How do middle powers act? Turkey’s foreign policy and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

How do middle powers respond to complex international challenges while balancing external commitments and domestic interests? This article uses Turkey, specifically it policy towards the invasion of Ukraine, as a case study to explore this question, focusing on two key axes: 1) alliance cohesion, which refers to the degree of unity and commitment among alliance members in responding to shared external threats and 2) domestic interest, which refer to the way domestic actors assess and prioritize risks to national security and regime stability. The analysis shows that these two factors give rise to four distinct patterns of middle power behavior—alignment, autonomy, opportunism, and dissonance. Rather than supporting analyses that claim middle powers consistently behave in a single, fixed manner, we argue that middle powers adopt their behavior based on the specific context, offering a more nuanced understanding of their foreign policy actions.