The four states, in turn, perceived this as an act of hostility by Turkey. Turkey openly breached the blockade from almost the very moment of its inception, sending troops to Qatar to deter the blockading Quartet from a likely invasion. Though the Arab Spring issue did provoke a break between Riyadh and Ankara, Turkish-Saudi relations did not grow truly hostile until Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt blockaded Qatar in June 2017. For its part, the Erdogan government remained undecided at the beginning but then began to support the demonstrations filling the streets of Arab capitals, as they mirrored Turkish conservatives’ own struggle against authoritarianism.
The Arab Spring revolutions made Saudi leaders, like other Middle Eastern authoritarian governments, nervous about the stability of their rule. However, following the 2011 Arab Spring, Turkey and Saudi Arabia went in different directions due to their ideological differences over the wave of protests that rocked the Arab World. Ties with Saudi Arabia, the region’s largest player, especially grew to an unprecedented level. As a result, bilateral relations with all regional countries improved in Erdogan’s early years. The Erdogan government took early initiatives to improve relations with the region.
Previous secular and western-oriented Turkish governments had largely ignored the Middle East until then. Turkey and Saudi Arabia had largely inactive relations before Recep Tayyip Erdogan came to power in Ankara in 2002.
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