangement ends, and so will the pipelines, and so will the reactors on the Mediterranean coast.

One of those three can be closed at will. The other two cannot.

References:

1. Geopolitics analysis of Turkish energy infrastructure, on daily oil volumes transiting the Turkish Straits.
2. Small Wars and Insurgencies, peer reviewed analysis of Turkish strategic ambiguity in the Russia Ukraine war and the invocation of the Montreux Convention.
3. Al Monitor, report on the NATO summit in Ankara of July 2026 and the announcement on sanctions.
4. Small Wars and Insurgencies, on the share of Turkish gas imports supplied by Russia.
5. Geopolitical Monitor, analysis of the Akkuyu nuclear project and Turkish energy import dependence.
6. Liga, report citing Ukrainian energy ministry assessment of the Akkuyu project and long term Russian involvement.
7. S and P Global, report on the first identified seaborne gasoline cargo to Russia arriving from Turkiye.
8. Aerospace Global News, account of the removal of Turkiye from the F-35 programme and the sums involved.
9. Al Monitor, background on the imposition of sanctions on the Turkish defence procurement agency in December 2020.
10. Eurasian Times, report on the storage and resale restrictions applying to the Turkish S-400 system.
11. Defense News, report on the announcement regarding sanctions and a possible fighter sale.
12. JINSA, analysis of the two statutes governing a Turkish return to the F-35 programme.
13. Foreign Affairs, analysis of Turkish realignment and the weakening of Russian leverage after the change of government in Syria.