Today’s Zaman, 2 September 2013
People who tend to look at Turkey’s foreign policy from a realistic perspective have the bad habit of subjecting everything to the truth test. Although this habit is one of the characteristics that distinguish them from other schools, extreme reliance on it may prevent us from seeing many things.
Those who read the assessments about “precious loneliness” by realistic foreign policy experts or who have had a look at Şaban Kardaş’s article, “‘Precious loneliness’ as a mumpsimus,” that appeared in the Zaman daily on Aug. 26 will understand better what I am trying to get at. In this article, Kardaş authoritatively explains why the concept of “precious loneliness” popularized by Cengiz Çandar is a mumpsimus. But is that all there is to the story? Is the validity of a concept compromised when we prove that it is a problematic, wrong and ideological one?