Turkey between the United States and Russia: Surfing on the Edge.

• Author: Canalp, Feyza Nur

By Nur Cetinoglu Harunoglu, Aysegul Sever, and Emre Ersen

Lexington Books, 2021, 196 pages, $105, ISBN: 9781793629586

Recent geopolitical developments in Syria, the Mediterranean, the Caucasus, and the Black Sea have placed Turkiye in a position where it has to walk a tightrope between its Western allies and flourishing relations with Russia. While the emergence of strategic disagreements between Turkiye and the U.S. led to Turkiye's purchase of S-400 air defense systems from Russia, Turkiye and Russia cooperate in Syria, and recently their economic ties have improved significantly. However, Turkiye did shut down the Bosphorus to all warships curtailing Russian operations during the war against Ukraine, Turkish defense companies openly sell drones to Ukraine that are then used against the Russian army, and Turkiye also remains committed to Ukrainian territorial integrity. This curious situation rekindled a debate about Turkiye's motives and the dynamics of Turkiye's diplomatic acrobatics between Russia and the West. When exactly did Turkiye's foreign policy maneuvering between the U.S. and Russia begin to crystallize? How can the recent debates regarding the emergence of a new 'axis shift' in Turkish foreign policy be evaluated? Do balancing tactics offer clues? Are we witnessing a tactical move that Ankara has resorted to simply to remind the U.S. of its strategic importance? Or is this a structural, therefore more durable, change in Turkiye's foreign policy?

These are indeed some of the questions Cetinoglu Harunoglu, Sever, and Ersen address ably in their book Turkey between the United States and Russia: Surfing on the Edge. The book takes a striking detour of Turkiye's foreign policy maneuvers between the U.S. and Russia starting with the Cold War period. Inspired by Snyder's understanding of alliance politics during the Cold War, in which the fear of abandonment and the fear of entrapment are the two constituent elements of the 'security dilemma' that may emerge within an alliance relationship (p. 4), Cetinoglu Harunoglu, Sever, and Ersen depict Turkiye's foreign policy moves during the Cold War as shaped by Turkiye's simultaneous fear of abandonment and the fear of being trapped in its relations with the U.S.. The authors examine in three chapters the triangular relations between Turkiye, the U.S., and Russia across two time periods during and after the Cold War.

In the first part, the authors deal with Turkiye's relations between the...