The Lawfare Podcast: The State of the U.S.-Turkey Relationship

Jen Patja, Scott R. Anderson, Nick Danforth, Asli Aydıntaşbaş
Friday, April 30, 2021, 12:00 PM

Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
Brookings

When President Biden entered office, he inherited a bilateral relationship with Turkey that was strained to the limits by the growing independent streak in that country's foreign policy—and one that had been pushed in unfamiliar directions by his predecessor's direct and often unpredictable personal relationship with Turkey's longstanding president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. This past week, the Biden administration made its first major move on the U.S.-Turkey relationship by recognizing the atrocities committed against Armenians by Ottoman authorities in the early 20th century as a genocide, a move that prior presidents had avoided for fear of how Turkey might react.


To discuss what these developments may mean for this key bilateral relationship, Scott R. Anderson sat down with Nicholas Danforth of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy and Asli Aydıntaşbaş of the European Council on Foreign Relations. They discussed how Turkey views its place in the world, what this means for its alliance with the United States and how the Biden administration is likely to respond moving forward.



Jen Patja is the editor and producer of the Lawfare Podcast and Rational Security. She currently serves as the Co-Executive Director of Virginia Civics, a nonprofit organization that empowers the next generation of leaders in Virginia by promoting constitutional literacy, critical thinking, and civic engagement. She is the former Deputy Director of the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier and has been a freelance editor for over 20 years.
Scott R. Anderson is a fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and a Senior Fellow in the National Security Law Program at Columbia Law School. He previously served as an Attorney-Adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State and as the legal advisor for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq.
Nick Danforth has covered U.S.-Turkish relations for the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Woodrow Wilson Center, and the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Aslı Aydıntaşbaş is a visiting fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings, as well as a Global Opinions columnist at The Washington Post and a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).

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