The Turkish-American Alliance: Opportunities and Challenges

A Conversation with Soner Cagaptay, Doug Feith, and Jonathan Schanzer

How does Turkey’s Syria policy help the United States? How do Turkey’s financial ties to Iran and Hamas complicate the Turkish-American relationship? How seriously does Turkey take its counter-terror finance responsibilities? What does the recent rapprochement between Ankara and Jerusalem mean for future ties between these two US allies?

Soner Cagaptay is a senior fellow and director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He has written extensively on U.S.-Turkish relations, Turkish domestic politics, and Turkish nationalism, publishing in scholarly journals and major international print media, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, Los Angeles Times, International Herald Tribune, Jane’s Defense Weekly, Newsweek Türkiye, and Habertürk. He is a regular columnist for Hürriyet Daily News, Turkey’s oldest and most influential English-language paper, and a contributor to CNN’s Global Public Square blog. He appears regularly on Fox News, CNN, NPR, Voice of America, al-Jazeera, BBC, CNN-Turk, and al-Hurra.

Douglas J. Feith served as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from July 2001 until August 2005. His official responsibilities included the formulation of defense planning guidance and forces policy, United States Department of Defense (DoD) relations with foreign countries, and DoD’s role in U.S. Government interagency policymaking. Prior to this position, he worked at the White House as a Middle East specialist for the National Security Council and he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Negotiations Policy under President Reagan. Upon his resignation from the Bush administration, he joined the faculty of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University as a Professor and Distinguished Practitioner in National Security Policy. He is a Belfer Center Visiting Scholar at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He is also the Director of the Center for National Security Strategies and a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute.

Jonathan Schanzer is the Vice President for Research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He previously worked as a terrorism finance analyst at the U.S. Department of the Treasury and for several other U.S.-based think tanks. He has co-authored two studies on social media in the Arab world: Palestinian Pulse: What Policy Makers Can Learn from Palestinian Social Media and Facebook Fatwa: Saudi Clerics, Wahhabi Islam and Social Media. His book Hamas vs. Fatah: The Struggle for Palestine is still the only book on the market that analyzes the internecine conflict between the two most powerful Palestinian factions. He publishes in Foreign Policy, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, CNN Global Public Square and other outlets.   He makes regular appearances on Fox News and CNN.