ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Turkey's relations with East Asia in the twenty-first century. The burgeoning of Turkey's relations with East Asia today is a result of the paradigm shift in Turkish foreign policy in the post–Cold War era driven by a neoliberal economic agenda, domestically and the tectonic geo-economic transition internationally. Consequently, Turkey's commercial relations with the four East Asian countries, namely China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, witnessed exponential growth. The relations follow a bilateral engagement model, and although Ankara engages with each of the regional countries at multilateral and minilateral levels as well, the relations are driven through a bilateral agenda. In the process, Turkey has kept away from the turbulent geopolitics both within the East Asia region as well as globally emanating from the tensions between the United States and China allowing it to focus on the economic agenda.
