TURKEY/INFLUENCE: "Triumph of the Turks: Turkey Is the Surprising Beneficiary of our Misadventures in the Middle East," by Owen Matthews and Christopher Dickey, Newsweek, 7 December 2009.

Matthews and Dickey have written before on Turkey with great insight.

Gist: it's Turkey vice Iran that's the big winner from Bush-Cheney's big bang takedown of Saddam.

Me like plenty.

Turkey, as some readers know, has a special place in my heart because my books always get translated there--pronto!

But it makes sense: Turkey is totally on the make in a strategic sense, so a natural consumer of such thinking.

Naturally, lotsa worries in NATO that Turkey is going Islamist, but I sense that it's more a matter of Turkey just deciding it's happy to be who it is and isn't going to sugar-coat its identity anymore just to make the nervous Euros accept it in their Christians-only club. Good on Turkey, I say, because the world benefits more from a Turkey that's avowedly Islamic and successful in a globalization sense than one that performs a personality transplant to gain entry into the EU.

So the bitching continues: the West frets that Turkey doesn't take Western values into account, and the Turks know damn well that the West rarely takes Turkish interests into account, so turnabout is fair play--finally.

Turkey's economy has doubled in the last decade, and its trade and investment ties are now more eastern- and southern-focused than directed at the EU.

Their logic is impeccable: "We can't be prosperous if we live in a poor neighborhood. We can't be secure if we live in a violent one."

I call it: shrink the Gap from the Seam in, letting the truly incentivized lead the way.

The more Turkey embraces this role, the more it's obviously in the Core. I make the map today and there's no question that I draw the Gap line so Turkey is on the Core-side of the Seam. Like Brazil, it has become a primary integrating agent.

About two years ago I put in a sequence in my Core-Gap map slide where I argue that the integration of the Balkans moved the seam line south to the point where Turkey is now clearly in the Core.

Naturally, it was really cool for me to finally visit Istanbul last May.