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American Perspectives on Turkey: An Evaluation of the Declassified U.S. Documents between 1947 and 1960

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2015

Hakan Yılmaz
Hakan Yılmaz*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science and International Relations, Boğaziçi University
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Extract

During the interwar years, U.S.-Turkish relations had been confined within the boundaries of conventional diplomacy. By the end of World War II, the Truman Doctrine of 1947 and the military assistance agreement that drew on it marked the beginning of a series of bilateral and multilateral agreements that bound the two nations together in the military as well as political, economic, and cultural fields. However, relations between the two states did not always proceed on a smooth path. Hence, the relatively optimistic, formative years of 1947-1960 were followed by the troublesome decades of the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s, mutual relations settled back on an upward track, reaching a peak during the Gulf War of 1990-91. With the demise of the Soviet system, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and the end of the Cold War, some commentators expected the eventual dismantling of NATO and with it the waning of the American connections with Turkey. Turkey's “strategic value” in the eyes of the Americans, it was being argued, would necessarily diminish as the Soviet threat-the main component of this “value”-was disappearing. Developments throughout the 1990s, however, did not fully justify those pessimistic scenarios. In fact, by the mid-1990s, Turkey and the United States, with the occasional participation of other states such as Israel, began to build a so-called strategic partnership to contain regional and local threats (arising in the areas surrounding Turkey and ranging from the Balkans to the Middle East and the Caucasus) that had been unleashed by the destabilizing forces of the post-Cold War period. It should be noted that, during about the same period, U.S.-Turkish relations gained unprecedented new dimensions, economic and cultural, complementing and sometimes overshadowing the military one.

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Articles
Information
New Perspectives on Turkey , Volume 25 , fall 2001 , pp. 77 - 101
Copyright
Copyright © New Perspectives on Turkey 2001

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