Where is the Anchor? Explaining the Endurance of the American-Turkish Partnership, 1927-2024

Year 2025, Volume: 14 Issue: 1, 121 - 147, 28.01.2025

Onur Erpul , Kemal Kirişci

https://doi.org/10.20991/allazimuth.1621469

Abstract

Once considered a model partnership, the American-Turkish relationship now
elicits ambivalence among scholars and policymakers, calling into question the
fundamental interests and assumptions that once undergirded the relationship.
Critics attribute the negative trends in the relationship to geostrategic and
value-based incompatibilities, but relatively few have examined both factors
longitudinally across the entire relationship. This paper does not aim to
provide a grand theory of American-Turkish relations. Instead, its goal is to
develop a framework illustrating the vital role that strategic, ideational, and
domestic political factors have played in shaping macro-level outcomes in the
partnership’s cohesion at various junctures. Overall, our paper identifies the
positive role of foreign policy bureaucratic elites on both sides acting as an
“invisible hand” providing an anchor for the relationship even in the absence of
other commonalities. Yet, we also observe the weakening of this hand in recent
times as both countries become domestically transformed.

Keywords

Turkish-US Relations, Foreign Policy, Alliance Politics, Elites

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