Operating Without Certainty: Türkiye’s Middle-Power Test

The Top Risks 2026 report by the Eurasia Group does not describe a world tilting toward a single, dominant confrontation. Instead, it outlines a system losing its anchors. The central risk is not China’s rise or Russia’s war in Ukraine, but the internal political transformation of the United States and the uncertainty it injects into the global order.

For Türkiye, this diagnosis carries immediate consequences. It reshapes alliance expectations, weakens institutional guardrails, and clarifies a reality Ankara has been navigating for some time: in an increasingly fragmented system, middle powers do not gain freedom of action. They inherit exposure.

A System Without a Reliable Anchor

The report’s most consequential claim is that the United States has shifted from being a stabilising force to a primary source of unpredictability. Policy is described as increasingly personalised, transactional, and driven by domestic political imperatives rather than institutional continuity.

For Türkiye, this alters the character of the bilateral relationship. The familiar pattern of difficult but structured engagement gives way to conditional interaction, where leverage matters more than precedent and timing matters more than alignment. Disagreements no longer unfold within a shared framework. They surface in an environment where rules are thinner and reactions faster.

This is not a temporary adjustment. It is a structural change that constrains how far Ankara can rely on predictability in its most important alliance relationship.

NATO and the Limits of Collective Assurance

That uncertainty extends into NATO. The report anticipates an alliance increasingly focused on hybrid threats and short-term crisis management, even as American commitment to European security becomes more selective.

For Türkiye, this creates an uneven equation. Responsibilities on NATO’s southern flank expand as assurances become less explicit. Ankara is expected to manage security spillovers in the Black Sea, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Middle East, while the political cohesion that once underpinned collective defence weakens.

In this context, strategic autonomy is not an ambition. It is a defensive adaptation. NATO remains indispensable for Türkiye, but no longer sufficient on its own.

China Without Binary Choices

The report rejects the idea that the defining risk of 2026 is a direct US–China rupture. Instead, it highlights China’s growing advantage in infrastructure, energy systems, and industrial capacity, particularly for emerging and middle-income economies.

For Türkiye, this framing reduces pressure for binary alignment but raises the cost of miscalculation. Ankara is not choosing between Washington and Beijing. It is managing exposure to secondary effects, including trade coercion, regulatory pressure, and geopolitical spillovers generated by great-power competition elsewhere.

The challenge is not alignment, but entanglement. Middle powers absorb shocks even when they did not create them.

Europe’s Weak Center and Türkiye’s Awkward Centrality

Europe’s political center emerges from the report severely weakened. France, Germany, and the United Kingdom are portrayed as inward-looking and constrained by fragile governments, with limited capacity for strategic leadership.

This has direct implications for Türkiye. European dependence on Ankara grows across security, migration management, and energy transit, even as Europe’s ability to translate that dependence into stable policy declines. The relationship becomes functional but brittle, shaped more by necessity than by strategy.

Türkiye is increasingly central to European stability, but rarely positioned comfortably within Europe’s political imagination.

The Discipline of Middle-Power Politics

Taken together, the report describes a system that rewards neither ambition nor passivity. For middle powers, uncertainty is not an opportunity to expand influence. It is a condition to be managed.

Türkiye’s position reflects this reality. It is neither a system-shaping power nor a peripheral actor. Its geography, alliances, and economic ties place it at the intersection of multiple fault lines. That exposure creates leverage only if handled with restraint. Overreach carries immediate costs; missequencing decisions compounds pressure across theatres.

In such an environment, consistency matters more than vision. The central task is not to redefine Türkiye’s role, but to preserve room for adjustment without turning volatility into doctrine.

The Top Risks 2026 report makes one point unmistakably clear. The international system is not moving toward a new equilibrium. For Türkiye, the question is not how to restore certainty, but how to operate without it.