The resilience of the US–Turkey alliance: divergent threat perceptions and worldviews

Abstract

Focusing on Turkey’s 68-year-old formal alliance with the US, this study asks why the alliance persists in spite of diverging perceptions of threat and worldviews. The first section of the article explains that the alliance has been transformed into a more than a threat-centric and transactional partnership over time. The second section focuses on the key issues of the US–Turkey alliance management between January 2009 and 2020 and points to a significant increase in the alliance security dilemma. The third section explores the AKP leadership’s divergent worldviews and rising contestations against the US. Overall, the study argues that both transactional and ‘order-centric’ arguments can be useful to explain the resilience of the US–Turkey alliance in the post-Cold War era.