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 (EPILOGUE (excerpt) 

‘There’s no such thing as gratitude in politics.’[1] On 1^st May 2003 during the run up to the invasion of Iraq after months of intensive negotiations between Washington and Ankara and despite strong US pressure, the Turkish Parliament in a close vote refused to allow the U.S. Fourth Infantry Division to deploy in Turkey in order to open a second front there against Saddam Hussein. Soon it became clear that the parliament’s decision was not an isolated act but was supported by the majority of Turkish foreign policy-makers,  including the military. The refusal stunned Washington. No-one in the US capital expected the Turks to decline to support the US as for nearly a decade the Americans had backed Ankara concerning a number of issues that greatly mattered to Turkish leaders. In fact, it was only a couple of years earlier that the George W. Bush administration had propped up Turkey’s economy through a gigantic IMF rescue package. And yet, if there is something to ponder in this story it is not the Turks’ refusal but Washington’s surprise.
   In the latter part of the 1990s the new kind of ‘mutual understanding’ that emerged between the Americans and the Turks[2] fuelled US officials' with optimistic expectations concerning the future of the relationship, but undoubtedly there were also serious challenges ahead, as many observers noted at the time. The Turks needed US diplomatic, political and military support, but they also wished to preserve as much freedom of action as possible. In addition, they continued to distrust the US and doubt its reliability. While they saw benefits in supporting certain US strategic objectives in the Middle East, they refused to discuss further regional coordination of action. At the end of the day there were a cinsiderable number of differences between the two countries concerning important issues and Iraq was number one.
  Grossman and a number of other US officials believed that the Turks would be more prepared to co-operate with the Americans if the US gave more attention to Turkey and backed its major goals. The early results were promising. In the second half of the 1990s the Turks were driven closer to the US under the influence of a complex set of parameters, some of which this book has sought to illustrate. However, sustaining the policy that Grossman and Holbrooke advocated, leaving all else aside, demanded a focused effort on the part of the bureaucracy that would be difficult to maintain even in the best of circumstances for a country which in the final analysis did not occupy a central place within the context of US foreign policy. By the end of the decade a new partnership designed for the post-Cold War era was still far from having taken place. The framework of US-Turkey strategic co-operation for ‘the twenty-first century’ and its main objectives were not properly discussed and agreed upon. Actually both sides found it hard to bring into the relationship a new purpose and enthusiasm and even more difficult to maintain it in spite of some effort. To a large extent the relationship continued to be coloured by historical experience while, however, US security assistance to Turkey was coming to an end. This state of affairs both reflected and strengthened the Turks’ ambivalence towards the US. Also Turkey was changing. A new powerful political force in the form of the pro-Islamist Justice and Development party was re-shaping the domestic political dynamics and affected foreign policy behaviour. In parallel, as the relationship shifted from an exclusive military-to-military track to a State Department-to-civilian government track Washington's channels of communication with Ankara could no longer be what they used to be, although the US still had strong bridges in the country. Much more importantly, Turkey was becoming stronger, and as Turkey’s confidence was advancing it was inevitable that the balance of the relationship was going to change. Turkey’s moving closer to the US during the 1980s and to the US and Israel in the 1990s essentially reflected its relative weakness. This thesis has been presented in different ways throughout the book. But at the dawn of the new century its internal stability had increased. Its potential to become a regional actor in the Middle East was better perceived in the region while the Turks could see that the influence of the US in the Middle East had fallen from the high point it occupied in the early part of the 1990s. In these circumstances, and as US security assistance to Turkey had come to an end while a new broader relationship was too slow to develop, the Turks' tendency not to allow their interests in the Middle East to be dictated by the wishes of the US was bound again to strengthen.