Turkey Archive

Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing series about the production and trade of arms around the world. Earlier this month, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed that his country would no longer buy defense systems, software or products from other countries, except in cases of emergency, in the interest of building up Turkey’s own defense industry. A NATO member, Turkey has bought arms from allies like the United States for years. In an email interview, Iyad Dakka, a fellow with the Centre for Modern Turkish Studies at Carleton University’s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs in Canada, […]

The contentious relationship between Turkey and the West hit a little-noticed but significant milestone this week, when the Dutch government announced it was formally downgrading diplomatic ties and officially withdrawing its ambassador from Ankara. Turkey and the Netherlands remain NATO allies, and diplomatic relations continue at the level of charges d’affaires. While not garnering the attention of the escalating confrontation between Turkey and NATO in Syria, the Dutch move is an important marker of Turkey’s continuing drift away from the West under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The decision was also unexpected because Turkey and the Netherlands had been in talks […]

In the end, the result was little surprise. On Feb. 4, Nicos Anastasiades won a second term as president of the Republic of Cyprus. Although the margin of victory was perhaps a bit closer than many predicted—he won by 56 percent in a runoff against Stavros Malas, an independent backed by the Greek Cypriot communist party, known as AKEL—polls had shown Anastasiades with a comfortable lead for many months. Now that the elections are over, attention inevitably turns to the long-running efforts to reunify the ethnically split Mediterranean island. Since violence first flared up between Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities […]