The Rise of Turkish Gaullism: Getting Turkish-American Relations Right (Commentaries) (Viewpoint Essay‪)‬

2010 proved to be a difficult year in Turkish-American relations. The Gaza flotilla incident and Turkey's "no" vote to a new round of sanctions against Iran at the United Nations Security Council, once again, triggered a heated debate about the "Islamization" of Ankara's Middle East policy. The cliche question of "who lost Turkey?" maintained its relevance for most of the year. In the meantime, the looming threat of an Armenian genocide resolution continued to sporadically dominate the bilateral agenda. Overall, American official circles that follow Turkey closely tend to display a sense of doom and gloom. The perception of an Islamist "axis shift" is real. Popular columnists, such as Tom Friedman from the New York Times, have now joined the cohort of those who share such pessimism. Yet, interestingly such pessimism tends to dissipate in the higher echelons of American foreign policy. There seems to be a less alarmist approach to Turkey at the level of the National Security Advisor, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and certainly the President of the United States. Part of this interesting phenomenon is related to the simple fact that everything is relative. American officials who focus on Turkey are often experts on Western Europe, NATO, Russia, the EU, and the Mediterranean. With high expectations and habits established during the Cold War, they tend to look at Turkey exclusively as a member of the transatlantic alliance and a Western state. Their level of disappointment is, therefore, much stronger when Turkey acts in defiance of transatlantic and western norms. Similarly, there is a tendency to see any deviation from transatlantic norms as Islamization.