Friends Without Benefits: The US-Turkish Alliance

At a time when humanitarian intervention was developing into a normative standard above and beyond a legal principle, highlighted by the “illegal but legitimate” intervention in Kosovo, Turkey was afforded a privileged position of international immunity. While behaving in a manner that ordinarily ought to have defined itself as an outlier nation and a candidate for international military intervention, Turkey not only managed to avoid such attention, but also to remain as an ally in both name and substance to most of the international community. This appears to be a contradiction in nature that Turkey has failed to grow out of.