Troubled Triangle

In April 2011, University of Virginia politics professor and veteran Middle East analyst William B. Quandt brought leading scholar-practitioners from Israel, Turkey, and the United States to a one-day gathering at the University of Virginia. Their task: To unravel and try to understand the tangle of accusations, sensitivities, fears, and misunderstandings that had arisen among policymakers in these three capitals. Troubled Triangle: The United States, Turkey, and Israel in the New Middle East is a record of the deliberations among these experts, that has been edited by Dr. Quandt.

Participants in the colloquium and in the project of producing this very timely volume include:

• Henri J. Barkey, an expert on Turkish affairs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Bernard L. and Bertha F. Cohen Professor at Lehigh University.
• Shlomo Brom, a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, Israel, and previously the head of strategic planning for the Israeli military’s general staff.
• F. Gregory Gause, III, an acclaimed analyst of Middle East affairs who is chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Vermont.
• Yaprak Gürsoy, an assistant professor at Istanbul Bilgi University and a 2008 PhD from U.Va.’s Department of Politics, where her dissertation compared the records of Greece and Turkey on democratization, civil-military relations, and business-government relations.
• Ellen Laipson, President of the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington, DC, and previously vice-chair of the National Intelligence Council.
• Tina S. Kaidenow, Deputy Assistant Secretary in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, with responsibility for issues related to Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, and the Caucasus.
• Daniel Levy, Senior Research Fellow and Co-Director of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation and a member of the Israeli government team that conducted peace talks with the Palestinians in early 2001.
• Allen Lynch, Director of Research at the U.Va’s Center for International Studies and a political scientist who specializes in international power dynamics.
• Soli Özel, Professor of International Relations and Political Science at Istanbul Kadir Has University and co-author of a recent report on rebuilding Turkish-American relations.
• Trita Parsi, President of the National Iranian American Council and author of the widely acclaimed Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States (2007), and
• Philip Zelikow, Professor of History at U.Va., and previously the executive director of the 9/11 Commission and Counsellor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.