The last decade has witnessed the flourishing of scholarly literature on rising powers and their relationships with the West. The decline of US hegemony and the rise of new players on the global stage have brought forward works on the motivations behind these actors’ foreign policies, the foreign policy instruments that they deploy, and the repercussions of their actions for the future of the liberal international order. Turkey, a longtime NATO member and an official candidate for accession to the EU, is one of those countries that has remained center stage in these debates. Its growing estrangement from the EU, its rapprochement with Russia, and, most recently, its unilateral actions in the conflict in the eastern Mediterranean over gas resources and maritime borders have generated intense debates over Turkey’s role in the Western alliance and its ramifications especially for NATO and the EU.

Against this background, Oya Dursun-Özkanca’s book, Turkey-West Relations, is indeed a timely one that seeks to explain why and how Turkey is detaching itself from the Western alliance—defined as the EU, NATO, and the United States—by closely examining Turkish foreign policy behavior between 2010 and the first half of 2019. After the introduction, which sets out the main argument and the structure of the book, the first chapter outlines the conceptual framework of the study: theories of intra-alliance opposition—more specifically the notion of soft balancing—are used to explain Turkey’s foreign policy actions vis-à-vis the West in the given period. In this theoretical chapter, Dursun-Özkanca identifies tools of statecraft that are particularly used in soft balancing within an alliance as economic statecraft, active diplomacy, cheap talk diplomacy, issue-linkage bargaining, entangling diplomacy, strategic noncooperation, cooperative balancing, compelling threats, territorial denial, and countervailing or alternative alliances. Although some of these tools are also seen as typical of boundary testing (i.e., active diplomacy), others are more typical of boundary challenging (i.e., strategic noncooperation) or boundary breaking (i.e., compelling threats).

The book proceeds to study how these tools have been used in Turkish acts of soft balancing against Western actors in six empirical cases, which constitute the next six chapters of the book. These empirical chapters cover Turkey’s policies in the Western Balkans, its veto of the EU–NATO security exchange, the EU–Turkey migration deal of 2016, Turkey’s energy policies, Turkish rapprochement with Russia in security and defense, and Turkish foreign policy in Syria and Iraq. The book argues that, in the last decade, Turkey has gradually shifted from a boundary-testing country to a boundary-challenging or, at times, a boundary-breaking country within the Western alliance. The book concludes by summarizing the intra-alliance opposition tools that Turkey has used against Western actors in the selected case studies and by listing the reasons behind this change in foreign policy behavior: “international systemic and regional sub-systemic factors,” “irreconcilable interests (with the West) and the subsequent lack of trust” and “domestic factors” (pp. 151–161). It highlights that, given the stability of these factors, Turkey’s relationship with the West will most likely become more acrimonious, resulting in more boundary-breaking foreign policy behavior on its part.

The book’s main strength is its rich and detailed description of the selected empirical cases in which Turkey’s divergent positions within the Western alliance can be observed. By relying on firsthand original data from more than 200 semi-structured elite interviews conducted over a time span of seven years across various countries, the study does an excellent job of identifying the tools of statecraft used by Turkey in its long-durée contestation of the West. Although Turkey’s relations with the West have indeed been a popular theme in the last decade, most of the works on this issue have been undertaken in policy circles, where its treatment has largely remained undertheorized. Dursun-Özkanca successfully moves beyond mere description of snapshot events that signal divergence with the West to analytically observing the patterns behind Turkey’s contestation of the Western alliance and identifying the precise ways in which it does so.

Although the book is particularly strong in showing how Turkey has been contesting the Western alliance from within, it could do more to explain why Turkey has moved farther away from its Western allies in the past decade. Even though the puzzle that the book seeks to explain, as expressed in the introduction, covers the “why” and the “how” question (p. 2), the main focus of the remainder of the book is on the “how,” with the reasons behind Turkish foreign policy behavior largely untouched until the conclusion. Even when the drivers of Turkish policy are finally mentioned, they come in a list of factors that, lacking conceptual standing, makes it almost impossible to identify where each mattered and how. As such, the book does not meet its claim to “determine whether there is a causal chain” between the independent and dependent variables (p. 15); it also runs the risk of excluding some drivers of Turkish foreign policy that have played a key role in creating a growing rift between the two sides. One case in point is the formal alliance between the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) with the ultranationalist Nationalist Action Party (MHP); Dursun-Özkanca also does not consider the AKP’s informal coalition with the nationalist factions of the state apparatus, which plays a significant role in Turkey’s growing estrangement from the United States regarding the status of the Kurds in Syria. In a similar vein, Turkey’s energy deals with Russia are described as a product of Turkey’s “goal to undermine the EU’s power” (p. 107), but may alternatively be interpreted as attempts to meet its growing energy needs.

The case selection could also benefit from a more elaborate justification. The book explains that the cases “were chosen due to their significance in creating substantial divergences between Turkey and its transatlantic allies during the tenure of the AKP government” (p. 15). Hence if the dependent variables are cases that have created divergence between Turkey and its traditional Western allies, then the question remains as to whether, for instance, the EU–Turkey migration deal is an act of divergence or an instance of bilateral cooperation that ultimately turned into leverage for Turkey over the EU, which provided it with a wider space to pursue its more independent and unilateral foreign policy.

These issues withstanding, this book is an important and rare academic contribution toward understanding how Turkey grew increasingly estranged from its traditional Western allies in the last decade. The most recent intensification of the conflict in the eastern Mediterranean attests to the significance of the book’s key argument that Turkey has now moved into boundary-breaking foreign policy actions toward its Western interlocutors, with another book waiting to be written on why this has been the case.