Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
At the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, Turkish geography
mirrored Turkish politics. Bordering Greece in the west and Iran in the east, Bulgaria in
the northwest and Iraq in the southeast, Azerbaijan in the northeast and Syria in the south,
even as more than half of Anatolia is Black Sea or Mediterranean coastline, Turkey is truly
equidistant between Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. The same with its foreign and
national security policy. Turkey was still a member of NATO, cooperated with U.S. intel-
ligence services, maintained an embassy in Israel, and had facilitated indirect peace talks
between Israel and Syria. But it was conducting military incursions against the Kurds in
northern Iraq, was helping Iran avoid sanctions for developing a nuclear weapon, and was
politically and emotionally behind the most radical Palestinian groups.
The Israeli commando raid in May 2010 against a flotilla of six ships bringing humanit-
arian supplies from Turkey to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, and the ferocious Turkish
reaction to that, was the catalyst for announcing to the world Turkey's historic pivot from
West to East. Turks saw the struggle for Palestine not as an Arab-Israeli fight, in which
as Turks they could play no part, but as a conflict pitting Muslims against Jews, in which
Turks could champion the Muslim cause. Among the key insights that often get overlooked
in the late Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington's
The Clash of Civilizations and the
Remaking of World Order
, of which Turkey represents a prime illustration, is that global-
