The Country Caught Between Two Worlds: Turkey's Relationships, Mapped
2026-09-03 · by Jordi Fuster
Few countries on WorldRelat make a stranger first impression than Turkey: 7th in our global influence ranking, ahead of countries like France and Germany — and yet its relationship scores with its own immediate neighborhood swing more wildly than almost any other country's on the site. That contrast is really the whole story of Turkish foreign policy in miniature.
A NATO member that isn't in the EU — and isn't really trying to be anymore
Turkey has been a NATO member since 1952, one of the alliance's longest-standing, and currently plays what the EU's own foreign policy chief has called a significant role protecting NATO's eastern flank. Its EU accession process, by contrast, has been formally open since 2005 and has been effectively stalled for most of the two decades since. As of mid-2026, that hasn't changed in substance, but the framing has: rather than continuing to negotiate toward membership, Brussels and Ankara have shifted to deepening practical cooperation instead — Ukraine-related security coordination, Black Sea maritime initiatives, a Trans-Caspian transport corridor meant to connect Europe to Central Asia without routing through Russia, and modernizing the customs-union arrangement the two sides have had since 1995. Turkey's own government has recently signaled that EU membership itself is no longer the priority it once was, formalizing what had already become the practical reality: a close working relationship built around shared interests, not accession.
What that split looks like in the relationship data
WorldRelat's own numbers track this split closely. Turkey's relationship with the United States sits at a middling 4.68, and with Germany at 3.96 — reasonably functional NATO-and-trade-partner territory, not glowing. Its relationship with immediate neighbors is where things get genuinely rough: Russia scores just 0.14, Syria the same, Greece sits at 2.17, and Cyprus — the site of an unresolved territorial dispute stretching back to 1974 — at 1.4. Armenia, with which Turkey has no formal diplomatic relations at all, scores 1.75.
Then there's the other end of the scale entirely: Turkey and Azerbaijan score 9.79, about as high as this site's method produces for any pair. The two countries are frequently described, including by their own leaders, as "one nation, two states" — shared language, deep cultural ties, and close military and economic cooperation that shows up unmistakably in how the relationship gets written about.
A regional power without a settled regional bloc
Put together, Turkey's data reads less like a country with one clear alignment and more like a country genuinely positioned between several — NATO membership without EU membership, close alliance with one neighbor and near-zero relations with several others, and a growing, semi-independent role brokering and mediating in conflicts (Syria, the Caucasus, and — through Pakistan's parallel mediation — even a channel of relevance to the Israel-Iran talks covered elsewhere on this blog) that a country fully embedded in a single bloc would have less room to play. It's a useful example of something that's easy to miss when a site like this one shows a single influence rank per country: a high overall score can sit on top of a genuinely fractured set of individual relationships, not a uniformly strong one.
Sources: Euronews on EU-Turkey cooperation; EU Today on Turkey's shifting EU priorities.