Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of the book. The book explores broad trends as well as offers an alternative reading of a number of developments within the context of the relationship. It largely focuses on a number of parameters which significantly affected that is the United States, US-Turkey relationship but have not received enough attention in the mainstream scholarly literature. It illustrates that the renewal of US interest in Turkey in second half of the 1990s was not an automatic response to new post-Cold War realities in the international environment. The book offers for the first time a comprehensive account of the role Mark Grossman, the US ambassador to Turkey, played in the renewal of the US interest in Turkey in the latter part of the 1990s. More specifically, studies of US-Turkey strategic co-operation explain its evolution in the decades during Cold War by focusing heavily on developments in the international environment.