Alliance formation and cohesion have been a crucial factor shaping roughly all agendas in international relations with the growing effect of interdependency. By understanding the importance of alliances in world politics, one can see that alliances can promote peace and eliminate the tension and insecure environment of international relations. In this respect, this thesis focuses on the peace-promoting role of alliances rather than their war-promoting one. The Turkey-NATO alliance underlines this situation very well, starting with the Cold War. Accordingly, this thesis presents the alliance formation and cohesion behaviors of Turkey by looking at the Cold War and post-Cold War periods and attempts to discover how Turkey provides stability in the Middle East. In this respect, different alliance theories explain Turkey’s alliance behavior in different time periods.
Turkey’s alliance behavior in contemporary history shows that it resolves conflicts and promotes stability through institutional cooperation with the Middle East while maintaining a military alliance with the West. Its western characteristics as a secular state with a western democracy and the only Muslim country in NATO make Turkey the only bridge between the West and the Middle East. In this respect, it will be argued that since interconnectedness increases by globalization, Turkey has been experiencing a high level of sphere of influence because of its historical, religious and ethnic ties and its geopolitical importance. Studying Turkey’s alliance behavior and its close historical and cultural ties with the Middle Eastern states not only questions Huntington’s clash of civilization theory but also promises to increase cooperation between the West and Islamic countries. Alliances, therefore, should be formed and operated as "proponents of peace" rather than “weapons of war”.