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U.S.-Turkish Ties: Turkey at the Turning Point
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18414 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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9 / 1990 |
2,794 Words |
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William Lewis
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The crisis of peace has struck Turkey. The passing of the Cold War after more than 40 years of confrontation and competition between East and West signals a triumph for the Atlantic alliance. For government leaders in Ankara, however, the period immediately ahead is likely to be a time of testing during which old doctrines and policy guidelines are reexamined. Some observers have characterized this process as the entry point for an identity crisis.
The cause for concern has been a succession of events since mid-1989 that have startled Western military strategists and policy planners, including:
· the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe;
· the demise of the Soviet-organized Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO) as a military alliance system; and
· the failure of the Marxist system in the Soviet Union, where President Mikhail Gorbachev is grappling with an economy in chaos and a political system that is both faction-ridden and in turmoil.
Accompanying the collapse of the communist empire have been efforts to alter the terms of East-West competition, including a U.S.-USSR agreement to withdraw and destroy their arsenals of intermediate-range nuclear weapons, the unilateral draw-down of Soviet forces in Eastern Europe, and significant progress in NATO-WTO negotiations to reduce conventional forces from the Atlantic to the Urals. Perhaps most portentous of all has been destruction of the obscene Berlin Wall and the ineluctable progress that the two Germanys are making toward unification.
IMPLICATIONS FOR TURKEY
These events are freighted with significance for Turkey, which since 1952 has anchored its hopes and expectations on membership in NATO. Long regarded as the southeastern linchpin guarding access to the Mediterranean Sea by the Soviet Black Sea fleet and military forces from the Southwest Military Region, Ankara now finds that its saliency has diminished with the reduced Soviet and Warsaw Pact menace. Notions of alliance formation, containment, and forward defense are undergoing reconsideration in Western capitals. Gorbachev has even been invited to address NATO and he and Eastern European confreres have been offered the opportunity to assign diplomatic representatives to NATO.
Turkey's pivotal position as the western anchor of the once-vaunted Baghdad Pact-cum-Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), which was organized to frustrate Soviet ambitions in the Persian Gulf, is no longer a strategic factor. CENTO collapsed with the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979, the growing enmity between Washington and Tehran, and the Iran-Iraq War. If anything, the Soviet menace to the region has been supplanted by dissidence in the Muslim republics of the Soviet Union - inhabited by more than 50 million people of Turkish origin. As a result, the southern reaches of the Soviet Union, stretching from the Transcaucasus to Central Asia, have become a zone of instability constituting more of a threat to the cohesion of the Soviet Union than to the territorial integrity of Turkey.
We are witnessing a time of transition for Europe and Turkey.
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