Testing times in Turco-American relations.

• Author: Raw, Laurence
• Position: 'US-Turkey Relations: A New Partnership,' 'Change and Adaptation in Turkish Foreign Policy' and 'The Adventures and Confessions of an American Drama Queen in Turkey'

US-Turkey Relations: A New Partnership

By Madeleine K. Albright, Stephen J. Hadley, Steven A. Cook

Washington DC: Council on Foreign Relations, 2012, 83 pages, ISBN 9780876095256.

Change and Adaptation in Turkish Foreign Policy

Edited by Bugra Kanat, Ahmet Selim Tekelioglu

Ankara: SETA, 2014, 216 pages, ISBN 9786054023325.

The Adventures and Confessions of an American

Drama Queen in Turkey

By Barbara A. Lawrence

Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2014, 442 pages, ISBN 9781491859674.

Turkey's relations with the United States have seldom been at such a low point. In late February 2014, 84 former lawmakers, ambassadors and national security advisers sent an open letter to Barack Obama in protest against what they saw as Recep Tayyip Erdogan's authoritarian policies that significantly compromised the rule of law. A month later, the American government distanced itself from Erdogan's repeated request to forcibly repatriate Islamic scholar Fetullah Gulen to Turkey. Such moves are symptomatic of a U.S. presidency that does not want to involve itself too much in Turkey's affairs and thereby fuel Erdogan's complaints that the West wants to harm him. In any case, criticism from Washington would have little effect on his policies.

This state of impasse seems a far cry from those heady days of 2012, when former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright co-produced a pamphlet outlining new initiatives for Turco-American relations. The authors believe that Turkey should be viewed "as a potential strategic partner with which it has a relationship comparable [...] to that of [...] its closest allies, such as Japan and South Korea." This relationship should be established on "equality and mutual trust; [and] close and intensive consultations to identify common goals" (p. 9). The authors argue that the United States should help Turkey accomplish the process of political and economic reform by helping them create a constitution that "will advance and deepen Turkish democracy," based on the idea of secular politics in a Muslim society (pp. 24-25). On the Kurdish issue, the authors recommend that "Washington should privately encourage Ankara to undertake economic, educational and cultural initiatives to ameliorate the situation of large numbers of Kurds," while pressurizing the PKK to abandon its armed struggle against Turkey (p. 29). In the economic sphere, the United States should promote "better economic futures" for both countries while facilitating "further liberalizing economic reform in Turkey that will spur next-generation economic growth" by creating "agreements to facilitate freer trade in services, strengthen investor protections, and/ or bolster competition" (pp. 31-32).

In the wake of the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt, Albright and her collaborators suggest that Turkey and the U.S. should work towards "a more democratic and prosperous Middle East," as "Arabs are genuinely interested in the political reforms Turkey took in the early 2000s and its recent economic development" (p. 42). Turkey could assume a leading role in the region by helping the various powers to forge a new status quo that would "recognize Israel, renounce violence, and uphold...