At least 36 people were killed and dozens wounded in a terror attack at Turkey’s largest airport, Istanbul Ataturk, according to Reuters. Two suspects reportedly blew themselves up outside a security checkpoint at the entry to the international terminal after police opened fire on them, said another Turkish official. Several have been wounded, according to Reuters. While no group has yet to claim responsibility, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has said that Daesh was likely behind the attack. The only other likely suspect would be the Kurdish militant group the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), designated a terror organization by NATO.

Regardless of which group ends up claiming responsibility, Daesh or the PKK, and without straying into victim-blaming against the people of Turkey, the attack is likely intimately tied to Erdogan’s policies in the region in general and in response to the Syrian civil war in particular, as described by Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, in commentary published on Monday regarding Turkey’s foreign policy, which is hopefully starting to finally take a more positive turn:

“Syria… is the failure within the failure of Ankara’s entire bid for leadership in the region… Where to begin? They believed they could convince Assad to reform early on in the crisis, they thought Ankara could coordinate and lead the Syrian opposition, they turned a blind eye to jihadis using Turkey to take part in the fight against Assad before actually coordinating with extremist groups, they were reluctant to allow members of the anti-Islamic State coalition to use Turkey’s airbases, they shot down a Russian bomber, and they failed to see how their unwillingness to join the fight against the self-declared Islamic State in order to snuff out Kurdish nationalism actually helped make Ankara’s Kurdish nightmares come true.”

“The Erdogan-Davutoglu team has created more foreign policy problems for Turkey than ever seen in the country’s modern memory… Davutoglu attempted to make Turkey a standalone Middle East power… Unfortunately, that policy has failed on virtually every front. Turkey’s ties with Egypt, Israel, Russia, and Syria all ruptured,” wrote Soner Cagaptay and James F. Jeffrey at the right-wing think tank the Washington Institute on Monday.

Following Turkey’s recent efforts to re-establish diplomatic ties with both Russia and Israel, Turkey has now indicated it wishes to begin mending fences with Egypt, according to statements made by Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim during a televised interview on Monday, Hurriyet reported. “Mr. President [Erdogan] has stated to the world since its beginning that this [Egypt’s post-2013 political order] is a coup and that we will never approve of this change in such a way. This is just one side of the matter. Let’s set this aside but on the other hand life goes on… Our ships sail to the Red Sea [through] the Suez Canal and from there they continue to [Saudi] Arabia, Jordan, Yemen and to the east of our Africa. Therefore we cannot cut loose our relations even if we wanted to,” the Turkish prime minister said.

What could have changed Erdogan’s calculations on Israel, Russia and now possibly Egypt? “The European Union’s disintegration has started,” Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Nurettin Canikli tweeted on Friday, Emre Peker at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) reported. Peker notes that with Brexit, Turkey has not only lost its “biggest champion,” in the EU, but the Leave campaign itself was built on anxieties over uncontrolled flows of migrants and xenophobia. Just last week, Erdogan threatened to hold his own referendum on acceding to a European Union that clearly doesn’t want him in the first place, likely over his frustrations that his policy to use the 2.7 mn Syrian refugees in Turkey as human bargaining chips to strong-arm his way into lifting visa restrictions on Turkish travel to the EU and eventual accession to the EU seems to have stalled. Erdogan also reportedly threatened to flood Europe with migrants if he did not receive more compensation to finance the presence of refugees in Turkey, Reuters reported last November, citing a Greek news site. EU officials would neither confirm nor deny that Erdogan had made the threats. Other factors weighing on the decision include diversifying sources of energy, as we noted in our past few issues regarding talks between Israel and Turkey on establishing a natural gas pipeline.