Anation’s survival hinges on power, yet the zenith of superpower status can paradoxically erode the strategic reasoning essential to sustain it. During the Cold War, the United States maintained strategic discipline by balancing its economic and military might against a peer competitor, the Soviet Union. However, the postCold War unipolar order disrupted this equilibrium, giving rise to a critical paradox: an excess of power began to dull Washington’s capacity for long-term strategic thought (Gaddis, 2005).
This erosion has been accelerated by the transformation of U.S. foreign policy from a long-term strategic enterprise into a reflexive system driven by lobbying networks, domestic polarisation, and short-term political gains. This condition aligns with Jürgen Habermas’s concept of a “rationality crisis,” where a system’s mastery of means—its technical and administrative power—expands even as its ability to generate coherent, purpose-oriented ends collapses (Habermas, 1975). In the American context, this crisis manifests as a foreign policy that increasingly treats power not as an instrument of strategy, but as a mechanism of reassurance, attempting to compensate for a lack of planning through military force and sanctions.
Compounding this intellectual crisis is the erosion of the material foundations of American power. The United States’ critical dependency on China for rare earth elements (REEs)—essential for defence, digital technology, and renewable energy—reveals that its technological superiority no longer guarantees material independence (Moran, 2021). This vulnerability makes the recalibration of U.S. strategic rationale not just imperative but urgent.
It is at this strategic juncture that Türkiye’s importance becomes decisive. Positioned at the nexus of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and possessing the world’s second-largest reserves of rare earth elements, Türkiye has the potential to become a “hub of critical minerals” (Anadolu Agency, 2022). This capacity offers the West a tangible path to reduce its dependency on China and re-establish equilibrium in global supply chains. Consequently, institutional cooperation with Ankara is not a mere tactical option but a foundational partnership for sustaining U.S. global leadership.
The recent rapprochement between Donald Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan underscores this strategic logic. When the urgent need for rare earth elements among Trump’s technology backers is considered, this diplomatic interest transcends personal chemistry, reflecting instead an emerging nexus of power, technology, and raw materials. In this sense, strengthening ties with Ankara represents a potential step toward overcoming America’s rationality crisis. Yet, this rational impulse exists in direct tension with the enduring influence of pro Israel, Armenian, and Greek lobbies, whose anti-Türkiye agendas perpetuate the very paradox at the heart of the crisis.
Ultimately, this paper argues that the fundamental challenge for the United States is not a deficit of power, but a deficit of coherence. It will first delineate the mechanisms—such as the electoral finance cycle and bureaucratic capture—through which lobbying produces strategic irrationality. It will then present the case of Türkiye as a critical litmus test: a partner whose geopolitical and geo-economic assets offer solutions to core U.S. strategic problems, yet whose potential is consistently undermined by the self-defeating policies born of America’s internal rationality crisis. Overcoming this crisis requires the U.S. to rediscover state-level strategic reasoning and realign its policy means with its declared global ends.
