This article tries to shed light on the root causes of Turkey’s activism in the Middle East during the rule of the Justice and Development Party JDP . By focusing on Turkey’s relations with Syria, Iraq, Iran and Israel along with the US foreign policy towards the region, it argues that the transformation of the US Middle East policy is a very important factor that affected Turkey’s Middle East policy in the JDP era. Besides, it asserts that recent debates regarding “Turkey’s soft power” in the region remind of “Turkey as a model country” discourse since both of them conceives Turkey as a facilitator in the articulation of the Middle East to the global system