ABSTRACT
Turkish-American relations have changed in essential ways during the past half-century. They started with what can only be characterized as honeymoon fervour in the aftermath of World War II. When the US battleship Missouri steamed into the port of istanbul in 1946, both parties focused on overarching security concerns and ignored all issues that could divide them. That phase of imagined complete harmony had ended in discord over Cyprus by the middle of the 1960s, when the external threat appeared significantly attenuated. Turkey then sought to find alternatives - or at least counterweights - to its previous great reliance on the US. Slowly, the two countries became reconciled to a less cooperative alliance. Yet it still remained one of impressive intimacy, even if punctuated by friction over subsidiary issues and characterized by a streak of simmering public mistrust sublimated in deference to common defence considerations in the Cold War framework. The disappearance of the Soviet Union changed the geostrategic base of the alliance. Accordingly, Turkey's relationship with the US entered a period of major transition, as Ankara sought to find new shared interests that would dramatize Turkey's continuing value to its Western alliance. Advertising itself as a bridge to Central Asia did not prove effective. But the Gulf War offered an opportunity to demonstrate that Turkey still remained important in global strategic terms.
