Winning Turkey: How America, Europe, and Turkey Can Revive a Fading Partnership. BY PHILIP H. GORDON AND OMER TASPINAR. Brookings Institution Press, 2008, 125 pp. $18.95.
This little book opens imagining a U.S. presidential debate in the fall of 2012 addressing the question; "Who lost Turkey?" The authors, having thus diverted the attention of foreign policy analysts from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and that hearty perennial--Israel and the Arabs--move on to depict a Turkey cynical about its prospects for membership in the European Union, upset by U.S. actions in Iraq, and whiplashed by issues such as Armenia, Cyprus, and the Kurds, the last both at home and abroad. In Turkey itself, various die-hard secularists have already sought to oust the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) by dubious legal means, as well as by a foiled coup. Meanwhile, the AKP, with its Islamic roots, appears more concerned with furthering Turkey's ties with Europe than do those remnant Kemalist westernizers bent now on what one observer has labeled a "neo-Ottoman" orientation. The authors' five-point plan to keep the United States and Europe from "losing Turkey" boils down to "support[ing] liberalism and democracy in Turkey"; promoting a settlement with Armenia, Cyprus, and the Kurds; and renewing a commitment to Turkey's eventual membership in the EU.
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