Turkey, Our Ally

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Front Page Magazine:

On his visit to Turkey in 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama proclaimed that Turkey and the U.S. can build “a model partnership” and in an interview with Time in January 2012, he spoke of “the bonds of trust” he had forged with certain leaders, including Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

 

Traditional Turkish foreign policy, based on Atatürk’s dictum “peace at home and peace abroad,” has been replaced by a delusion, created by former foreign and now prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, that Turkey can restore its former Ottoman magnificence. As Davutoglu proclaimed in Sarajevo in 2009, “Like in the 16th century, when the Ottoman Balkans were rising, we will once again make the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Middle East, together with Turkey, the center of world politics.”

 

The main thrust of this new policy has been to create a Muslim Brotherhood crescent running from Egypt through Turkey to Syria to rival Iran’s Shia crescent, but this policy has been a dismal failure. Turkish ambassadors have been withdrawn from Syria, Egypt, Israel, Libya and Yemen, and recently from Austria and the Vatican, after their acknowledgement of the Armenian genocide, resulting in what Ibrahim Kalin, Erdogan’s chief adviser, in a tweet two years ago, called “precious loneliness.”