Turkey’s president says he would consider raising his country’s status in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Eurasian security bloc built as a counterweight to the West, while insisting it would mean no break with NATO or the Western world. It is the latest expression of a foreign policy that refuses to choose.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan has spent two decades perfecting the art of belonging to everything at once, and this week he offered another demonstration of it. Speaking to journalists on his return flight from Kyrgyzstan, the Turkish president said his country, a member of NATO, would consider elevating its relationship with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the security bloc led by China and Russia, to a higher level. He was careful to frame it as an addition rather than a defection. “Turkey’s prospect of becoming a full member of the organization does not imply a break from any other bloc or from the West,” Erdogan said, according to a transcript of his remarks.

The comment came directly on the heels of the SCO summit in Bishkek, where Turkey participates as a “dialogue partner,” the outer tier of association with the bloc. Erdogan attended the gathering on Tuesday, held bilateral talks with Vladimir Putin on the sidelines, and then, airborne and homeward bound, floated the idea of drawing closer to an organization whose leading members define themselves in significant part by their opposition to American primacy. That sequence, a NATO head of state moving from a summit of the West’s principal rivals to musing aloud about deeper membership in their club, captures the peculiar position Turkey has carved out for itself in the international system.

It is essential to understand what Erdogan is and is not proposing, because the distinction is the entire point. Turkey is not contemplating leaving NATO, and full SCO membership would not, in any formal sense, be incompatible with its Atlantic alliance obligations, since the SCO is not a mutual-defense pact of NATO’s kind. What Erdogan is proposing is a further step in a long-running strategy of strategic hedging: keeping one foot planted firmly in the Western alliance while extending the other ever deeper into the Eurasian order that Beijing and Moscow are constructing. Ankara has pursued this balance for years, buying Russian air-defense systems while hosting NATO installations, mediating between Russia and Ukraine while selling drones to Kyiv, courting Gulf capital while deepening trade with China. The SCO overture is the newest expression of a settled worldview, not a sudden turn.

The strategy is not without cost or contradiction, and Erdogan’s Western partners have long found it exasperating. A NATO member flirting with the security architecture of NATO’s chief adversaries sends a signal that ripples through the alliance at a moment when it is trying to project unity against Russia. Yet Erdogan calculates, with considerable evidence on his side, that Turkey’s geography and military weight make it too important for the West to discipline, and too valuable for the East to ignore. He extracts leverage from both directions precisely by refusing to commit fully to either. The SCO remark is a reminder to Washington and Brussels that Ankara has other options, delivered at no real cost to himself.

Tellingly, Erdogan paired his SCO musings with a concrete and constructive proposal on an issue where Turkey’s between-worlds position makes it genuinely indispensable: the security of the Black Sea. He warned that a grain crisis has re-emerged, particularly in Africa, and that action is needed before the problem escalates further. “The safety of all civilian maritime transport in the Black Sea is important to us,” he said. “The fighting between the parties should not escalate to the point of undermining the safety of civilians and commercial life. We must solve this problem.” Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, had said earlier in the week that Ankara has prepared a plan for the safe passage of grain through the Black Sea and is in contact with both Russia and Ukraine, and Putin himself discussed the Black Sea situation with Erdogan in Bishkek.

Here Turkey’s positioning becomes an asset rather than a provocation. Ankara helped broker the original Black Sea Grain Initiative alongside the United Nations in July 2022, an agreement that allowed the safe export of nearly 33 million metric tonnes of Ukrainian grain despite the war, before Russia withdrew from it in 2023, complaining that its own food and fertilizer exports faced serious obstacles. Because Turkey talks to both Moscow and Kyiv, controls the straits through which Black Sea shipping must pass, and is trusted, or at least tolerated, by both sides, it is one of the very few actors capable of reviving such an arrangement. Erdogan’s willingness to raise it is a concrete illustration of the value his non-alignment can generate.

The obstacles, however, remain formidable, and Erdogan’s diplomacy cannot conjure agreement where the belligerents see none. Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Alexander Grushko, said on Wednesday that Moscow sees no reason to revive the Black Sea grain deal, a flat rejection that underscores how far apart the parties remain even as Turkey positions itself to mediate. A plan for safe passage requires the consent of the side doing much of the disrupting, and for now that consent is absent.

Taken together, Erdogan’s remarks on the flight home form a coherent portrait of Turkish foreign policy in 2026: one foot in NATO, one edging toward the SCO, a hand extended to Moscow and Kyiv alike, and a president who treats every bloc as a marketplace of leverage rather than a demand for loyalty. Whether Turkey ever formally upgrades its SCO status may matter less than the message the possibility sends. Erdogan is telling all his partners, Western and Eastern, that Turkey belongs to no one, and that this is precisely the source of its usefulness and its power. In a world dividing into competing camps, Ankara’s wager is that the greatest advantage lies in belonging, at least partly, to both.

By I. Constantin