No country would have freshened its American connection more. The second policy is classic liberal pressure. Home voting blocs, foreign friends, Turkish democrats' appeals and its own principles put the United States under a broad obligation to face up to Turkey's flaws. These include the distended political influence of the Turkish military, the army's human rights abuses, the country's rigid posture in occupied Cyprus and its handling of the terrorist separatist movement conducted by a minority of its Kurdish minority. In and after the Cold War, successive administrations have toyed mostly at the margins with the two outlooks.
American ambivalence fits Turkish facts.
He rebuffed one line of my questioning, saying that Turks have a National Security Council, just as Americans do. But the American NSC is a creature of law that keeps the military under civilian control. The Turkish NSC expresses the immense military privilege written into the constitution. Furthermore, polls show high popular support for an army that regularly flaunts its muscle inside and outside the borders. Neighbors such as Russia, Iran, Iraq and Syria, and the terrorism, make at least plausible Ecevit's insistence that Turkey is surrounded by threat.