Turkey at 100: Between Constancy and Change

Abstract

One hundred years after its establishment, the Turkish Republic remains an international actor of considerable geopolitical and also analytical consequence. As with all such actors, the exercise of its growing power is shaped by tension between rest and motion, structural parameters and human agency, and domestic and interstate dynamics. Utilizing some key insights of Thucydides and Ibn Khaldun, this essay will consider the interplay of these factors through a case study of the AK Party’s foreign policy. Special attention will be devoted to the increasingly fraught relationship with the United States, a dynamic illuminated, it is suggested, by considering the evolution of American attitudes toward Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s.