Turkey: A Swing State in the Great Power Competition.

Dr. Soner Cagaptay

Topic: Turkey: A Swing State in the Great Power Competition.
Date: Tuesday, May 12, 2026
Place: Irondequoit Country Club: 4045 East Ave. [14618]
Time: 6:00 Cocktails; 7:00 Dinner; 8:00 Speaker Presentation followed by Q and A
Cost: $60 per person ($62 if paying online), buffet style. Cash Bar
Dinner: Buffet style – 2 protein options, 1 vegetarian option

***Registration Policy: For reservations, please email MemberServices@WACROC.org and remit payment ($60/pp) to: WACR, PO Box 25462, Rochester, NY 14625 OR
go to Meeting Registration – World Affairs Council of Rochester (wacroc.org) and register on-line ($62/pp to cover bank fees) no later than May 5, 2026..

Turkey’s global vocation has shifted under the long tenure of President Erdogan, from an exclusively European and pro-Western orientation to that of a transcontinental, swing state –and a middle power. Which dynamics inform these changes and what do they mean for the U.S.? For starters, Ankara has been playing a key role in ending the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, Syria, Iran. And while new areas of cooperation are emerging between Ankara and Washington in the great power competition in Africa and Eurasia, challenges to the relationship remain.

Soner Cagaptay is the Beyer Family Senior Fellow and director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute. He has written extensively on U.S.-Turkish relations, Turkish domestic politics, and Turkish nationalism, publishing in scholarly journals and major international print media, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and The Atlantic. He has been a regular col- umnist for Hürriyet Daily News, Turkey’s oldest and most influential English-language paper, and a contributor to CNN’s Global Public Square blog. He appears regularly on Fox News, CNN, NPR, and BBC. His latest book, A Sultan in Autumn: Erdogan Faces Turkey’s Uncontainable Forces, was published in June 2021 by I.B. Tauris. His books have been translated into Turkish, Italian, Greek, Romanian, and Croatian.

A historian by training, Dr. Cagaptay wrote his doctoral dissertation at Yale University (2003) on Turkish nationalism. Since 2025, he is an adjunct professor at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy. Dr. Cagaptay has taught courses at Yale, Princeton University, Georgetown University, and Smith College on the Middle East, Mediterranean, and Eastern Europe. His spring 2003 course on modern Turkish history was the first offered by Yale in three decades. From 2006-2007, he was Ertegun Professor at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies. Dr. Cagaptay is the recipient of numerous honors, grants, and chairs, among them the Smith-Richardson, Mellon, Rice, and Leylan fellowships, as well as the Ertegun chair at Princeton. He has also served on contract as chair of the Turkey Advanced Area Studies Program at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute. In 2012 he was named an American Turkish Society Young Society Leader.