Anyone who has ever spent time in Washington knows that briefings with policymakers and their staff tend to start and end with the question: “Is [name of country] stable?” The problem is that the answer to this question is rarely straightforward. To respond “yes” or “no” is to invite policies based on faulty assumptions. That’s what happened in late 2010, when Middle East experts and other observers informed U.S. officials that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s rule was durable and his son, Gamal, or Omar Suleiman—the head of intelligence—would likely succeed him. Of course, none of those assumptions turned out to be true.
Rather than looking at countries in terms of stability versus instability, it’s more analytically useful (and interesting) to approach the problem in terms of assessing a country’s relative instability. And on this measure, the country in the Middle East that stands out is Turkey.
