While Turkish officials portray this campaign as an anti-terrorism operation (awkwardly named Operation Olive Branch), Turkey has much to answer for in this department. Over the course of the conflict in Syria, the Turkish government turned a blind eye to jihadists, enabled al-Qaeda affiliates, and was (at best) ambivalent about fighting the Islamic State. Let us also stipulate that Turkey would likely be better off if it approached the grievances of many of its Kurdish citizens with an open hand rather than a clenched fist. It is also true that the rhetoric of Turkish leaders at rallies in support of Turkey’s incursion is blood curdling.

And yet the Turkish operation is entirely rational—not only in terms of how the Turks view the war in Syria and its impact on their own security, but also in terms of Turkey’s geography, identity, and problematic history with great powers. Policymakers in Washington often justify Turkey’s strategic importance based on location. The country’s capital, Ankara, sits roughly at the geographic center of many U.S. foreign policy concerns in the Balkans, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Caucasus, and the Middle East. This geography also has its disadvantages for Turks. As a rump state of the Ottoman Empire, it shares long borders with threatening, unstable, or warring countries, a fact the Turks recognize. It is hard to have, in Atatürk’s famous words, “peace at home, peace in the world” when the fragmentation of countries on one’s borders threatens one’s own unity. Observers were shocked when, in October 2016, Erdogan questioned the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne that defined the Republic of Turkey’s borders. At the time, the Turks were facing the possibility that Iraq’s Kurds would declare their independence at the same time their Syrian cousins were leveraging battlefield success and American support to do the same.

This geographical fate accentuates the unresolved problem of identity within Turkey’s ethno-national state. It is true that there are many Kurds who have prospered and participate in the political, social, and economic life of the country. But there are also a large number of Turkey’s approximately 15 million Kurdish citizens who are alienated from a society that, over the course of the republic’s history, has denied their identity or made it difficult to express their “Kurdishness.” These circumstances spawned separatists in the form of the PKK, raising fears among Turks that, should this group prevail in battle, it would shear off a large piece of Turkey’s southeast territory. What, from the perspective of Turks, would this mean for Armenian and Greek claims on current Turkish land? All three Anatolian minorities have strong support in the West, raising fears in Turkey—that seem unreasonable and even conspiratorial to Westerners, but reasonable to Turks—about the country’s dissolution.