All Policy Analysis by Soner Cagaptay

The September 1 meeting in the Turkish city of Istanbul between Israeli foreign minister Silvan Shalom and his Pakistani counterpart, Khurshid Kasuri, was historic. There have been no public official contacts between the two nations since Pakistan was founded in 1947 as a home for Muslims in the Indian subcontinent

The following are excerpts of remarks by Washington Institute senior fellow Soner Cagaptay at a FrontPageMagazine.com symposium moderated by Jamie Glazov. Percentagewise, as well as in cumulative terms, France has the largest Muslim community in the EU. There are no official figures, since France does not collect numbers on religious

Today, the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union (EU), issued its Framework for Negotiations with Turkey, a document outlining a strategy for accession talks with Ankara. In December 2004, the EU indicated that Ankara had satisfied its membership criteria “sufficiently enough” to begin talks on October 3

Testimony before the House Committee on International Relations. We have a number of issues to discuss. I would like to focus on three of them, namely: 1. Turkey's importance for the U.S; 2. U.S.-Turkish ties within the context of the ripple effects of the Iraq War; and 3. Turkey's European

On May 25, the presidents of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and Turkey inaugurated the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (BTC), a major artery linking oil fields in the Caspian Sea region to the Mediterranean Sea and Western markets beyond. It will take several months for oil pumped from Baku, Azerbaijan, to pass through Tbilisi

The following is a FrontPageMagazine.com symposium moderated by Jamie Glazov and featuring remarks by Washington Institute senior fellow Soner Cagaptay. As Turkey drifts toward Islamization, some serious questions arise: Is Turkey even our ally? Is Turkish accession to the EU in America's interests? Does the Justice and Development Party (AKP)

On May 1–2, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will visit Israel. Erdogan’s trip is important since it follows harsh criticism of Israel’s policies in the Palestinian territories (see “Where Goes the Turkish-Israeli Relationship?” by this author in Middle East Quarterly, fall 2004). Turkish-Israeli relations, which flourished in the 1990s

Next to the Middle East lies another region with a large Muslim population and some acute problems with Islamist radicalism: the Caucasus. Aware of the danger that instability in the Caucasus (particularly since the dissolution of the Soviet Union) could spill over into the Middle East, Israel has actively sought

If countries could be vegetables, Turkey would be an onion. Every time you take off a layer of skin, hoping to get to the core, you come across yet another skin. In The Turks Today, Andrew Mango successfully peels modern Turkey to its core. Most people who have rubbed elbows