Alliance disillusionment and strategic autonomy: Turkish foreign policy after the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cyprus Problem

This article challenges leader-centered and rupture-based interpretations of Turkey’s autonomy-seeking diplomacy by tracing its Cold War roots. Using a constructivist framework, it examines the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cyprus Problem as episodes in which Turkish actors reassessed alliance reliability, sovereignty, and autonomous decision-making. It argues that these crises contributed to a repertoire of alliance skepticism and strategic autonomy within, rather than against, the Western alliance, suggesting that contemporary Turkish policy draws on earlier experiences of contested alliance reliability.