Editor's Note: Soner Cagaptay is a senior fellow and Altay Sedat Otun is a research intern at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. 

By Soner Cagaptay and Altay Sedat Otun - Special to CNN

You may have heard of dams being built for water management purposes or electricity production, but probably not one being built for counter-terrorism purposes. Turkey’s proposed Ilisu Dam on the Tigris River would satisfy just that end.

When Ankara completes the proposed construction on the dam in 2013, a large artificial reservoir would flood canyons across the rugged terrain of southeastern Turkey, thus effectively flooding out the Kurdistan Workers party (PKK) from the area and scoring a rare “hydro-victory” against terrorism.

The Ilisu Dam project is part of the government-funded Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP), which traces its origins to the early days of the Turkish republic when plans to utilize the Euphrates and Tigris rivers for energy generation and irrigation were first developed. However, GAP it still awaiting completion. Major fighting between the PKK and the Turkish military has prevented completion of the project since the 1990s. FULL POST

Editor's Note: Soner Cagaptay is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a GPS contributor. You can find all his blog posts here. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Soner Cagaptay.

By Soner Cagaptay - Special to CNN

Has Turkey’s twentieth century experience with Kemalism - a Europe-oriented top-down Westernization model - come to an end?

To a large extent: Yes.

Symbolically speaking, nothing could portend the coming end of Kemalism better than the recent public exoneration of Iskilipli Atif Hoca, a rare resistance figure to Kemalism in the early twentieth century. However, even if Kemalism might be withering away, ironically its founder Ataturk and his way of doing business seem to be alive in Turkey.

But first the story of Iskilipli Atif Hoca: In November 1925, Ataturk carried out perhaps the most symbolic of his reforms, banning all Turkish males from wearing the Ottoman fez in order to cement his country's commitment to European ideals. Ataturk wanted make Turks European head to toe and the abolition of the fez embodied this effort. FULL POST

Editor's Note: Soner Cagaptay is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a GPS contributor. You can find all his blog posts here. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Soner Cagaptay.

By Soner Cagaptay - Special to CNN

Could Turkey really go to war against Syria?  If it were to do so, Ankara would need to find a way to deal with the increasingly sectarian nature of the conflict in Syria and its potential ramifications inside Turkey.

The regime of Bashar al-Assad has enjoyed overwhelming support among Syria’s minority Alawite population. The country’s Sunni majority, on the other hand, is leading the anti-Assad rebellion.  Turkey’s push-back against al-Assad has drawn attention to a possible risk for Ankara: A sectarian Sunni-versus-Alawite conflict in Syria could potentially spill over into neighboring Turkey, causing tensions between Turkey’s Alevis and the government in Ankara.

This is especially surprising since the Alevis are not Alawite.  Despite semantically similar names - -both Alawites and Alevis derive their names from their reverence for Ali, a close relative of the Muslim prophet Mohammed - Alevis and Alawites represent different strains of Islam.  Alevis are not Alawites, just as Protestants are not protestors.

Furthermore, the Alawites are Arabs and the Alevis are Turks.  Even Alevi populations among the Kurds and Balkan Muslims pray in Turkish, testifying to the essentially Turkish nature of Alevism.  FULL POST

Editor's Note: Soner Cagaptay is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a GPS contributor. You can find all his blog posts here. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Soner Cagaptay.

By Soner Cagaptay - Special to CNN

Turkish-Syrian ties are slowly unraveling. Each day, thousands of Syrian refugees cross into Turkey, fleeing persecution. Ankara has been hinting that it will take action against Bashar al-Assad by setting up a safe haven across its border with Syria to protect civilians. On April 1, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the international community has to defend Syrian people's “right to self-defense.”

With Syrian soldier firing across the border, wounding Syrian refugees as well as Turks, all eyes are on the Turkish-Syrian border for a potential confrontation between the two countries. Yet there is another area where Turkey and Syria meet: A little-known Turkish exclave, Caber Kalesi (Qal’at Ja’bar in Arabic), a sliver of sovereign Turkish territory that is smack in the middle of Syria. On April 4, Turkish daily Today’s Zaman wrote about Caber Kalesi, drawing attention to its unique character as Turkey’s only exclave. FULL POST

Editor's Note: Soner Cagaptay is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a GPS contributor. You can find all his blog posts here. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Soner Cagaptay.

By Soner Cagaptay - Special to CNN

A visit to Gaziantep, a Turkish city near the Syrian border, suggests that Turkey’s policy on Syria is evolving in parallel to Bashar al-Assad's crackdown: The more brutally al-Assad acts against its own people, the more serious Ankara’s steps.

When the uprising began a year ago, Ankara initially took the more diplomatic road, suggesting that al-Assad launch political reforms and refrain from using violence when dealing with the demonstrations. Damascus, however, chose not to listen to Ankara’s advice. Locals in Gaziantep who have relatives and business partners in Syria add that the regime’s crackdown has only intensified over the past months.

Increasing violence against the civilian population brought Ankara to the second phase of its Syria policy - namely taking the issue to the U.N. in the hopes of securing a Security Council resolution to call for an end to the regime’s brutality. That effort, too, did not bear fruit: Russian and Chinese vetoes have thus far blocked U.N.-sponsored action to end the conflict in Syria. FULL POST

Editor's Note: Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former director of policy planning in the US State Department (2009-2011), is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. For more from Slaughter, visit Project Syndicate or follow it on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Anne-Marie Slaughter.

By Anne-Marie Slaughter, Project Syndicate

As the world watches the obliteration of the Syrian city of Homs and the crisis spills into neighboring Lebanon, it is time to ask what separates great powers from small powers. Turkey’s international star has risen steadily over the past few years, with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan being lionized in many Middle Eastern and North African countries, and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu traveling the world as the representative of an increasingly influential power. Indeed, Turkey and Indonesia have joined the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) on the list of the most important rising global players.

Now, in Syria’s carnage, Turkey is facing a critical test of its regional and global aspirations. It is time for its leaders to stop talking and start acting. FULL POST

Editor's note: Fadi Hakura is the associatefFellow and anager of the Turkey Project at the London-based think-tank Chatham House. He has written and lectured extensively on Turkey's political, economic and foreign policy and the relationship between the European Union and Turkey.

By Fadi Hakura - Special to CNN

Syria is heading to an "intolerable situation" according to Turkey's hyperactive Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, whose country is at the forefront of global efforts to engineer the downfall of the Bashar Al-Assad leadership.

Less than two years ago, relations were diametrically different.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan considered Assad a close friend and paraded Syria as the epitome of its much vaunted but now defunct "zero problems with the neighbors" policy to encourage rapprochement with Middle Eastern nations. Trade across their 850-kilometer border blossomed tenfold, security cooperation against the Kurdistan Workers' Party - a militant Kurdish group conducting a violent separatist campaign in Turkey - flourished and mutual visa restrictions were lifted. FULL POST

Editor's Note: Soner Cagaptay is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Hale Arifagaoglu is a research assistant at the Institute. Bilge Menekse is a former research intern at the Institute.

By Soner Cagaptay, Hale Arifagaoglu and Bilge Menekse - Special to CNN

Over the course of the 20th Century, Turkey’s world became increasingly Eurocentric. The country joined European and broader Western institutions, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), while also moving to become a member to the European Union (EU).

Today, however, the country’s single-minded European trajectory appears to be a thing of the past. Turkey, which has experienced phenomenal economic growth in the past decade, no longer feels content to subsume itself under Europe.

Since 2002, the Turkish economy has more than doubled in size, reaching a magnitude of $1.1 trillion. Gone is the Turkey of yesteryear, a poor country begging to get into the EU.

Enter the new Turkey: A country that feels confident, booming as the world around it suffers from economic meltdown. In the third quarter of 2011, the Turkish economy grew by a record 8.2%, outpacing not only the county's neighbors, but also all of Europe. FULL POST

Editor's Note: Soner Cagaptay, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is the co-author of Turkey's New Political Landscape: Implications of the 2011 Elections.

By Soner Cagaptay – Special to CNN

The Turks are selling pasta to the Italians, educating Papua-New Guineans in their universities, building airports in Egypt, running schools in Nigeria and establishing diplomatic missions in Latin America. Turkey has not felt and acted like the confident global player it is today since the heyday of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century.

After the decline of the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century, the Turks tried to belong to Europe in hopes of eventually becoming an ordinary country subsumed by it. That dream has passed. In the past decade, a new Turkey was born, shaped by unprecedented political stability, domestic growth and new-found commercial and political clout overseas. This has instilled a sense of global confidence in the Turkish people, not seen since Suleiman the Magnificent ruled in Constantinople. "And the new Turkey is here to stay," says Namik Tan, the Turkish ambassador to Washington.

Like a Eurasian China, the new Turkey is interested in building influence across the globe and is no longer confined by a regional, European rubric. FULL POST

By Fareed Zakaria, CNN

Earlier this year, I thought the Syrian regime would be able to persevere. It has been extraordinarily brutal and, unfortunately, if governments are willing to open fire on their people with utter disregard for human life, it often works. Crowds disburse; people stop gathering. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been about as brutal as you can get. So I thought that, as sad as it is, his regime would be able to endure.

Furthermore, I noted that the opposition did not have a geographic foothold in the way that the Libyan opposition did. In Libya, you had a divided country; the opposition, generally speaking, came from the East. They were able to take Benghazi. That provided them with a base of support. Syria's opposition doesn't seem to have that.

In the face of all of this, the courage of the Syrian people is just stunning. They keep protesting. They keep organizing. And it appears that the Syrian security forces are actually suffering significant setbacks.

But a big reason I think the Assad regime will fall is simple: It's running out of money. FULL POST