Winning Turkey: How America, Europe, and Turkey Can Revive a Fading Partnership
Review by Professor John Handley, Ed.D.
Philip H. Gordon and Omer Taspinar; afterword by Soli Ozel, Winning Turkey: How America, Europe, and Turkey can Revive a Fading Partnership, Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute, 2008, ISBN 978-0-8157-3215-0, pp. 115, $13.00. paperback
For those of us that assume the long-standing and generally positive relationship between Turkey and the US, as well as a similar relationship between Turkey and Europe, will continue into the foreseeable future, the authors provide compelling reasons to rethink this assessment. They are not saying that Turkey is lost to the West, but that Turkey has options, several options, which may be of great benefit to Turkish citizens while not benefiting the West at all. The authors give Turkey’s improving relations with Russia, Iran, and Syria as such examples; however, as the authors conclude in Chapter 1, all is not lost. Chapter 2 briefly describes Turkey’s political history since the end of World War One and explains the goals of secular Kemalism and the current struggle for the “hearts and minds” of the Turkish voting population by both Kemalists and Islamists. Chapter 3 discusses the US-Turkish schism over the US incursion into Iraq and Turkey’s eventual rejection of allowing US forces to cross into Iraq from Turkey. Chapter 4 details the widening problems between Turkey and Europe over eventual Turkish ascension into the EU, especially considering that Cyprus, a relatively recent addition to the EU, now holds veto power. Chapter 5 addresses Turkey’s Eurasian options, while the final chapter contains the authors’ five policy positions recommendations for the US and Europe to adopt in order to strengthen the US/Europe/Turkish alliance. These five recommendations include:
- Promote a “grand bargain” between Turkey and the Kurds
- Support liberalism and democracy in Turkey
- Renew the commitment by the EU for Turkish admittance
- Promote a historic compromise with Armenia
- Support a political settlement in Cyprus and greater
Western engagement with Turkish Cypriots
This last chapter expands at length on each of the recommended steps and concludes that if the US and Europe are willing to work with Turkey to accomplish these positions, Turkey will continue to see its greatest economic and political prosperity through continued and improved ties with the West. The afterword, by Soli Ozel, summarizes the points and arguments made by the authors while commenting on the difficulty of resolving two specific issues: the Kurdish problem and the Cypriot problem. Although hopeful, he does not appear convinced there is sufficient political will in the US, or in Europe, or even in the UN, to adequately resolve these two contentious areas of concern.
