ABSTRACT
The difficulty of thinking about the future is indicated by going back to the Treaty of Lausanne, which gave Turkey international legitimacy, and thinking through how likely it would be in 1923 that one could have imagined the world 25 years later, in 1948. While one might have been able to speculate, in 1923, on subsequent hostility between the Soviet Union and Turkey, the rise and fall of Nazi Germany would have been impossible to predict. The destruction and consequences of World War II, likewise, would have been impossible to predict, while the collapse of the British Empire and its replacement by the US in a new version of the 'Great Game' with Russia would have been seen by psychiatrists - in the US, at least, and in view of US isolationism in the interwar years - as certifiably insane. The fact that the US, unilaterally, would make a commitment in 1946 to the defence of Turkey against the Soviet Union in an area that was previously totally outside US cogni zance - a commitment that was formalized by the Truman Doctrine in 1947 and shortly after by a mutual commitment by Turkey and the US in the NATO alliance - would have been beyond the imagination even of the psychiatrists making such judgements.
