Valdai Club

Turkey was invited to the latest BRICS Summit held in Johannesburg under the framework of "BRICS +" initiative as Chair of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), not as a separate country. It would not be very supportive to make predictions that there will be closer cooperation between Turkey and BRICS from now on. Actually, in order to make realistic evaluation of Turkey’s possibility to join BRICS, it is useful to analyze objectively the positive and negative aspects of this assumption in terms of both parts.

Despite Turkey’s military and political achievements in the Astana process in cooperation with Russia and Iran, Ankara’s stance on the recent Western military operation against Damascus was highly unfortunate. It is worth taking a closer look at the reasons behind Turkey’s inconsistent Syria policy. In order to do that, we need to focus on three factors.