On 6 April 2009, US President Barrack Obama addressed the Turkish Parliament with carefully crafted words. ‘History’, he declared, ‘is often tragic, but unresolved, it can be a heavy weight. Each country must work through its past. And reckoning with the past can help us seize a better future’. Obama’s move revealed the premium now placed by Washington on relations with Turkey. As such, the call to ‘confront the past’ was imbedded in a wider vision of Turkey as key partner in multiple arenas, from revitalizing NATO to building peace in the Middle East. As it turns out, the notion that Turkey’s promise as a regional and global player is somehow related to historical legacies is not new. For some time now prominent intellectuals and politicians in the country have been revisiting the past and extracting from it lessons for the present and future. This trend is evident with regard to the Armenian question, but also in the surge of popular interest in the final years of the Empire and early years of the Republic which has unleashed a passionate debate on the legacy of those decades. Nowhere is this more evident than in the so-called neo-Ottomanist foreign policy of the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi AKP). What are the sources of this burgeoning propensity to revisit the historical record? What do such debates tell us about shifting alignments in Turkish society and politics? And what are the implications of all this for Turkish foreign policy? This paper written by Nora Fisher Onar and supported by the GMF-German Marshall Fund of the United States, suggests that the will to revisit the past is rooted in domestic and international forces which have spurred diverse groups to question three pillars of the long dominant vision of the national project—its emphasis on a unitary identity, its understanding of secularism, and its ambivalence towards the West.