Politik Uyanış

Many books examine strategy and politics separately, or explain the relation between them. This one puts the human being and Turkey at the center, and can be read as a textbook, a guide, a reference, a source of inspiration, or as a criticism. Its stated ambition is to hand the reader a method for looking at problems with high strategy, rather than a set of conclusions to accept.

Reading a country’s grand strategy whole, he argues, requires two things in order: first the features and difficulties that fall within geopolitics, then a multidisciplinary account drawing on history, philosophy, culture, political practice and the existing balances. Without a sound vision, no forward step can be taken at all.

The title’s phrase carries the argument. Nations rarely evaluate what their activity actually accumulates, and his claim is that national power must be continuously increased rather than spent down. He gives the idea an image: power lost the way soil is lost to rain and flood. International texts signed by governments in a moment of enthusiasm surface years later as obstacles in the field of survival. Left unattended, sediment builds up the way plaque builds in the arteries, and the expected progress never arrives.

The second diagnosis concerns politics itself, which he treats as the country’s most conspicuous deficiency: politics conducted without political concepts. Against that he sets national power, coordination and cooperation, and political leadership, with human resources at the center. The book also makes a decision about who it is talking to: the citizen and the specialist together, which he concedes was the hard part.