What changed from Trump to Biden?

Last month, the US National Security Strategy (NSS) document signed by US President Joe Biden was published. 

This 48-page document, dated October 2022, is a very special and important document in terms of understanding the new US doctrine after the Ukraine war. The file name is interestingly written as "Biden-Harris-Administrations-National-Security-Strategy-10.2022". In other words, it is as if Ms. Kamala's influence in the preparation of this document was wanted to be felt. 

The Biden administration published the first 55-page NSS document in March last year. After the war, it seems that there is a need to update the document. After all, the Ukraine-Russia war, referred to by Western politicians as "Putin's War", can be seen as the first step in a long march to change the world order. It is, of course, inevitable that the United States would also want to take measures against Russia's and Putin's hard power revolt.

There are many noteworthy points in this document published in October 2022. I will share the details in my second article on the subject. The point I want to draw attention to here is to examine what is written about Turkey in these documents. Since we have started to see ourselves as a central and very important geopolitical power, I wanted to see if the US sees us in the same way.

First of all, we analyzed the Trump-era NSS documents with which we had slightly better relations, prepared articles on the subject with my PhD students and published a book titled "An Overview of US Foreign Policy, Doctrines, Electoral Systems and Codes of Trump's National Security Strategy Document". At that time, we analyzed how many times Turkey was mentioned in Trump's NSS document. The result was quite surprising, because Turkey was not mentioned at all in the 56-page 2017 NSS document. Greece and Cyprus were also not mentioned at all in this document, showing that none of the issues that we problematized were a problem for the US. 

Biden's first NSS document, a 23-page document published last year, also did not mention Turkey at all. This showed that Turkey did not figure in the US priorities. 

Let's come to the last NSS document published last month. In this post-war document, unlike the others, Turkey is mentioned in one sentence. This sentence is exactly as follows:

"We will continue to engage with Turkey to reinforce its strategic, political, economic, and institutional ties to the West."

Yes, it is just one sentence and that is the content. Do we understand what Turkey means to the US? As we can see, the US is only concerned that Turkey stays in the Western bloc, stays in NATO and strengthens its institutional ties with the West.

In other words, this is our situation from the US point of view. Approaches like "We have become a superpower, we have risen to power, the world is jealous of us" are not that accurate. Even though Turkey has increased its influence in the world after Putin's war, we should keep in mind that for the US, Turkey is the kind of country that can be glossed over with a general sentence. So, let's not fly, let's keep our feet firmly on the ground. 

In short, let's make our daring calculated.