By Can Öztaş
There are nations that approach foreign policy the way sensible adults approach dinner: they taste, they adjust, they stop before their eyes start watering in public.
Then there are the rest of us. People like me from the south of Turkey, spooning “pul biber” (chili pepper) onto everything like it is a constitutional duty, insisting it’s for flavor while the nervous system files a formal complaint and the stomach begins drafting its dissenting opinion.
Turkey is not alone in this. But we are, let’s say, culturally well-trained for the genre. Peppers are an important garnish in this country. Especially when we dry, flake, and weaponise the stuff into pul biber, we export the burn to 95 countries with a revenue of $14.1 million in 2025.
Then there’s “isot”, also known as “Şanlıurfa Biberi”, dark, slow, smoky, lingering. It’s not just cuisine: it is region, labor, memory, and ritual. If pul biber is the everyday heat you shake onto life, isot is the sophisticated burn you apply deliberately, like a signature.
So yes, we know our heat.
BURN IN FOREIGN POLICY: TASTE FOR INTENSITY
And that matters, because foreign policy has its own pul biber: not a taste, but a trigger. It hits the national alarm system, floods the body politic with urgency, and then, perversely, with relief. The first burn is unpleasant; the second is manageable; the tenth becomes a ritual. What begins as seasoning becomes identity. And like the collector who buys special peppers to display rather than eat, a country can start accumulating crises not to solve them, but to exhibit them, proof of defiance arranged neatly on the shelf.
In politics, the rewards of “heat” are immediate and concentrated: attention, cohesion, the comforting simplification of a complicated world into one clear sensation. The costs are delayed and distributed: markets, alliances, institutions, credibility, and the slow erosion of room to maneuver.
Political science has a blunt term for one of the reward mechanisms: the “rally around the flag” effect, where external confrontation can temporarily increase support for leaders under certain conditions. It is not automatic, and it is not guaranteed. But like the first bite of something irresponsibly spicy, it often works to alert the body and also just enough to tempt another bite.
DOSE CREEP & CRISIS ADDICTION
Some heat is unavoidable. Some is even strategically useful. And no, we did not light every fire that we live beside. But when we think about where we live, one does not have to invent volatility, when we sit next to the war in Ukraine that re-militarised the Black Sea, the Syrian conflict’s long shadow, including the refugees, Gaza’s moral and strategic vertigo, and an Eastern Mediterranean that periodically remembers it has energy, maritime boundaries, and old grudges.
The pepper metaphor is not about blame. It is about habituation. When you live near constant heat, you stop noticing mild flavors. Normal diplomacy, institutional patience, collegial interaction, slow bargaining, the dull dignity of procedure, all of it starts to feel bland, even suspicious. Compromise tastes like weakness. Prudence feels like someone stole your personality.
And then the problem worsens, because the public grows accustomed to the performance. Yesterday’s tension becomes baseline. Today’s rhetoric must be hotter to be heard. Tomorrow’s gesture must be sharper to be believed.
That is “dose creep” in statecraft: not necessarily a plan for war, but a political metabolism trained to require spice in order to feel alive.
NEED FOR SPICE IN FOREIGN POLICY?
So, the real question is not whether Turkey “loves heat”. We clearly do. We grow it, brand it, register it, export it. The question is whether we can distinguish culinary heat from political heat. Because in food, pain is optional and bounded: you can stop eating, drink ayran, laugh, recover, live to order dessert.
In foreign policy, the burn travels. It slips into budgets, trade, visas, alliances, and the everyday lives of people who never asked for extra isot on their future. We are often encouraged to believe that suffering is proof of sophistication, like isot itself: the darker the pepper, the deeper the character. As if a nation’s dignity is measured by how long it can stare into the mirror with tears in its eyes and declare, heroically, that it isn’t crying.
Some heat is a fact of geography. But if the point of foreign policy becomes the burn itself, we are no longer seasoning the meal. We are eating the spice jar and calling it our civilisational duty.
*Can Öztaş, LL.M., Ph.D, recently retired from Turkish diplomatic service and currently teaches courses on foreign policy and international law at Bilkent University.
