Ally No More: Erdogan’s New Turkish Caliphate and the Rising Jihadist Threat to the West

NEW CENTER BOOK DOCUMENTS THAT TURKEY IS AN ALLY NO MORE, ERDOGAN’S NEW-OTTOMAN JIHAD STATE MUST BE TREATED AS SUCH

“Whither Turkey?” is a question that has become one of the most pressing national security topics of our time. The available evidence – including, notably, the increasingly overt ambition of Recep Tayyip Erdogan to become the Caliph of a neo-Ottoman empire, his naked hostility toward the United States and the damage being done by Turkey to America’s vital interests and those of the rest of NATO and other allies like Israel and the Kurds – suggests the answer is alarming.

That evidence is thoughtfully assessed in a new book from the Center for Security Policy Press,Ally No More: Erdogan’s New Turkish Caliphate and the Rising Jihadist Threat to the West. Its ten essays include a detailed treatment of the presence of Turkish influence operations and infrastructure in this country that could enable the regime in Ankara not only to harm U.S. interests elsewhere, but to engage in subversion here – making it required reading for American policy-makers and the public, alike. ?

A group of highly respected authors/experts – notably including Harold Rhode Burak Bekdil, Uzay Bulut, David Goldman, Daniel Pipes and the Center for Security Policy’s Executive Vice President Christopher Hull and Senior Fellow Deborah Weiss – contributed chapters to this much-needed book. So did the Center’s Vice President for Research and Analysis, Clare M. Lopez, who also served as Ally No More’s editor.

This extensively footnoted collection of essay features insightful treatments of: Turkey’s own demographic and economic situation; Erdogan’s increasingly autocratic disregard for Turkey’s constitution and escalating record of human rights abuses; and the apparently not-quite-final divorce from Erdogan’s longtime jihadist collaborator, Fethullah Gulen.

Dr. Rhode’s chapter as well as two others focus on a strategic look at how Turkey is not only alienating itself from its own Ataturk legacy by pursuing a frankly jihadist agenda, but from the U.S. directly, through Erdogan’s brazen alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood on U.S. territory. Dr. Pipes offered suggestions for necessarily tough, but effective, measures for Turkey’s NATO allies to take in response to Erdogan’s overtly hostile policies.

Overall, this is a most timely and scholarly contribution to our understanding of shifting realities that must be dealt with in a clear-eyed and expeditious manner if U.S. national security priorities are to be preserved.

Upon the release of Ally No More: Erdo?an’s New Turkish Caliphate and the Rising Jihadist Threat to the West, Frank Gaffney Jr. President of the Center for Security Policy observed:

Few recent geostrategic developments are as fraught as the transformation of Turkey from a reliable, secular and democratic allied nation to one ruled by a hostile, Sharia-supremacist and increasingly despotic regime.  This book maps out that trajectory and its implications – and offers astute and timely suggestions for how America must respond.

Watch the Facebook livestream launch event: