To a Western observer it looks like cognitive dissonance. A government that brands the United States an imperial threat, a declining hegemon, and a sponsor of terrorism is simultaneously lobbying Washington to sell it F-16 Block 70s, demanding readmission to the F-35 program, and powering its proudest national project, the KAAN fighter, with American General Electric engines. In late June 2026, days before the NATO summit it is set to host in Ankara, Turkey won Washington’s approval for a sale of more than $700 million in additional engines for that aircraft, approved despite objections from senior members of Congress.

There is no contradiction. Inside the Turkish strategic establishment, the juxtaposition is the policy. Ankara separates its ideological end-state from its mathematical present, and it does so deliberately. The anti-Americanism describes the future it wants: a multipolar order in which Turkey leads the Islamic and Turkic worlds free of Washington’s leverage. The arms purchases describe the present it is stuck with: an air force that will lose its qualitative edge in the Aegean by 2030 unless American technology keeps it aloft. Ankara buys American engines today so that it can afford to be anti-American tomorrow. The capitalists, Lenin is supposed to have said, will sell us the rope with which we will hang them. Turkey’s defense planners have read the line and taken it as a procurement strategy.

This paper makes three arguments. First, that Turkish anti-Americanism is not a mood or an Erdoğan tantrum but an engineered system, manufactured by a dense ecosystem of state-aligned think tanks, foundations, and a state-owned defense house, and walked directly into the organs of the Turkish state. The pipeline is extant: the man who founded Turkey’s most influential pro-government think tank now runs its intelligence service. Second, that this system rests on an ideological operating system, a fusion of Islamist grievance, ultranationalist Eurasianism, and a century-old partition trauma, that is now bipartisan within Turkish nationalism and will outlast any single government. Third, that the threat this poses to American defense, intelligence, and diplomatic interests is concrete and compounding, and that Washington’s habit of treating each flashpoint as an isolated transaction plays directly into Ankara’s hands.

The corrective is neither a trade war nor a rupture. It is the end of one-way compartmentalization. Turkey insists that its purchases carry no political strings, that it can take American hardware in one stall of the bazaar while threatening American troops in another. Washington should accept that framing and apply it in reverse: every advanced capability conditioned on measurable conduct, every NATO privilege tied to alliance behavior, and a deliberate, funded investment in the shrinking community of Turkish institutions that still believe in the transatlantic relationship. The stakes are not regional; they are about whether the world’s most heavily armed swing state spends the next decade inside the Western system or building the machine designed to replace it.

Begin with the contradiction, because the way Ankara resolves it tells you everything about how it thinks. Five logics let the Turkish state reconcile ideological anti-Americanism with a desperate dependence on American aerospace. None of them is irrational. Taken together they amount to a doctrine of compartmentalized hostility: the conviction that you can buy a hegemon’s tools to build the machine that ends its hegemony.

1. The physics of strategic autonomy

The foundational goal of the Turkish state is defense autarky, total self-sufficiency, so that Ankara never again has to bow to a Western sanction. Turkey has come remarkably far. It dominates the global drone market through Baykar and builds its own warships through the MİLGEM program. But it has hit the hardest ceiling in modern engineering: the fast-jet turbofan. You can build a fifth-generation airframe. Turkey has, and flew the KAAN for the first time on 21 February 2024. But the engine that powers it demands a metallurgical and thermodynamic mastery that perhaps five nations possess. Turkey’s state engine house, TEI, is developing the indigenous TEI-TF35000, and it is realistically a decade or more from reliable serial production. So to keep the KAAN alive, and to keep the domestic story alive, the story of a rising superpower building its own jets, Ankara must fly its prototypes and early production aircraft on the American GE F110. The engine is not, in Ankara’s mind, a surrender, but a rented ladder: American technology used to cover the period of vulnerability until the indigenous engine arrives, the hegemon’s own tools borrowed to build the anti-hegemon machine.

Watch the timing. In the final days of June 2026, just before the NATO summit it is set to host in Ankara, Turkey secured Washington’s approval for more than $700 million in additional F110 engines, advanced over the objections of senior members of Congress. Ankara had already taken delivery of 10. The new tranche covers the dozens that early serial production requires. This is the rented ladder in real time: the United States supplying the engines that keep Turkey’s bid for engine independence aloft, on the eve of a summit Turkey intends to use to press its wider agenda.

2. The Aegean math

Ideology bows to the balance of power, and the balance in the Aegean now frightens Turkish planners. After Ankara was expelled from the F-35 program on 17 July 2019 for buying the Russian S-400, Athens moved fast. Greece upgraded its F-16s to the advanced Viper standard, bought 24 Rafales from France, and won U.S. approval to purchase as many as 40 F-35s, firm-ordering 20. By 2030 the Hellenic Air Force is positioned to hold a qualitative edge over an aging Turkish fleet. Anti-American rhetoric cannot shoot down a Greek F-35. Only another fifth-generation aircraft, or a modernized F-16, can. For Turkey’s general staff, securing American jets and engines is therefore not an ideological concession. It is a matter of immediate survival, and survival overrides purity.

3. The stolen-property narrative

How does a government sell crawling back to Washington for jets to a base it has spent a decade teaching to hate Washington? It reframes capitulation as the recovery of stolen goods. Turkey did not merely want to buy the F-35. It was a Level-3 partner in the Joint Strike Fighter program from 2002, its firms machining some 900 components, its treasury having pre-paid roughly $1.4 billion toward the aircraft it expected to receive before it was thrown out. So when officials demand the jets back, they tell the public a story of righteous entitlement: we paid for these planes, we built parts of these planes, they are the property of the Turkish nation, and the United States is behaving like a pirate state by withholding them. The framing is elegant: it lets the governing coalition keep its anti-American posture while negotiating for American weapons. Ankara is not submitting; it is demanding what is legally its own.

4. Extreme transactionalism: the bazaar

In the Western tradition, buying American weapons once meant buying into Pax Americana. Hardware and loyalty travelled together. Ankara has decoupled them. In the bazaar model of statecraft every issue sits in its own stall. In one stall the United States is an enemy arming Kurdish terrorists in Syria. In the next it is an accomplice to war crimes in Gaza; in the following one it is simply a vendor with the best jet engines on the market. President Erdoğan sees no contradiction in taking Washington to task over Gaza, threatening American troops in Syria, and sitting down the following morning to negotiate a multibillion-dollar deal with an American defense prime. The transaction, in this view, is devoid of geopolitical strings: we will pay you billions for your hardware, but we will not buy your foreign policy.

5. Keeping the United States in the tent

Finally, within the older state apparatus, the foreign ministry and the surviving secular military echelons, there is a quiet understanding that severing defense ties with Washington outright would be strategically suicidal. Lock Turkey entirely out of the American defense ecosystem and Washington loses every financial and strategic incentive to restrain itself. It throws its undivided weight behind Greece, Cyprus, and Israel. By dangling multibillion-dollar contracts, Ankara entangles the American defense-industrial base in its own prosperity. If U.S. contractors are earning billions from Turkey, they will lobby Congress against punishing Turkey too harshly. Purchasing American hardware is, in other words, a way to buy lobbying leverage inside Washington against the very pressure Washington might otherwise apply.

The anti-Americanism is the desired future. The F-16 order is the unavoidable present. Ankara is bridging the two, with our engines.

This is the tell. A state that merely disliked America would not invest this much engineering, money, and narrative discipline into managing its dependence. A state that intends to outgrow America does exactly that. To understand how deliberate the project is, you have to look at the machine that produces it.

Anti-Americanism in Turkey is not improvised at the podium. It is researched, drafted, footnoted, and rehearsed inside a layered ecosystem of policy institutes, family foundations, and a state-owned defense house, and then carried into the presidency, the foreign ministry, and the intelligence service by the same people who wrote it. The Middle East Forum’s survey of 21 of these organizations maps an architecture with a clear division of labor.

The apex pipeline: SETA

The Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research (SETA) is the most consequential pro-government think tank in Turkey, and the clearest proof that in the New Turkey the line between analysis and state power has been erased. SETA’s founding director, İbrahim Kalın, became Erdoğan’s spokesman and, in 2023, the director of the MİT, Turkey’s national intelligence service. Two successive Directors of Presidential Communications, Fahrettin Altun and Burhanettin Duran, came from SETA’s general-coordinator chair. Its board is chaired by Serhat Albayrak, who also runs the media conglomerate that publishes Sabah and Daily Sabah. The German federal government has stated the foundation is “mainly financed by the Albayrak family.” SETA produces the English-language case that the United States is engineering a Kurdish “terror statelet” on Turkey’s border (see its report PKK/YPG’s State Dream in Syria), while running an active Washington office that shares panels with the city’s mainstream institutions. It argues America is in decline in one publication and lobbies America’s capital in the next. That is not hypocrisy, but the model.

The regional and ideological shops: ORSAM, SDE

Below SETA sit the specialists. The Center for Middle Eastern Studies (ORSAM), brought under Foreign Ministry influence in 2014, supplies the scholarly case that Washington’s partnership with the YPG is a betrayal by a NATO ally. Its recent output frames the United States as the initiator of regional war, including in its analyses of the 2026 American-Israeli campaign against Iran. The Institute of Strategic Thinking (SDE), the platform from which Yasin Aktay moved into the AKP deputy chairmanship, is more nakedly partisan still. It brands the United States the patron of terrorism (its analysis The US Hand-in-Hand with Terrorists), frames the July 2016 coup attempt as a NATO operation, and runs columns announcing that European States and the USA Are Collapsing. Its board is conspicuously staffed with retired generals. The themes are uniform across the tier: American support for Kurdish separatism, American complicity with Israel, American harboring of the cleric Fethullah Gülen, and American decline.

The radical doctrine shop: ASSAM and SADAT

At the militant pole sits ASSAM, founded by Adnan Tanrıverdi, a retired general who served as Erdoğan’s chief military adviser and founded the private military company SADAT, whose Syrian recruits for Libya were documented by the United Nations Panel of Experts. ASSAM is the place where anti-Westernism stops being commentary and becomes a blueprint. Across annual congresses it has drafted the institutional architecture and a model constitution for ASRICA, a proposed confederation of Islamic states explicitly conceived to build an alliance that would replace NATO. Its founding declaration is not subtle. Its signature campaign demands that the United States “shut down your 34 military bases in Islamic states” and “get out.” Its congress preambles name the United States first among “imperialist Western states” waging an “undeclared Third World War” on the Muslim world. Its 2024 congress declaration framed the struggle as one against “Racist Imperialism and the G-7s.” This is the maximalist edge that drags the entire conversation in its direction.

The cadre foundations: TÜGVA, TÜRGEV, KADEM

Then there are the bodies that do not look like think tanks at all, the Erdoğan-family foundations that function as the regime’s talent pipeline and cultural enforcement arm. TÜGVA (the president’s son Bilal Erdoğan sits on its high advisory board) and TÜRGEV (founded by Erdoğan himself) vet and place the next generation of civil servants, judges, and officers. A 2021 leak, whose authenticity the foundation’s chairman conceded, alleged cadre lists for the military academy, the police, and the judiciary, and a 2016 internal memo recommended surveilling dissidents abroad in coordination with the MİT and treating the United States as the orchestrator of the coup attempt. KADEM, co-founded by the president’s daughter, manufactured the “gender justice” framework that furnished cover for Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention and now works to organize Muslim and Global-South civil society as a counterweight to American-led NGO networks. These institutions do not write foreign policy. They build the loyal society in which an anti-American foreign policy is permanent.

The state’s own house: STM ThinkTech

Finally, the technocratic node. STM ThinkTech is not an independent institute at all but the foresight brand of STM, a state-majority-owned defense firm whose board chairman simultaneously serves as a vice president of the Presidency of Defence Industries, the agency Washington sanctioned under CAATSA. Its job is to rationalize the technology cutoff: to convert the F-35 expulsion and the engine bottleneck into a narrative of triumphant indigenization, and to supply the “objective” data that makes strategic autonomy look like not isolation but destiny. Tellingly, it does all this while holding active NATO contracts, proof that even the indigenization narrative runs on Western rails.

The division of rhetorical labor

Map the ecosystem onto the state and a sophisticated division of labor appears, engineered to manage domestic fury and international diplomacy at once. The incubators, ASSAM and SDE, draft the maximalist blueprints and push the Overton window toward the collapse of the West. The firebrands in parliament deliver the conspiratorial, overtly hostile speeches that mobilize the nationalist base. The technocrats, Kalın, Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, and the SETA scholars, deliver the cold, institutional critiques calibrated for Washington’s ear, signaling that Turkey’s grievances are structural rather than emotional. And above them all stands the pendulum: Erdoğan, who will call the United States complicit in genocide one morning and negotiate an F-16 sale the next, using the anti-Americanism his subordinates manufacture as leverage, proof to Washington that he alone can manage a Turkish state that has been taught, deliberately and well, to despise it.

None of this is reducible to one man’s temper, and that is precisely why it is dangerous. Over the past decade Turkish anti-Americanism has migrated from the fringes of Islamist and left-nationalist activism into the central nervous system of the state. It now runs on an ideological operating system with deep roots and bipartisan reach.

Sèvres Syndrome 2.0

Start with the trauma. The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, under which the victorious Western powers moved to partition the Ottoman heartland, left a permanent scar on the Turkish strategic imagination: the conviction that the West is forever conspiring to dismember Turkey. The current government has updated the fear and named a new architect. When the Pentagon arms the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, Ankara does not see a counter-ISIS expedient. It sees a hostile statelet engineered to encircle Turkey and fracture its borders, a Modern Sèvres. And the failed coup of 15 July 2016 is the syndrome’s ground zero. Because Washington refused to extradite Gülen, the Turkish establishment concluded that the United States was at minimum complicit in an attempt to kill its president and collapse its government. In the AKP’s account, America is no longer a flawed ally. It is the entity that tried to destroy the Turkish state, and failed.

The Turkish-Islamic Synthesis

Onto that fear the regime has welded an ideology: the Türk-İslam Sentezi, the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis, the fusion of Sunni-Islamist civilizational grievance with ultranationalist security thinking that was first codified by the Aydınlar Ocağı circle and now forms the backbone of the AKP-MHP People’s Alliance. Erdoğan’s political DNA runs back to the Milli Görüş movement, which holds the Western-led order to be inherently exploitative and morally bankrupt. After 2016 he fused that Islamist root to the secular-nationalist Eurasianist cadres who view Washington through a pure power lens. The synthesis makes anti-Americanism bulletproof, because opposing the United States becomes simultaneously a religious duty (defending Gaza against a “Crusader-Zionist” alliance) and a national-security imperative (defending the border against American-backed Kurds). A nationalist and an Islamist who agree on nothing else agree on this.

Strategic autonomy in a post-American world

The third layer is a strategic judgment that the unipolar American moment is over and that remaining a docile eastern flank of NATO is now a liability rather than an insurance policy. In this reading, decoupling from American defense supply chains is not a cost of sanctions but a form of decolonization, the breaking of Washington’s “kill-switch” over Turkish weapons. The expansion of U.S. logistics in Greece, the lifting of the Cyprus arms embargo, the alignment with Russia on the S-400 and with China on connectivity are read through a single lens: Turkey as a central pole in a multipolar order, obligated to push American influence out of its neighborhood rather than channel it. The convening institutions (ANKASAM, the Marmara Group, TASAM) supply the intellectual scaffolding for the pivot toward Russia, China, and the “Asia Anew” initiative.

The domestic utility of an omnipotent enemy

And underneath the doctrine sits raw political utility. After two decades in power, presiding over chronic inflation and a battered currency, the governing coalition requires a scapegoat with unlimited explanatory power. The Üst Akıl (the supreme mastermind, a thinly veiled Washington) is blamed when the lira falls and when the opposition wins. By equating American interests with terrorism, financial sabotage, and domestic subversion, the alliance brands any Turkish politician who wants better relations with the West, the rule of law, or human-rights reform as a foreign asset. Anti-Americanism has become the non-negotiable litmus test of Turkish patriotism. That is why it will survive Erdoğan: it is now wired into how the state explains itself to its citizens.

An institutionally anti-American NATO ally is not a paradox to be admired. It is a problem to be managed, and the costs fall across all three pillars of the relationship.

Defense

The defense threat is interoperability erosion dressed as modernization. Turkey holds a Russian S-400 system inside NATO’s air-defense space and has spent years probing whether it can be “managed” back into the F-35 program rather than surrendered, an outcome that would compromise the aircraft’s most sensitive signatures. As of mid-2026, Turkey remains barred, and reporting that it asked Moscow to take the system back was contradicted at the highest levels of the U.S. government. Meanwhile, the indigenization the think-tank complex celebrates (the KAAN, the Baykar drones, the Özgür avionics that led Ankara to cancel most of the modernization kits in its 2024 F-16 package, cutting it from roughly $23 billion toward $7 billion) is explicitly designed to end American leverage over Turkish forces. And Incirlik remains the unresolved vulnerability. American tactical nuclear weapons sit on the soil of a government whose own strategists theorize about expelling foreign bases, and whose closure of the base to American use has been threatened as routine leverage. A NATO that cannot count on basing, cannot share its most advanced platform, and watches a member field Russian air defenses is a NATO whose southeastern flank is a question mark.

Intelligence

The intelligence threat is the most underappreciated, and the SETA-to-spy-chief pipeline is the reason. When the founder of the government’s flagship anti-American think tank runs the national intelligence service, the doctrine and the apparatus are no longer separable. Turkish intelligence has been documented surveilling and pressuring dissidents and diaspora communities abroad, including on American and allied soil, and the family-foundation network has, in its own leaked memoranda, proposed precisely that kind of transnational monitoring “in coordination” with the MİT. An ally whose intelligence service is led by an architect of the “America orchestrated the coup” narrative is an ally with whom genuine counterterrorism cooperation carries a counterintelligence cost, and whose handling of shared sources and methods cannot be assumed to be friendly. The same service is the one Washington must work with on Syria, on ISIS detainees, and on the Eastern Mediterranean.

Diplomacy

The diplomatic threat is that Turkey increasingly uses its NATO membership as a tool against the alliance rather than within it. Ankara slow-walked the accession of Finland and Sweden to extract concessions. It conducts proxy and conventional operations against American partners in Syria. It has become the most reliable amplifier inside the alliance of the claim that the “rules-based order” is a fraud. And through ASSAM’s congresses, the Marmara Group’s summits, and TASAM’s forums it is building the convening infrastructure of a post-American bloc, deepening ties with Russia, China, and the Organization of Turkic States. The danger is not that Turkey leaves NATO. It is that Turkey stays and uses the access, intelligence-sharing, and the procurement seat that membership confers while working, intellectually and diplomatically, to assemble the order intended to succeed it. As I have written before, Iran attacks through proxies and deniability. Ankara can operate through proxies too, but also with conventional forces, diplomacy, migration pressure, energy leverage, and NATO procedure. The institutional cover is the threat.

The mistake Washington keeps making is to accept Ankara’s bazaar on Ankara’s terms, to treat each crisis as a discrete transaction and each weapons sale as a relationship-repair. That is one-way compartmentalization, and it rewards exactly the behavior it is meant to discourage. The answer is not a rupture, but symmetry: take Ankara at its word that hardware and politics are separable, and separate them in the other direction. Specific steps follow.

Condition every advanced capability on measurable conduct. No F-35 readmission while a Russian S-400 sits on Turkish soil. Not managed, not mothballed, but removed and verified. Tie any new F-16 Block 70 deliveries, and any future engine cooperation, to documented changes in Turkish behavior toward U.S. forces and partners in Syria. Name the trigger, publish the metric, and let Ankara choose.

Remove the B61 nuclear weapons from Incirlik. Tactical nuclear gravity bombs do not belong on the territory of a government that threatens to close the base as leverage and whose strategists theorize about expelling it. Relocating them removes a hostage and ends a recurring point of coercion.

Treat the intelligence relationship with eyes open. Recognize that the MİT is led by the architect of an anti-American doctrine, scope cooperation accordingly, and bring the full weight of U.S. and allied law against transnational repression along with the surveillance and intimidation of dissidents and diaspora on Western soil, and use sanctions and prosecutions where the conduct is documented.

Apply transparency law to the influence apparatus. The U.S.-based affiliates of the Erdoğan-family foundation network and the Washington operations of the state-aligned think tanks should be examined under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. An institution financed by, and staffed into, a foreign government does not get to operate in Washington as if it were a neutral research center.

Stop ceding the convening space. Ankara has spent 20 years building the forums of a post-American order in the Turkic world, the Caucasus, and Africa while Washington under-invested. Compete: resource Middle-Corridor and connectivity alternatives, show up where TASAM and the Marmara Group show up, and contest the narrative of inevitable American decline with presence rather than press releases.

Resource the transatlantic holdouts. A shrinking community of genuinely independent Turkish institutions (EDAM, the Global Relations Forum, TEPAV, the Foreign Policy Institute) still argues for a rationalized relationship with NATO and the West, and they are marginalized, under-funded, and squeezed at home. They are the single best long-term investment available: fellowships, co-publication, platform access at Munich and Davos, and protection from the “foreign agent” smear. Washington spends fortunes on hardware for Ankara and pennies on the Turks who want the alliance to work. Reverse the ratio.

Do not mistake opposition to Erdoğan for friendship to America. The post-AKP nationalist and former-insider currents, and bodies like the Ankara Institute, which partners with Russia’s Valdai Club, are often as sovereigntist and West-skeptical as the government. Engage them on rule-of-law and democratization where interests align, but plan for the durability of Turkish anti-Americanism beyond any election.

When a Turkish parliamentarian brands CENTCOM the patron of terrorism, or a state-aligned institute publishes the obituary of the American “rules-based order,” it is not an accident and it is not noise. It is the output of an engineered grand strategy whose premise is a post-American Middle East, and whose authors are writing the military, diplomatic, and ideological doctrines to accelerate its arrival. Ankara has decided what it wants the future to look like and is using American engines to get there.

Washington’s task is not to win an argument with Turkey’s think tanks. It is to stop subsidizing the machine that produces them while pretending the purchase orders prove the relationship is healthy. Turkey will buy the rope as long as we keep selling it on credit. The remedy is to charge full price, in conduct, not just cash, and to invest, at last, in the Turks who never wanted the rope in the first place. The stakes could not be higher. The most heavily armed swing state in the Western alliance is deciding, right now, whether the next decade belongs to the order that built it or to the one designed to replace it. We should stop helping it choose the latter.

APPENDIX A: HOW ANKARA TALKS ABOUT AMERICA

The statements below are representative, paraphrased composites that synthesize the recurring anti-American arguments advanced across the pro-government ecosystem (SETA, ORSAM, SDE, ASSAM, ANKASAM, and aligned voices) during 2025 to 2026. They are illustrative of documented positions and are NOT presented as verbatim quotations from any single author. Verified primary sources that substantiate each theme are listed in Appendix B.

On U.S. support for the YPG/PKK

Washington’s military partnership with the YPG is not a tactical alliance but a calculated assault on Turkey’s territorial integrity.

Under the cover of fighting ISIS, the United States set out to engineer an artificial “terror statelet” to encircle Turkey.

CENTCOM functions as the logistical supply line and public-relations wing for Kurdish separatism.

Promises to withdraw YPG elements from Manbij and east of the Euphrates proved to be deliberate diplomatic deception.

A NATO ally arming a PKK affiliate is a betrayal of the alliance’s founding principles.

On Gaza and complicity with Israel

The United States is an active participant in Gaza, providing the munitions, intelligence, and diplomatic cover for the killing.

Unconditional support for Israel has destroyed whatever moral authority the West retained in the Islamic world.

Repeated U.S. vetoes at the Security Council expose the “rules-based order” as a tool to shield Western and Israeli conduct.

American carrier deployments to the Eastern Mediterranean were coercion aimed at regional powers, Turkey included.

On the 2016 coup and domestic subversion

By harboring Fethullah Gülen, the United States made itself complicit in the July 15 coup attempt.

Washington wields human-rights and press-freedom rhetoric as a Trojan horse to interfere in Turkey’s sovereign affairs.

American-funded NGOs and media operate as a fifth column waging psychological warfare against the state.

On sanctions, the F-35, and strategic containment

CAATSA sanctions are an attempt to enforce colonial dependency on the American defense industry.

Expelling Turkey from the F-35 program punished a NATO partner for exercising strategic autonomy.

The U.S. buildup in Greece and the lifting of the Cyprus arms embargo are designed to box Turkey in, not to deter Russia.

Washington weaponizes the dollar and the financial system to cripple states that pursue independent policies.

On American decline and multipolarity

The unipolar American moment has permanently ended; Washington refuses to accept the multipolar reality.

The United States is a declining power that now relies on chaos, sanctions, and proxy war rather than statecraft.

The “rules-based order” is a decaying American construct that must be dismantled and replaced.

Turkey must integrate with Eurasian, Asian, and African institutions to counter American containment.

The following primary and official sources document the positions and facts cited above. Each title links to the original. Verbatim ASSAM declaration language quoted in the body is drawn from the first two entries.

ASSAM: “Why ASSAM” (organizational declaration)

Frames the U.S. and NATO as a “world gendarmerie” occupying Muslim lands.

ASSAM: Islamic Union / ASRICA congress declarations

“USA! Shut Down Your 34 Military Bases … Get Out!”; “imperialist Western states”; “undeclared Third World War.”

SETA: “PKK/YPG’s State Dream in Syria”

Alleges a U.S.-built statelet for the PKK/YPG.

SETA: “Dangerous ‘Local Partner’: The YPG’s Terror Campaign in Northern Syria”

Profiles the U.S.-backed YPG as a terror actor.

SETA Security Radar: “Türkiye’s Geopolitical Landscape in 2026”

Names the U.S./SDF partnership the “most significant structural crisis” in relations.

SDE: “The US Hand-in-Hand with Terrorists”

Accuses Washington of building the PKK/PYD/YPG into a regular army.

SDE: Alper Tan, “European States and the USA Are Collapsing”

Declares the U.S.-led order “morally bankrupt” and “collapsing.”

ORSAM: “Regional Repercussions of US/Israel and Iran War” (3 Mar 2026)

Frames the U.S. as initiator of the 2026 Iran war.

ORSAM: “Could US/Israeli-Iran War Set Off a Bab el-Mandeb Flashpoint?” (8 Apr 2026)

Regional escalation analysis of the 2026 war.

ANKASAM: “The Rise of BRICS and the Multipolar Order”

Multipolarity and the decline of U.S. hegemony.

KADEM: “We United Muslim Civil Society Leaders in New York” (Mar 2026)

Organizing Muslim civil society against “Western” NGO norms.

U.N. Panel of Experts on Libya: report S/2021/229 (2021)

Documents SADAT’s recruitment of Syrian fighters for Libya.

U.S. Department of State: CAATSA sanctions on the SSB (Dec 2020)

The sanctions on Turkey’s defense-procurement agency.

The White House: Turkey removed from the F-35 program (17 July 2019)

Official basis for the F-35 expulsion.

U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency: Greece F-35 sale, notified to Congress 26 Jan 2024

U.S. approval for Greece to buy up to 40 F-35A, notified alongside Turkey’s F-16 package; the Aegean balance shift cited in Part I.

U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian: Treaty of Sèvres (Foreign Relations of the United States)

Primary U.S. diplomatic record of the 1920 partition treaty and its abrogation.

Methodology and companion products. This assessment draws on a Middle East Forum survey of 21 Turkish think tanks and foundations (organizational dossiers and a personnel/network matrix, available separately), supplemented by independent verification of all defense-procurement figures and primary-source citations. Confidence in the institutional and personnel findings is high. The Appendix A narratives are explicitly paraphrased composites, not quotations.