A Torn country’s Western alignment draws condemnation from both nonaligned and religious peers

Evidence

Turkey remained neutral during the West’s civil war between 1939 and 1945. Following that war, however, it quickly moved to identify itself still further with the West. Explicitly following Western models, it shifted from one-party rule to a competitive party system. It lobbied for and eventually achieved NATO membership in 1952, thus confirming itself as a member of the Free World. It became the recipient of billions of dollars of Western economic and security assistance; its military forces were trained and equipped by the West and integrated into the NATO command structure; it hosted American military bases. Turkey came to be viewed by the West as its eastern bulwark of containment, preventing the expansion of the Soviet Union toward the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and the Persian Gulf. This linkage with and self-identification with the West caused the Turks to be denounced by the non-Western, non-aligned countries at the 1955 Bandung Conference and to be attacked as blasphemous by Islamic countries. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 393

Categorization

• XREF: Illustrates the cost of civilizational re-identification that echoes Turkey’s later NATO-era estrangement from the Islamic world and current geopolitical limbo.