Many had supposed that Gülenists were good people and that their activities would help society for the better. A good example is Bülent Ecevit, a former prime minister of Turkey and known to be a strong advocate of the Kemalist leftist political ideology. Ecevit supported the Gülen Movement by saying that Fetullah Gülen was the representative of moderate Islam vis-à-vis political Islam. However, with the uncovering of the secret agenda of the Gülenists and its messianic discourse, both concealed by the avowal of universal moral values, many people realized the terrible mistake they had made, which caused a strong sense of betrayal. Since the coup attempt, people in Turkey have fully grasped the fact that the Gülenists’ real intention was to take control of the state. Fetullah Gülen, the FETO leader, taught his disciples to obey all rules without question and to wait for the right time to seize power. It seems that the Gülenists sacrificed their lives to reach the promised day, to which they had dedicated their entire lives.

Although Turkish politics is passing through turbulent times, one can safely argue that the decades-old discourses and highly problematic hypocritical approaches of Gülenists have lost all plausibility. Moreover, the Gülenists have lost their legitimacy and credibility within society. A recent study shows that eighty-one per cent of Turkish citizens support Gülen’s extradition to Turkey and a subsequent trial. Many believe that the Gülenists’ will to seize power will not stop here and that they may seek to regroup in other countries in order to redesign their domestic politics. The foreign minister of Turkey, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, has already pointed out such a threat for some of the Turkic countries in which FETO has been established for decades, as in Turkey. As Gülenists attempt to turn Turkey from democratic to military rule, it is probable that they will try to apply similar methods to other countries in the near future. On the bloody night of July 15, Turkish people acknowledged that Fetullah Gülen and his followers pose a global threat since they did not hesitate to use heavy weapons against civilians when they tried to seize power.

FETO has lost all legitimacy in the eyes of Turkish society and, as a side effect, has united Turkish citizens from all ideological backgrounds and worldviews. Turkish citizens survived by defending their democracy against this religio-military attack. For Gülen, it seems that Turkey was only a step toward a broader goal; the organization will certainly continue to disseminate and realize its messianic purpose from East to West. The FETO leader should be considered not only a religious fanatic and fundamentalist in his own country but also a danger to the democratic world order.

Fourth, there are two main options for Turkish-American relations going forward.  First, the United States may convincingly demonstrate that it will not employ the Gülenists, or any other similar instrument, to exert influence in the Turkish military, bureaucracy, judiciary, media, and politics-at-large. Exerting such influence through covert networks is against the spirit of a genuine “alliance” between two sovereign political entities. According to leading Turkish policy-makers, including President Erdoğan and Prime Minister Yıldırım, the minimum prerequisite for the pursuit of this option seems to be the extradition of Fethullah Gülen from the United States to Turkey, which would signal the willingness of the United States to recalibrate bilateral relations as a genuine alliance.

The second option is the breakup of the Turkish-American alliance, and Turkey’s realignment with one or several other great powers to balance against the United States, since the United States would then be reclassified as a hostile power for sheltering Gülen and the leading Gülenists, who are implicated in the failed coup plot. Moreover, the United States may even be designated as the foreign state sponsor of Gülenist terrorism against Turkey. Russia, Brazil, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, Pakistan, and France are among the many middle or great powers with which Turkey has established amicable relations, at least for a limited time (in the case of Russia and Iran), under AK Party governments since 2002. Russia is the most likely and nearby great power with which Turkey may seek to build such a balancing coalition in the near future. Turkish Eurasianists, an ideologically pro-Russian group composed of Kemalists, Maoists, and other leftist nationalists, have advocated such a pro-Russian reorientation in Turkish foreign policy for almost the past two decades, as I argued and demonstrated in my articles in Turkish Studies(2015) and in Ab Imperio (2004). However, pro-Russian sympathies go far beyond this radical intellectual movement in Turkey after the failed military coup, for various reasons.

Russian President Putin was the first major world leader to call President Erdoğan on the day after the military coup attempt to state his support for the democratically elected government of Turkey, and Russia is the first country to which Erdoğan will be paying an official visit since the coup. These two observations alone are indicative of a palpable pro-Russian reorientation after the coup. There are even reports, emphatically accepted and circulated by some Turkish journalists, that Russian intelligence warned Erdoğan just hours before the impending coup, even though there is no official verification of these reports. Moreover, the Turkish pilots who shot down a Russian bomber aircraft in November 24, 2015, which brought Turkey and Russia to the brink of war, have been taken into custody as suspects in the Gülenist conspiracy. This incident is cited as evidence of Gülenists deliberately trying to instigate a military conflict between Russia and Turkey, in the service of US interests.

Fifth, any new alliance that Turkey may form with another great power, including Russia, is unlikely to be as asymmetric and as exclusive as the Turkish-American alliance has been since Turkey’s entry into NATO in 1952. There is at least one objective and one subjective/attitudinal reason for this. Objectively, there is no other great power whose military economic capabilities would massively overshadow Turkey’s capabilities as do those of the United States. Thus, if a Turkish-Russian alliance was to be established, for example, the difference in bilateral military economic capabilities would not be as incomparable or as asymmetric as the difference in bilateral capabilities in the Turkish-American alliance. I have argued elsewhere that the military economic capability gap between Russia and Turkey closed considerably with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, only to widen somewhat with the rise in oil prices in the early 2000s. Subjectively, if Turkish-American alliance breaks up precisely because of the anti-American public opinion that the asymmetry of this alliance engendered over time, it is unlikely that the Turkish public opinion would be convinced to be part of another asymmetric alliance.

Finally, despite all of the above, it is still more likely, for structural reasons and simple path dependence, that the Turkish-American alliance will persist after a lengthy and tortuous renegotiation, in which significant political capital will have to be spent on both sides of the Atlantic. If such a renegotiation of the alliance succeeds, in the end, Turkey will continue to be a key US ally as it has been since 1952, but Turkey’s status within the Western alliance might then resemble that of France, a country that has been a US ally but with a set of preferences and priorities that differ significantly from the United States in certain important respects.

It suffices to remember that, as late as 2003, France led the opposition to the Iraq War within NATO, and Turkey surprised the world, including many Turks themselves, by refusing to participate in the US-led invasion of Iraq (although French foreign policy in general changed significantly during Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidency). These kinds of disagreements are to be expected and should be respected and tolerated in a genuinely multilateral alliance. The American-British initiative to invade Iraq, executed with a “coalition of the willing,” and its disastrous consequences for millions of Iraqis and the wider Middle East, including Turkey, provides a tragic cautionary tale against the dangers of asymmetric alliances with unilateral decision making.