Turkey’s ties with its neighbors have been transformed since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power almost seven years ago in November 2002. Some analysts have described the AKP’s foreign policy as a “zero problems with neighbors” approach. Under the AKP, Ankara has indeed eliminated problems and built good ties with some neighbors, such as Syria and Iran, and signaled a thaw with Armenia, with whom Turkey shares a closed border. On the other hand, Ankara’s traditionally good ties with other neighbors such as Georgia and Azerbaijan have deteriorated under the AKP, and Turkish-Israeli ties could unravel despite diplomats’ best efforts. The AKP’s foreign policy, far from producing “zero problems with neighbors,” has resulted in significant ups with some neighbors and significant downs with others—especially those that are pro-Western.

For starters, the AKP’s foreign policy has focused heavily on the Muslim Middle East. Some analysts have referred to the party’s foreign policy as “neo-Ottomanist,” suggesting “secular” imperial ambitions or desire to achieve status as a regional power. But the AKP’s foreign policy energy has not asserted Turkey’s weight equally in all the areas that were under Ottoman rule, namely the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Middle East. Instead, the AKP has focused its energy on the Middle East, with a slant towards Islamist and anti-Western actors, while building a finance-based relationship with Russia.

In this regard, the party’s use of diplomacy is evocative: a study of high-level visits by AKP officials to the Middle East, Balkans and Caucasus reveals that the party focuses asymmetrically on anti-Western Arab countries and Iran, while ignoring Israel, the Balkans and the Caucasus. Between November 2002 and April 2009, the Turkish foreign minister made at least eight visits to Iran and Syria, while paying only one visit to Azerbaijan (a Turkic nation once considered to be the closest country to Turkey) and one visit to Georgia (despite the fact that after Georgia’s independence, Turkey had acted as a mentor for that nation). During the same period, the Turkish prime minister made at least seven visits to Qatar and Saudi Arabia, while paying only two visits to Greece and Bulgaria, Turkey’s two immediate European and Balkan neighbors.

Much of the AKP’s energy in the Muslim Middle East has been focused on Syria. In the 1990s, Turkey viewed Syria as an enemy, because of its support of the Kurdistan Workers Party’s (PKK) terror attacks against Turkey. Yet, on October 13, Turkey and Syria opened their borders, which facilitated visa free-travel, and set up joint cabinet-level meetings which encouraged a meld in bilateral policymaking. Turkish-Syrian rapprochement began in the late 1990s when Damascus stopped supporting the PKK, but the past seven years of rapprochement under the AKP have brought about a significant strengthening of Syrian-Turkish ties. The AKP’s sympathy towards Turkey’s Arab neighbors, and its tendency to analyze the Middle East through an “us versus them” religion-based political lens, as well as to side with anti-Western causes in the region, have helped build Turkish-Syrian relations. Today, diplomats describe Turkish-Syrian relations as perfect.

Turkey’s ties with Iran have also improved under the AKP’s leadership, although not to the same extent as Turkish-Syrian ties. This is due to the fact that Tehran is a regional power which, unlike the Baath regime in Damascus, does not need patrons to survive. Still, Turkey defends Iran’s nuclearization, and as international pressure to prevent it mounts, Iran will likely launch diplomatic overtures to strengthen its bonds with Turkey. Trade links, including Turkish purchase of and investment in Iranian natural gas, will upgrade bilateral ties. Yet they will also create tensions between Ankara and the West, which will view AKP-promoted investments in Iran as undermining efforts to isolate Iran economically.

As Turkey’s ties with Iran have improved, Turkish-Israeli relations have significantly deteriorated under the AKP. The party’s critical rhetoric regarding Israel, which has eroded all Turkish public support for ties with Israel, had been dismissed for a long time in the West and in Israel as domestic politicking. However, that evaluation changed earlier this month. On October 7, the AKP dis-invited Israel to “Anatolian Eagle,” a NATO air force exercise that has been held in central Turkey with U.S., Israeli and Western states’ participation since the mid-1990s. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan justified his party’s decision by saying that Israel is a “persecutor.” Yet, the next day, the AKP announced that it had requested that Syria, whose regime persecutes its own people, participate in joint military exercises. A proverbial mountain is moving in Turkish foreign policy: the AKP’s “us versus them” mindset, which does not see nations but rather religious blocks in the Middle East, is corroding the foundations of Turkey’s 60-year-old military and political cooperation with Israel.

Rather than being pro-Western or neo-Ottoman in a “secular” sense, the AKP’s foreign policy is asymmetrically focused on anti-Western Middle East powers, as well as Russia. Rather than having a “zero problems with all neighbors” approach, the AKP’s foreign policy is a mixed bag, eliminating problems with some neighbors, yet souring previously good ties with other neighbors, especially pro-Western ones. The question is: how is that good for the United States?

The past several days have witnessed not one but two momentous, even stunning, developments in Turkish foreign policy that are reverberating through the region. Both are the work of Ahmet Davutoğlu, a former university professor who became Turkish foreign minister last year. Before that, Davutoğlu (shown on far right with his Syrian counterpart Walid Muallem) served for several years as the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s chief foreign policy advisor. In a manner perhaps befitting a university professor, Davutoğlu has aspired to give Turkish foreign policy a comprehensive and consistent conceptual basis. He laid out his vision in his book Strategic Depth: Turkey’s International Position (Stratejik Derinlik: Türkiye’nin Uluslararası Konumu). According to this vision, whereas in the past the Turkish Republic followed a policy of quasi-isolation and self-imposed quarantine from its neighbors, today it should instead seek to take advantage of the cultural and historical links it shares with other countries in its region. As foreign minister, Davutoğlu has been working tirelessly to put his stamp on Turkish foreign policy. The past week has offered two dramatic examples of Turkey’s new foreign policy orientation.

An opening to the East. The first of took place on October 10 in Zurich where the Turkish and Armenian foreign ministers signed a protocol agreeing to open their border and establish diplomatic ties between their two countries. Up until recently, observers – Armenian, Turkish, and foreign alike – generally regarded the idea of a Turkish-Armenian rapprochement as sheer fantasy. Precisely because their histories are intertwined, the rift between the Armenian and Turkish peoples is deep and multi-dimensional, going beyond already contentious geopolitics to extend into the very hearts of modern Armenian and Turkish identities and the founding myths of the Turkish and Armenian republics. Attitudes on both sides are so sensitive that despite even lengthy and meticulous preparation by the Armenian and Turkish foreign ministries, the signing of the protocol was almost consigned to remain the realm of fantasy right before it took place.

At the last minute both foreign ministers objected to the public statement planned by the other. The ceremony was saved only when, apparently at the suggestion of Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, the two foreign ministers compromised by agreeing simply to refrain from making any statements at all. Such is the fragility of the rapprochement. Moreover, to come into force, the legislatures of Armenia and Turkey must first ratify the protocols. Multiple constituencies opposed to the normalization of relations exist inside (and outside) the two countries, and they may well prove skeptics and nay-sayers correct.

Nonetheless, the mere fact that Davutoğlu was able to bring the two countries this close in itself represents a fundamental change in Turkish foreign policy. And whereas the likelihood of failure in these sorts of sensitive and politically charged undertakings typically deters most, Davutoğlu’s tack is to capitalize in these situations on the power of boldness combined with persistence to change first expectations and then reality. Simply by striving for seemingly unthinkable change, Davutoğlu reckons, one demonstrates that change is possible, and thereby one changes fundamental calculations of all parties. The fact that Davutoğlu was able to coordinate both American and Russian support for this Caucasian gambit reflects his exceptional diplomatic skills and the considerable momentum he has already generated for normalization. Turkey’s opening to Armenia will have an impact on everything from stability in the greater Caucasus and Caspian region through world energy supplies and the future of NATO.

An opening to the South. As momentous as Turkey’s opening to its east in the Caucasus might be, its opening to the south has the potential to change regional dynamics even more. For most of its existence, the Turkish Republic has enjoyed at best cool relations with Syria. During the 1980s and 1990s, Turkish-Syrian ties were outright confrontational as the two states sparred over such issues as Turkish control of the waters of the Euphrates and Syrian support for the Kurdistan Workers Party (Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan or PKK) inside of Turkey. Relations hit a nadir in 1999 when Turkey threatened to invade Syria if it continued to provide sanctuary to the head of the PKK, Abdullah Ocalan. This period of heightened Turkish-Syrian tension overlapped with the establishment of a security partnership with Israel that became one of the constituent elements of the regional balance of power.

Relations between Syria and Turkey began to improve slowly after 1999, while ties to Israel became noticeably more strained in the wake of Israel’s 2006 military operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon. But this week, what remained of the old architecture of regional relations came crashing down. First, in a pointed gesture, Turkey retracted its invitation to Israel to participate in the aerial war games known as “Anatolian Eagle.” Turkey has hosted the war games annually since 2001, and it has routinely involved Israel in them. This year, however, Turkey refused to allow the Israeli air force to take part as form of protest over Israel’s policies toward Gaza and in particular Operation Cast Lead.

The United States and Italy subsequently pulled out of Anatolian Eagle in protest. If this gesture was intended to cow Turkey, it failed. Lest there be any misunderstanding about Turkey’s motives for excluding Israel, Davutoğlu clarified matters on October 13 when, in what Turkish newspapers described as a “warning” to Israel, he demanded that the “human tragedy in Gaza” end and that “respect be shown to the al-Aqsa mosque, the Noble Sanctuary, and East Jerusalem, which are sacred to Muslims.” The day before, the Turkish foreign ministry on its website described the public interpretations and commentary of Israeli officials regarding Anatolian Eagle as “unacceptable” and chided those officials to use “common sense” in their future statements and actions.

No less significant than the content of Davutoğlu’s “warning” was the place where he chose to issue it, in the Syrian city of Aleppo at the first ministers’ meeting of the newly formed Turkish-Syrian High Level Strategic Cooperation Council. Whereas a decade ago common opposition to Syria served as a glue binding Turkey to Israel, today Turkey’s foreign minister issues appeals from inside Syria to Israel to heed the sensitivities of Muslims toward their holy sites in Jerusalem.

During his visit to Syria, Davutoğlu underscored that the opening up to Syria is neither a matter of tactics nor temporary, but is constituent part of the new Turkish foreign policy. Thus, for example, when he announcing the introduction of visa-free travel for Syrian and Turkish citizens, he described the occasion as a third common holiday for Turkish and Syrian citizens alongside the two major Islamic feasts Eid ul-Fitr and Eid ul-Adha. Davutoğlu brought to Syria nine cabinet members and revealed a raft of projects ranging from educating Syrian students in Turkey through the removal of mines from the Turkish-Syrian border to the transformation of Aleppo into a major logistical hub for expanded Turkish trade with the Arab Middle East. The Turks hope to use Aleppo to meet Arab demand for Turkish foodstuffs.

There is a certain poetic irony to the Turkish dream of exporting food throughout the Middle East via Syria. Damascus’ Ottoman-era fame for its sweets gave rise to a Turkish saying that aptly summarized official Turkish attitudes from the 1920s through the end of the century toward all things Arab: Ne Şam’ın şekeri, ne Arabın yüzü, literally “Neither sweets from Damascus nor an Arab’s face,” which can be roughly translated as, I don’t want to have anything to do with the Arabs, even if they do have tasty sweets.

Instead, while in Aleppo Davutoğlu uttered an entirely different phrase to describe Turkish-Syrian relations: “A common fate, a common history, a common future.”

Israeli Anxieties. Needless to say, the developments of the past several days have thrown Israeli politicians and policymakers into confusion and no small bit of anxiety, with some urging caution and others hinting at forms of retaliation against Turkey ranging from ending Israeli arms sales to withdrawing support for Turkish lobbyists in America. At this point, however, it would seem that there is little to be gained from responding quickly in the hopes of either assuaging Ankara or deterring it from similar demarches. The Turkish-Israeli strategic partnership is no longer in crisis, but has essentially ended. Indeed, unconfirmed reports in the Syrian and Turkish media promise the conclusion of a formal Turkish-Syrian strategic partnership in the near future.

Not surprisingly, Davutoğlu’s criticisms of Israel and expressions of solidarity have met with great enthusiasm inside Syria. Without a doubt, the sound of cheering crowds in a country long known to the Turks as an obstinate and troublesome neighbor must deeply gratify Davutoğlu. That gratification will certainly only increase as others in the Arab world and beyond join in to hail the change in Turkey’s regional orientation away from Israel to the Arabs. Turkey’s expanded engagement with the Arab world may well turn out to be a boon for all involved, as Davutoğlu surely hopes. Turkey has a great deal to offer by way of its relative political openness and economic dynamism to the Arab world. If done correctly, Turkey’s engagement could help point the way for the Arabs to transform their societies into more open, competitive, and democratic ones.

But that will be no easy task, nor will it be a short one. Initiatives such as student exchanges and increased business contacts can help change societies, but they require decades to yield fruit and provide little gratification after their inception.

Turkey’s engagement also carries real risks if the course of influence runs in the opposite direction, i.e. from the Arab countries to Turkey. This was the reasoning behind the traditional Kemalist desire to keep all things Middle Eastern at arms length and under control. Turkish officials saw the Middle East as a cultural swamp from which Turkey must escape, not a realm of common culture in which it could thrive.

As Davutoğlu must recognize, the problems of the Arab world, and the sources of its misery, are greater and deeper than the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Arab countries are politically dysfunctional and most are economically moribund. There is little that they can offer the Turks aside from perhaps oil and gas and markets for Turkish consumer goods. In earlier eras, others such as Nasser and Saddam Hussein sought to expand their influence throughout the region by appealing to Arab sympathies against Israel, but their efforts did nothing but bring their own societies to ruin and leave the Arabs as whole worse off. Today, Ahmadinejad is attempting something similar with his backing for Hezbollah and routine denunciations of Israel. Yet, one need only look at Iran’s recent elections to answer the question of whether Ahmadinejad’s version of statecraft is serving anyone but himself and those close to him.

Israel’s policies are not above criticism, but if Davutoğlu truly aspires to have Turkey play the role of an effective regional leader, he will have to direct some of his criticism toward those entities, such as Hezbollah and Hamas, that celebrate violent confrontation with Israel over the development of their own societies. And he will have to do so soon. With Iran in determined pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability, an enigmatic Obama administration sending mixed signals to the Middle East, and Hamas and Hezbollah mantaining their romantic commitments to violence, the sight and sound of Turkey closing ranks with Syria will not spur Israelis to step back and announce a “kindler, gentler” Israel to soothe its neighbors. Instead, it will only magnify existing fears among Israelis that their country does indeed face an unprecedented existential threat that only desperate action can solve. Better than most people, Davutoğlu should understand that precisely what Israel lacks is the sort of strategic depth Turkey possesses, and this has consequences for Israeli policymaking.

But does Davutoğlu understand this? Right now, the indications are that he does not, or at least does not care.

Turkey’s experiment with Islamists-turned-democrats might be coming to a tragic end. When the Justice and Development Party (AKP), rooted in Turkey’s Islamist opposition, came to power in Turkey in 2002 and declared that it had become a democratic movement, nearly everyone gave it the benefit of doubt. At that time, the party pushed for European Union (EU) accession, and followed a liberal reform agenda. The party also reached out to non-Islamist constituencies, suggesting a pluralist understanding of democracy and alleviating concerns about its Islamist pedigree.

Seven years later, the AKP’s democratic credentials are under doubt. On September 8 the AKP slapped Doğan Media, Turkey’s largest media group, composed of liberal and secular voices, with a record $2.5 billion tax fine. The AKP has also made a habit of arresting its opponents and critics, connecting them to the Ergenekon case that alleges a coup plot against the government. Turkey-watchers are waking up from a dream that started well in 2002, but has since become an illiberal nightmare.

The AKP’s slide away from its liberal stance began in 2005. As Turkey started accession talks with the EU, the AKP decided that the talks necessitated reforms that would erode its popular support, and shied away from pursuing Turkey’s EU dream. Following the party’s landslide victory in the 2007 elections, with 47 percent support, it moved from a pluralist to a majoritarian understanding of democracy. The AKP began to interpret its popular mandate as a blank check to ignore democratic checks and balances, and crack down on dissent, using the financial police to intimidate liberal businesses and the Ergenekon case to harass its opponents and critics.

When the AKP came to power, Turkey’s liberal business lobby group TUSIAD, whose members control a large chunk of the Turkish economy, supported the AKP’s liberal pursuit of the dream of a European Turkey. However, relations between TUSIAD and AKP soured as the new majoritarian-thinking AKP abandoned consensus building policies—for instance telling TUSIAD to “shut up” during the 2007 debate for a new constitution.

TUSIAD members have since come under fire from government-controlled tax police. For example, Doğan Group, a prominent TUSIAD member, was targeted after Doğan’s newspapers covered a court case in Germany that dissolved a Turkish-German charity for illegal transfer of funds to various Islamists in Turkey. Tax authorities selectively audited Doğan’s businesses for a year, and slapped him with a $600 million fine in February, alleging improper business dealings. AKP leader and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan then called on Turks to boycott Doğan’s media outlets, exposing the political nature of the fine.

The AKP’s stance against Doğan is a move against independent media. Turkish media continues to be free, but its independence is now checked by a government that wants political subservience.

The case against Doğan is also a move against liberal businesses. In this regard, Vladimir Putin’s heavy-handed treatment of his billionaire opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky is a telling example. When Putin jailed the Russian businessman on corruption charges, he sent other Russian oligarchs a strong message. Soon thereafter, many embraced self-imposed exile or turned into subservient figures like Roman Abramovich. The AKP’s actions against Doğan suggest a striking parallel to the Russian case. The new fine brings the total charges against Doğan to $3.1 billion, an amount larger than Doğan’s worth. Should Doğan meet Khodorkovsky’s fate or come close to it, the remainder of the country’s rich—the safety valve of pro-Western Turkey—will be hard-pressed not to take inspiration from Abramovich.

Meanwhile, Turkey’s intellectuals worry about Ergenekon. When the case opened in 2007, AKP watchers saw it as an opportunity for Turkey to clean up corruption and investigate coup allegations. But the case has become much more than that.

For starters, the case is nebulous. In a recent study, Gareth Jenkins, an Istanbul-based analyst, described Ergenekon as a case that charges people “with membership of an organization which, as defined in the indictment presented to the court, does not appear to exist or to ever have existed.”

Instead of prosecuting criminals, the AKP is using this fluid case to persecute its opponents. Since 2007, AKP-controlled police have taken over 150 people, including university presidents, journalists, and women’s activists, into custody without evidence of criminal activity, only to release them after a few days of harsh questioning with no charges. Most have become docile intellectuals following their release. Meanwhile, some AKP opponents have been held in indefinite police custody for over a year, demonstrating to Turkey’s intellectuals the cost of not supporting the AKP.

Wiretaps are another tool for harassment of liberal and secular Turks. In Turkey, it is a crime to wiretap private conversations or publish conversations captured by the police. Yet pro-AKP media outlets regularly publish wiretapped conversations of the AKP’s opponents, compromising their private lives and even alleging that they are “terrorists” connected to Ergenekon. The AKP does not prosecute these crimes, which terrorize liberal intellectuals.

In truth, Ergenekon has devolved into a witch hunt, reminiscent of the McCarthy hearings in the United States. Most Turks refuse to even discuss the case on the phone or via e-mail, out of fear that just by speaking of it they might be implicated in it.

This state of fear and intimidation in Turkey is nightmarish. However, things could still end up well. Whenever Turkey goes through a political spasm, analysts warn about the collapse of Turkish democracy. Yet Turkey has pulled through numerous crises in the past, thanks to the balancing power of its fourth pillar. With coup allegations, arrest of government’s opponents, and a media crack down in the background, only free and independent media can clear things up. Never before has media independence been so crucial to Turkish democracy.

While Washington is mulling over what to do next in order to weaken Iran economically, this summer the Islamic Republic has taught us a lesson in strategic maneuvering, taking major steps to bolster its economy and geopolitical posture by positioning itself as an indispensable energy supplier to hundreds of millions of people.

Last May, I described here how after 14 years of negotiations, Iran, which has the world’s second largest natural gas reserves, signed a deal to connect its economy with its eastern neighbor, Pakistan, via a 1,300-mile natural gas pipeline. Both Iran and Pakistan hope to extend the pipeline into India and perhaps even into China. This would not only give Iran a foothold in the Asian gas market and ensure that millions of Pakistanis, Indians and perhaps Chinese are beholden to Iran’s gas, but it would also provide Iran with an economic lifeline and the diplomatic protection energy-dependent economies typically grant their suppliers.

Not wasting any time, Iran is now implementing the second tenet of its pipeline strategy. In July, it announced that by the end of 2009 it will be connected with its northern neighbor, Turkmenistan, Central Asia’s largest gas producer, via a pipeline. Turkmenistan’s interest in pumping its gas to Iran stems from its desire to diversify its export market. Two-thirds of Turkmenistan’s gas flow to Russia, and the dependence on one major client allows Moscow to take advantage of its former republic. But why would energy-rich Iran want to import gas from its neighbor? The answer is the Nabucco pipeline.

For some years, a number of European governments and a consortium of energy companies have been lobbying for the construction of a pipeline from Central Asia via Turkey and the Balkan states to Austria, aimed to ease Europe’s dependence on Russian gas. Last July an intergovernmental accord on Nabucco was signed in Ankara. Scheduled to be completed by 2014 at a cost of over $11 billion, the 2,000-mile pipe is estimated to supply between 5-10 percent of the EU’s projected gas consumption in 2020.

The problem, though, is that it is far from certain where the gas for Nabucco would come from. To date, not a single gas-producing country has signed on to the project. The U.S. position toward Nabucco has been supportive, with the caveat that no Iranian gas should supply the pipeline. But this is an exercise in self-delusion. Even if the 10-15 billion cubic meters of gas per year projected to be tapped from Azeri fields were to become available, much gas would still be needed to meet the pipeline’s capacity of 31 billion cubic meters of gas a year. No doubt about it: Nabucco would have to access both Turkmen and Iranian reserves.

This inconvenient truth is well known to all those involved with the project. But in order to maintain U.S. support, European governments, Turkey—the main transit state—and the consortium of companies which have undertaken to build the pipeline have made sure to drop Iran’s name from any official document or statement related to Nabucco. Tehran, so it seems, does not believe in denial. Its President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad knows well that making Europe beholden to his gas is the best insurance for his regime and that Iran is an appealing alternative to Russia for those for whom Vladimir Putin is a far bigger menace than him. Once Nabucco is constructed, it will be only a matter of short time before Iranian gas will be requested. Hence, the pipeline to Turkmenistan will also make Iran a conduit for Turkmen gas.

In Iran’s effort to bring its gas into the heart of Europe, it has another project: a 1,100-mile pipeline currently being constructed from Iran’s South Pars gas field through Turkey and onward to Greece, Italy and other European countries. This pipeline is expected to deliver 20.4 billion cubic meters per year.

Whether Iran’s natural gas ends up powering turbines in New Delhi, Karachi or Vienna, one thing is certain: Iran will be richer and more geopolitically indispensable. As in the case of U.S. dependence on Saudi Arabia, China’s on Sudan or Germany’s on Russia, energy dependency is a major driver of foreign policy. Once these new gas conduits are established, it will be far more difficult for the United States to gather international support for policies aimed to reign in Iran.

All of these developments have received little attention in Washington, where sanctions on imported gasoline are the only game in town when it comes to crippling the mullah’s regime. Unlike the Bush administration, which was vocally opposed to the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline, the Obama Administration has been mute on the issue. Instead, it has pressured India to give more consideration to global warming, essentially pushing India to shift from coal-powered electricity to cleaner burning Iranian natural gas. In doing so, the Obama administration has demonstrated that environmental stewardship enjoys higher priority than nuclear proliferation. At a volatile time when the Taliban is at Islamabad’s gate, the Obama administration has also refrained from pressuring Pakistan to reconsider its decision to provide Iran with an umbilical cord. As a result, should the worst happen and a Taliban-style regime take over Pakistan, the economies of the world’s most radical Shiite state and that of what could be the world’s most radical Sunni state would be connected to each other for decades to come like conjoined twins.

But all’s not lost. The Obama administration should actively promote alternative energy corridors which will prevent Iranian gas from reaching major markets while addressing Asia’s and Europe’s energy needs. One potential gas-pipeline project is the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline. The project can supply Pakistan and India as much gas at a lower construction cost, while providing the impoverished Afghan government with a steady revenue stream in the form of transit fees. Most important, TAPI would allow Turkmenistan to sell its gas to India, enriching two U.S. allies (Afghanistan and Pakistan) rather than selling the same gas to Europe, enriching a U.S. enemy (Iran).

Washington should therefore impress upon Islamabad, recipient of $1 billion-plus yearly of U.S. aid, to adopt TAPI rather than the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline.

If the United States aims to stop Iran’s ambitions for regional hegemony, it is also in its interest to advance Europe’s and India’s use of renewable electricity and even coal rather than natural gas. And if those two markets insist on using gas, this gas should come in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG) which can be imported from any gas exporter rather than in the form of Iranian gas.

The United States should cooperate with India on the development of a thorium nuclear fuel cycle rather than the commonly used highly problematic uranium-based nuclear fuel cycle. Thorium cannot be used as bomb material in any way; its fuel cycle is inherently incapable of causing a meltdown; its waste material consists mostly of 233-uranium, which can be recycled as fuel; its waste material is radiotoxic for tens of years, as opposed to the thousands of years with today’s standard radioactive waste; and it exists in greater abundance than uranium.

Only this month India announced that it has designed a new version of its advanced heavy water atomic reactor which will use thorium and low-enriched uranium (instead of highly enriched uranium) as fuel. At a time when the entire Middle East is going nuclear, this is a major opportunity for the United States to cooperate with India—after Australia, India and the United States have the second- and third-largest reserves of thorium—on advancing a safe pathway to globally-used peaceful nuclear power.

Finally, the United States should curb its enthusiasm toward Nabucco, take a more sober look at it and see the project for what it is: an economic lifeline for Iran. While this ambitious pipeline project may serve the interests of some European countries it would inevitably undermine those of the United States. Here the United States will find commonality of interests with Russia, the main opponent of Nabucco.

Nabucco was Verdi’s opera about the difficult plight of Jews under the ancient Persian Gulf ruler, Nebuchadnezzar. What an historical irony it would be if this eponymous pipeline ended up emboldening a modern regional ruler, one with much more sinister plans.

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On April 6, U.S. President Barack Obama gave an address to the Turkish parliament in Ankara, on the occasion of his first visit to a Middle Eastern country as president. (If you cannot see the embedded video above, click here. The text is here.) In his speech, the President touched on a range of issues related to U.S.-Turkish and U.S.-Muslim relations. The following MESH members responded to an invitation to comment on the speech: J. Scott Carpenter, Michele Dunne, Hillel Fradkin, Adam Garfinkle, Bruce Jentleson, Josef Joffe, Mark N. Katz, Michael Reynolds, Michael Rubin, Philip Carl Salzman, Harvey Sicherman, Raymond Tanter, and Michael Young. Soner Cagaptay’s assessment is added in the comments.

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J. Scott Carpenter :: There were many, including me, who were worried that President Obama’s speech before the Turkish parliament would send the wrong signal to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development (AKP) government, by embracing Erdoğan’s conceit that Turkey is somehow a leader of the “Muslim World” and a major player in the Middle East. Our worry, it turns out, was unjustified—for the most part.

In the speech, the President struck mostly high notes. Symbolically he linked Turkey strongly to Europe by traveling there as part of his European trip. He spoke of Turkey as the secular, democratic nation-state that it is, even as he challenged it to move forward on religious freedom and minority rights. His formulation that Turkey is a country where the Muslim faith is practiced was merely… accurate. When the President mentioned Turkey’s desire to play a role in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, he did so only after referencing the more proximate conflicts of Nagorno-Karabakh and still-divided Cyprus. Importantly, in a thinly-veiled reference to Hamas, the President called on the Turkish government to “reject the use of terror, and recognize that Israel’s security concerns are legitimate.”

There were a couple sour notes, however. When the President delivered the requisite reminder that the United States is not, I repeat, not at war with Islam, he once again invoked the tired bromide of the so-called “Muslim World.” When will senior U.S. policy makers stop reinforcing Al Qaeda’s narrative about a mythical Muslim world? The President also continued to avoid the “D” word (democracy). Prosperity, instead, is the word of the day. Finding ways to improve education expand healthcare, boost trade and investment without improved transparency and accountability will be a neat trick which I look forward to hearing more about. The President promised more detail in “coming months.”

Whatever the Turkish people might have thought about the speech, Erdoğan’s body language suggested he did not like it. At all. The fact that Obama tracked substantively with President Bush on Iran and the Palestinian issue was clearly painful for him to hear. More painful still probably was the President’s wise decision to skip the Khatami-inspired Alliance of Civilizations meeting in Istanbul. The AKP were desperately hoping to rope the President into this muddleheaded effort to divide “civilizations” into religious camps. Actions always speak louder than words.

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Michele Dunne :: In President Obama’s address to the Turkish parliament, he made a few basic statements—inter alia, “The United States is not, and never will be, at war with Islam,” “The United States strongly supports the goal of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security,” and “The United States strongly supports Turkey’s bid to become a member of the European union”—that were, if not revolutionary, at least useful in their clarity. I will leave the evaluation of what Obama said on internal Turkish affairs to those who specialize in that, but what he said about specific reforms inside Turkey seemed to reach a satisfying level of detail, and he made several general statements—e.g., “freedom of religion and expression lead to a strong and vibrant civil society that only strengthens the state,” and “an enduring commitment to the rule of law is the only way to achieve the security that comes from justice for all people”—that encouraged further movement on these issues.

What was peculiar about Obama’s speech, however, was his strong emphasis on democracy (mentioned at least eight times) as the tie that binds the United States and Turkey in friendship, and yet his unwillingness to apply the same principle in the latter part of the speech to U.S. relations with the Muslim world. There, the “D” word was banned. Aside from the usual platitudes about “mutual interest and mutual respect,” Obama promised to promote the welfare of people in the Muslim world only in socioeconomic terms: education, health care, trade and investment. No objections to that, Mr. President, but what’s the plan for working with countries where the state stands squarely in the way of citizens getting those things? And that would apply to quite a few states in the Muslim world.

The President and Secretary Clinton can only go around the world apologizing for the Bush administration for so long. The Obama administration needs its own foreign policy—one that is neither Clinton-warmed-over nor anything-but-Bush—and one that takes account of current conditions. Those conditions include much more political ferment and stronger demands for civil and human rights than existed in the Middle East a decade ago. So promoting democracy and human rights will need to be part of that foreign policy, including in the Muslim world. It’s getting to be about time to face that, and Turkey would have been an excellent place to start.

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Hillel Fradkin :: Towards the close of his speech to the Turkish parliament, President Obama declared “as clearly as I can” that the “United States is not at war with Islam.” He sought to reinforce that message by implying that our military actions within the Muslim world, in past and future, have only the object of “rolling back a fringe ideology” and the terrorism represented most prominently by Al Qaeda—an effort he regards as shared by Muslims themselves.

Much attention has and will be paid to this declaration—it is already being referred to as an “olive branch”—even if it stated the obvious. The United States is not in fact at war with Islam and never has been, as President Bush made clear by declaring Islam to be a religion of peace but a few hours after the attacks of September 11, 2001. For after all, why would we Americans be at war with a peaceful religion? Moreover, although our soldiers are presently engaged in fighting some Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, we are fighting side by side with other Muslims. A statement of these facts would have enhanced Obama’s declaration.

But perhaps the obvious must sometimes be stated, and Obama is perhaps in a better position to make it clear by virtue of a fact he mentioned in his speech: he is among those Americans “who have Muslims in their family, or have lived in a Muslim-majority country.” Perhaps this will put this issue to rest so long as such misunderstanding as exists is not willful. At all events, and as Obama implied, the future of peaceful and fruitful relations between the United States and the Muslim world may depend less on the United States than on the approach that the Muslim world takes to terrorism of all varieties—including anti-Israeli terrorism—and the ideologies which inform them.

But Obama’s speech was not primarily addressed to the Muslim world, but to the Turkish people and its government. In the long run, it is the substance of his remarks to them which is likely to be more important than his declaration—and not only for U.S.-Turkish relations but for the wider Muslim world. Here he placed less stress on Turkey’s Muslim heritage than its republican heritage as the first and so far the most successful Muslim-majority republic.

As Obama almost indicated directly, this emphasis comes against the background of recent concerns that Turkey under the present leadership of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) might be weakening in its fidelity to that heritage, turning away from its long-standing alliances with Western countries—including the United States—and even moving closer to radical Islamic actors such as Sudan and Hamas. Obama’s remarks, although gently stated, essentially urged Turkey to renew its historic commitment to republican democracy and reaffirm its role as the place where East and West “come together.”

Obama referred explicitly to the heroic statesmanship of Atatürk, George Washington and perhaps above all of Abraham Lincoln. In light of his appeal to Lincoln, one might say that Obama invited Americans, Turks and Europeans to listen to the “better angels of our nature,” and urged Turks in particular to rededicate themselves to the propositions upon which modern Turkish history and success have been built. This was an important message to deliver, and it can only be hoped that it will be well received. That hope may however embrace not only Turkey but the wider Muslim world, which might profit from the example of Turkish republican success both now and hopefully in the future. In the long run, the reception of that message will be more important to American-Muslim relations than the declaration that the United States is not at war with Islam.

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Adam Garfinkle :: President Obama’s speech to the Turkish parliament yesterday was, to my way of thinking, an anti-climactic event. For months now we have been tantalized by the promise that Obama would go to a majority-Muslim country and tell it like it is. And this is what we get? This was a box-checking speech, full of duck-billed platitudes and not a single deliverable. The only things noteworthy about it were that: a) it happened; b) there was no quid pro quo protocol equilibration to Greece; and c) the speech abjured the old language that Turkey is a “moderate Muslim nation.” Turkey, we learn, is a secular democracy, just as Atatürk and his secular fundamentalist followers have insisted ever since 1924. This comes at a time when Turkey has a government, and a fairly popular one, that makes that description less resonant politically than ever. Why go talk to a Muslim-majority society only to pretend, sort of, that you’re not?

As for the “key” line—that we are not at war with Islam—well, Obama buried his lead four-fifths the way down the text, and of course that statement is nothing Bush administration principals, including the President, did not say dozens of times. If it suits your interests not to believe that statement, it’s not going to matter much which U.S. president says it. If it suits your interests now to stop saying you don’t believe it, then any president who is not George W. will do. If some Muslims now have heard this statement for the first time, just because it was delivered in Turkey by Barack Obama, fine: better eventually than not at all. But no, that statement in and of itself is not a game-changer, not with more U.S. soldiers headed to Afghanistan, more missiles fired into Pakistan’s border areas, more violence inevitable in Iraq over the next two years. Those of the conspiratorial persuasion seeking evidence that Obama is a liar will be able to find it just as easily as those who were sure George W. was a liar.

As for the speech itself as a form of the “black arts” (as Peggy Noonan once put it about speechwriting), it’s the worst major presentation the President has given (or delivered) so far. Judging from the official transcript pulled off the White House website, I counted at least two dozen mild infelicities, bona fide clunkers and grammatical errors that never should have made it past a second draft. One of these days people will stop comparing Obama to the hopeless George W. Marblemouth and recognize how mediocre this stuff really is.

Am I saying I could have written a better speech for this occasion? Yes, I actually believe that. There were oh-so-many missed opportunities in that speech—so many ways to have better concretized U.S.-Turkish friendship, and so many ways to have recognized that tolerance, hospitality, rule of law and other virtues (not to exclude democracy) which apply to Turkey, historically and at present, do not have to be expressed in an American idiom to be real and worthy of sincere admiration.

Maybe the lack of a unifying theme and anything remotely resembling a deliverable is the good news here. Some people had been hoping that Obama would use this occasion to launch a Presidential initiative on Israel/Palestine, stating U.S. parameters for a settlement, inviting the world to sign up to them, and implying muscular suasion on all engaged sides to make it happen. That we did not hear. Though I am skeptical that such a policy is wise, I’m almost sad it didn’t happen: that, at least, would have made the speech memorable.

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Bruce Jentleson :: Good speech. Got both the music and the words right. Doesn’t solve all problems in U.S.-Turkish relations, or all issues on the U.S. agenda of which Turkey is part, but does amount to a good start on both separating from the most counterproductive parts of the Bush policy and defining the key elements of an Obama policy.

Obama struck two key notes in getting the music right. One was his emphasis on mutual respect. This is the same phrasing he used in his inaugural address and in his video message to Iran. True, the respect mantra often gets invoked in the Muslim world as cover for less defensible positions. But its genuine resonance is even truer. Meeting people where they are, rather than where one may think they should be, is more likely to lead to being able “to build on our mutual interests, and rise above our differences,” as Obama put it, than lecturing and hectoring. Those self-styled hard-headed powerites who like to deride this sense of mutuality would do well to remember how the strength of anti-Bush sentiment in the Turkish parliament blocked Turkish military cooperation with the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The other was the line about not being at war with Islam. This needed to be said. Sure, Bush made any number of disclaimers of his own. But they didn’t stick. In saying that trust was strained “in many places where the Muslim faith is practiced,” Obama was recognizing reality. That’s strategic, not self-flagellatory as some neo-cons would have it.

On the substance he also got much right. He spoke to Turkey’s multi-faceted role as an ally, not just on terrorism or any one particular issue but more broadly on a range of global, regional and bilateral issues. He gave Turkey credit for its diplomacy in the Israel-Syria talks, while stressing active U.S. re-engagement in the Arab-Israeli peace process. He supported Turkey’s accession to the European Union. He also pushed a bit on internal democratic reform and rule of law. He approached the Armenia issue with more of an eye to what the two countries need to do together than what the lobby back home expects of him.

Much remains to be done. Music and words are fine, but action must follow. But not bad for a start.

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Josef Joffe :: “The United States is not, and will never be, at war with Islam.” This is one of those sentences which are so right that nobody could disagree—like “I love jamocca ice cream” or “The sun sets in the west.” Of course the United States is not at war with Islam, and never will be. If you want to push it, you might say: a part of Islam is at war with America, and for that there is plenty of evidence—from 9/11 to an endless slew of statements made by Bin Laden or al-Zawahiri or a bunch of lesser imams and mullahs or by various leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas, not to speak of those representatives of the “Arab street” we get to see on Al-Jazeera.

Why would the president affirm what was undeniable in the first place? To make a gesture, of course. As he did with this sentence: “I also want to be clear that America’s relationship with the Muslim community, the Muslim world, cannot, and will not, just be based upon opposition to terrorism. We seek broader engagement based on mutual interest and mutual respect.”

Again, this is as “surprising” (or if you want to be catty: vacuous) as the “we are not at war” sentence. Whoever based America’s relationship with the umma on “opposition to terrorism?” Not Bush ‘43—not, he, the coddler of Saudi Arabia, the financier of Egypt, the ally of Jordan’s Abdullah, the guarantor of the Gulfies. How patient, to the point of self-effacement, was W. with Turkey, after Ankara betrayed him in the run-up to the Iraq war? And who saved the Muslim Bosnians from the rage of the Serbs? The U.S. Air Force in the days of Clinton.

“We will listen carefully, we will bridge misunderstandings, and we will seek common ground.” Does this mean we did not listen carefully to our Arab allies, paying over-sensitive respect to their fence-sitting and their mumbly caveats? Here Obama resorts not to belaboring the obvious, but to the oldest (liberal) tradition of American foreign policy. There are no clashes, no interests, no conflicts—just “misunderstandings.” And if we listen hard and patiently enough, these “conflicts” will just go poof.

Of course, these are not the ways of international politics, where collisions and conflicts are real, where the measure is not goodness or careful listening, but the power and the will that—sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly—backs up diplomacy.

Especially in the Hobbesian universe that is the Islamic Middle East—say, from the Levant to the Hindu Kush—homily will get you nowhere. Let’s hope the 44th president of the United States is not like Jimmy Carter who took four years to learn about the nasty ways of the world—who preached in the beginning that we should lose our “inordinate fear of communism” only to be rewarded by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and who let Khomeini come to power only to be repaid with the 444-day humiliation of the embassy hostage crisis.

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Mark N. Katz :: President Obama’s speech to the Turkish parliament was designed to appeal not just to the Turkish public, but also to the broader Muslim world. In it, Obama certainly struck many positive notes. His administration is for improved Turkish-American and Muslim-American relations. His administration also seeks peace or improved relations between Turkey and Armenia, Greek and Turkish Cypriots, Israel and the Palestinians, and Israel and Syria, among others. His administration supports Turkey’s admission to the European Union.

Indeed, Obama signaled that America is willing to work with all parties in the Muslim world except the terrorists. He called for the United States to work with Muslims and non-Muslims alike against them. The only two terrorist movements that he mentioned by name, though, were the PKK and Al Qaeda. He made no mention of the Taliban, Hamas, and Hezbollah, among others. By not describing them as terrorist, Obama has certainly opened the door—and perhaps even raised the expectation—that he is willing to work with them.

The audience applauded when Obama said, “The United States is not, and will never be, at war with Islam.” His next sentence—”In fact, our partnership with the Muslim world is critical not just in rolling back the violent ideologies that people of all faiths reject, but also to strengthen opportunity for all its people”—appears to be more an expression of hope than a statement of fact. For unfortunately, there is widespread support in the Muslim world for non-democratic movements that engage in terrorism. Many Muslims instead see groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and even the Taliban as legitimate “national liberation” movements.

What Obama may soon find is that it is going to be extremely difficult for the United States to appeal to the broader Muslim world and to fight terrorist groups within it simultaneously. The Bush administration at least recognized that this was a dilemma and attempted to resolve it by recognizing the need for democratization (even if it did not push very hard for this in many Muslim countries). But Obama’s statement that “Turkey’s democracy is your own achievement. It was not forced upon you by any outside power,” appears to be a strong signal that his administration does not share even the Bush administration’s recognition that the United States can and should do something to promote democratization in the Middle East.

Obama’s hopes for improved relations between the U.S. and the Muslim world are laudable. But unless public opinion in the Muslim world stops supporting non-democratic political movements, or these movements undergo a democratic transformation, it is doubtful that the improved relations he hopes for can be achieved.

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Michael Reynolds :: President Obama demonstrated in Turkey the talent that has distinguished him at least since his tenure as head of Harvard’s Law Review: namely, the ability to play the role of reconciler between otherwise seemingly irreconcilable sides. The best example of this was his ability to touch on the question of the Armenian genocide in his speech to the Turkish parliament in such a way as to win applause from the parliamentarians as well as praise from one of the leading advocates of Turkish recognition of genocide.

Obama’s charisma extended beyond the parliament. Even the thousands of leftist protesters who declared Obama to be merely a new face for an old American imperialism felt compelled in interviews to concede that, yes, Obama himself comes across as intelligent, affable, and appealing. Posters showing a cartoon Uncle Sam with Obama’s face superimposed recalled the famous New Yorker magazine’s spoof of Obama dressed in a turban, albeit with precisely the opposite point: far from being a secret Al Qaeda sympathizer, Obama represents merely a new face for an old American imperialism.

Obama’s message of humility, patience, and charity thus left a generally positive impression in Turkey. Needless to say, however, articulating a vision wherein conflicts are resolved through mutual and sincere compromise is easier said than achieving that vision. Obama has not yet indicated publicly to what extent he is willing to use American power, positive as well as negative, to push the resolution of the Middle East’s multiple conflicts.

Another thing that that struck me was this statement made by Obama in support of Turkey’s EU candidacy: “Europe gains by diversity of ethnicity, tradition and faith—it is not diminished by it.” It is a quintessentially American assertion. The sentiment behind it is, indisputably, appealing on the most obvious level. But one has to wonder what citizens of the European Union, regardless of their stance on Turkey’s EU candidacy, think when the President of the United States of America makes declarations about what constitutes Europe’s fundamental interests.

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Michael Rubin :: There are certain points every U.S. official should make upon visiting Turkey. President Obama did his homework and delivered them. He is correct when he declares, “Turkey is a critical ally. Turkey is an important part of Europe. And Turkey and the United States must stand together—and work together.” Obama is right to highlight Turkey’s EU accession ambitions as well as the reforms accomplished over the past several years. And he successfully tiptoed through the political minefield of the Armenian genocide debate.

However, Obama also broke new ground, not all of it positive. For example, Obama stated, “The United States will continue to support your central role as an East-West corridor for oil and natural gas.” But how can Obama expect to pressure Iran to accede to its international obligations when Turkey’s State Minister Kürşad Tüzman seeks to raise bilateral trade with the Islamic Republic to $20 billion? (It was just $1.3 billion when the AKP took power.)

And while diplomatic nicety is the bread-and-butter of speechwriters, in the case of Obama’s reference to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, it can have cost. Here his comments were infused with moral equivalency which is especially dangerous given Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s embrace and, indeed, endorsement of Hamas. Obama could have sent a positive message, especially in a country like Turkey which has suffered so much terrorism, had he reinforced that idea explicitly that democracies must stand against terrorism and that no political agendas can legitimize terrorism. Obama drew equivalence between Al Qaeda and the PKK; he should have added Hamas to the mix. Let us hope that, before Obama embraces Erdoğan as a true partner, he becomes aware of the Turkish Prime Minister’s endorsement of Al Qaeda financier Yasin al-Qadi.

Rhetoric is easy, but can be ephemeral. It is easy to say “We will be respectful, even when we do not agree,” but the President of the United States should never sacrifice the values of free speech or expression in order to protect the sensitivity of anyone who might take insult. To compromise fundamental values is a slippery slope; we should not go down the path of Europe. Nor should Obama speak of the Islamic world. He should recognize the true diversity of Muslim peoples, and not seek to impose a unitary identity upon them.

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Philip Carl Salzman :: Will President Obama, even with his Muslim middle name, have any greater luck than President George W. Bush reassuring the Muslim world of the good will and good intentions of the United States? He goes farther, saying that “we will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over so many centuries to shape the world for the better.” Along the same line, addressing Turkey’s application to the EU, he argues that “Europe gains by diversity of ethnicity, tradition and faith.” In fact, the benefits of Islam, both in history and prospectively in the EU, are highly contested, but the Turks and Muslims more broadly probably welcomed these sentiments.

The President says that the United States is not and can never be at war against Islam, that “our partnership with the Muslim world is critical in rolling back a fringe ideology that people of all faiths reject.” Here the President asserts a division between the moderate majority of Muslims and the minority “fringe” of jihadis—oops, I mean “terrorists”—not to be specified further. This may be a distinction without as much of a difference as we, and the President, might hope. If the President says it enough, maybe his Muslim audience will come to believe it.

The President’s approbation of Turkey and its recent legal measures was clear, while he urged its leaders to continue along the line of diversity and pluralism, particularly in regard to the Kurds (but not the PKK), and the Orthodox Christians, as well as to resolve differences and improve relations with Armenians. At the same time, he stressed the secular nature of the Turkish constitution, and made no mention of the Islamist—I mean Islamic—party in government.

President Obama took a hard line on Iran, focusing not on cooperation in regard to Iraq and Af/Pak, but on Iran’s movement toward nuclear weapons. He offers a stark choice to Islamic Republic: “Iran’s leaders must choose whether they will try to build a weapon or build a better future for their people.” No hints about what may follow the manufacture of an Iranian nuclear bomb.

They say that those who ignore history are destined to repeat it, first as campaign promises, then as foreign policy. So it is with Palestine. In spite of much good advice from MESH prior to the President’s ascension, he is determined to achieve what so many, with so much effort, have failed to achieve: “In the Middle East, we share the goal of a lasting peace between Israel and its neighbors. Let me be clear: the United States strongly supports the goal of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security. That is a goal shared by Palestinians, Israelis, and people of good will around the world.” (Emphasis added.) I do not know which Palestinians the President has been speaking to, but neither Hamas nor Fatah will recognize Israel, and the preferred goal of most Palestinians appears to be a different two-state solution: Palestine and Jordan.

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Harvey Sicherman :: President Obama’s speech at the Turkish parliament gave ample evidence of his gift for allowing his audience to see themselves in him. Thus, he spoke winning words to those advocating the democratic Kemalist Turkey of the West. But those who wanted to “reorient” (literally) Turkey toward the East could also find comfort in references to Ankara’s mediation of regional conflicts and imperial Muslim past. Kemalism, of course, burns the bridge to the East. And the current Turkish government is suspected by its opponents of seeking to burn the bridge to the West. Nevermind; Obama levitated above this contradiction with the crowd-pleasing conclusion that “Turkey’s greatness lies in your ability to be at the center of things.” Gifted rhetoric to be sure.

In the wake of Presidential parades, a clean-up crew (usually the unfortunate Secretary of State) must collect the policy. Three specifics:

1. RESET: To use the blackberry-proficient President’s favorite phrase, he wants a renewal of U.S.-Turkish cooperation. On the most neuralgic item—the Kurds—Obama pledged “our support” against the PKK while restating that the new Iraq should not be a danger to its neighbors (i.e. no independent Kurdistan). He advocated Turkish entry to Europe (a poke at France and Germany) and swallowed whole in public his previous view of the Armenian genocide, which he consigned to the historians.
2. I’m coming your way: Obama notified Israel’s new government not to quarrel over the two-state solution, “the road map and Annapolis… a goal that I will actively pursue as President of the United States.”
3. I feel your pain: Ankara was another installment in a campaign to change the American image, this time for Muslims. Obama declared (as had Mr. Bush) that the United States was not “at war with Islam.” He tried manfully to lift the American-”Muslim World” relationship out of the terrorist focus through two devices: a respectful search for common ground and his personal experience of Muslims in the family. This, too, was cunningly designed to sway his audience: I am not one of you but I am close enough to know you, a near relative as it were. And, of course, “we will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith…” Although variations on the theme were also uttered by his predecessor, the President can count on amnesia, and his own striking example, to change the image. But does this really matter? And is Obama not raising expectations of impossible comity with a “Muslim World” at war with itself and gripped by the grievance culture besides?

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Raymond Tanter :: In tennis, when confronting a choice between hitting the ball cross-court or down the line, “Solve the riddle by going up the middle!” Like the tennis analogy, the visit of President Obama to Turkey is a search for a middle ground between opposing points of view.

One school of thought: Turkey’s harsh response to Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad should prompt the NATO alliance to reconsider Turkey’s commitment to the global struggle against radical Islam. Because such “Islamism” is priority number-one for NATO, and because Ankara holds an incompatible view of the threat, consider removing Turkey from the alliance.

When Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen rose as consensus candidate for NATO Secretary General, Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan raised objections. Rasmussen had been prime minister when the cartoons were published and refused to censor the newspapers in which they ran. Rasmussen was cleared for the NATO post after negotiating with Turkish President Abdullah Gül and stating: “I consider Turkey a very important ally and strategic partner, and I will cooperate with them in our endeavors to ensure the best cooperation with Muslim world.” Obama’s apt intervention to help devise language acceptable to the parties allowed for the appointment of Rasmussen and typifies the President’s approach of searching for a middle ground between opposing points of view.

A second school: Turkey’s strategic position—the second-largest NATO-member army; borders with Syria, Iraq, and Iran; a base for U.S. operations in Afghanistan; and Europe’s sixth-largest economy—requires greater outreach and integration of Turkey into Europe.

Accordingly, Washington should take a lead role in promoting Turkish accession to the European Union to overcome French objections. Enhanced bilateral relations would include expanding the economic component of U.S.-Turkey relations and promoting more collaboration between mid-level military officers. To overcome religious tension, the United States would no longer treat Turkey as a “Muslim country” and more as a European country.

The most prudent course for the Obama administration is the middle path between these two extremes, a road the President is beginning to take. Indeed, Turkey is too important an ally to alienate with even the suggestion that the country might be removed from NATO. But enthusiastic engagement should depend on the degree to which Turkey is on the same page as the rest of NATO regarding the threat of radical Islam.

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Michael Young :: As I read President Obama’s comments to the Turkish parliament on Monday, I couldn’t help but think of Egypt.

Under the conditions prevailing during much of the past 25 to 30 years, his speech would have been one that, in its references to the Arab-Israeli conflict but also at the highly symbolic moment of Obama’s first contact with the Middle East, would have been made before the Egyptian parliament. Instead, the U.S. president chose a non-Arab state as the venue for his first major address to the region and the Islamic world.

One wonders how Egypt’s President Husni Mubarak reacted when he heard Obama say: “The United States and Turkey can help the Palestinians and Israelis make this journey. Like the United States, Turkey has been a friend and partner in Israel’s quest for security. And like the United States, you seek a future of opportunity and statehood for the Palestinians. So now, working together, we must not give into pessimism and mistrust.”

Surely, he felt that someone had gently bumped him back into the line. Wasn’t Egypt the traditional mediator between Israelis and Palestinians? If your hunch is that this gives us a sense of the thorough marginalization of the Arab countries compared to their non-Arab periphery, particularly states like Turkey and Iran, but also Israel, then your hunch comes very late. Whether it was in his passages on Iran, Iraq, or terrorism, and even in his appeal to the Muslim world, Obama not once mentioned Egypt or Saudi Arabia, though he did mention their rival, Syria, just once.

Remember, in 1990 it was Egypt and Saudi Arabia that were the cornerstones (if you could call them that) of the Arab mobilization against Iraq when Saddam Hussein ordered his soldiers into Kuwait. When the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was extended in 1995, it was Egypt that led the Arab effort to create a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East (and failed). Throughout the 1990s, Egypt was the go-to place to talk about Palestinian-Israeli issues, and when Egyptians were the victims of Islamist violence during the 1990s, it was the go-to place to hold anti-terrorism summits, for example the one at Sharm al-Sheikh in 1996.

That Obama mentioned these topics, and others, in Ankara did not mean that it is time to write Egypt’s obituary. But with Mubarak now an old man, still sitting atop a political system seemingly incapable of renewing itself in pluralistically invigorating ways, and with no end in sight to the Saudi gerontocracy, it is not surprising that Obama should have struck his highest notes in a country that is of the region but not quite in it—and therefore untainted by its irrepressible decline. The United States will continue to ally itself with Arab states to contain Iran, but as Obama made clear in his speech, and in his diplomatic initiatives in recent weeks, he relies much more on countries like Turkey and Russia to act as hooks on which to hang any international effort to deal with Iran’s nuclear program.

Obama sent a kind word to the world’s Muslims, and surely many in the Arab world applauded his lines. But what he was really telling them, intentionally or not, is that their region is changing, and it’s changing in ways that may soon turn the Arabs into secondary characters in their own narrative, because their regimes simply seem unable to change.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

A trap awaits Turkey analysts seeking to explain rising anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism in Turkey. There is a tendency to look into the historic roots of both phenomena and to explain both as hardwired in the Turkish polity, not as products of current politics.

To be sure, there are anti-Western instincts in Turkish nationalism, not unlike most post-Ottoman nationalisms. Turkey has had past episodes of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism as well. However, these phenomena were never grassroots movements and never politically sanctioned. Moreover, the Turks have historically supported strong ties with the United States. They also did not oppose intimate ties with Israel, which Turkey recognized in 1949.

Today, though, this is no longer the case, as the Turks view the United States as the country’s chief enemy. A recent poll shows that 44 percent of the Turks consider the United States the biggest threat to Turkey. And the number of people in the country who have anti-Semitic views is rising dramatically. In 2004, 49 percent of the Turks said they did not want a Jewish neighbor; in 2009, this number climbed to 76 percent.

So why are the Turks suddenly spiteful towards the United States and Israel, Americans and Jews? Anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are surging in Turkey because the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government sanctions both phenomena. This combination of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism is not a coincidence. The Islamist thinking is as follows: The Jews are evil, they run America, and therefore America is evil.

Take, for instance, the billboards that Istanbul’s AKP government put up during the Gaza war in Istanbul’s mixed Muslim-Jewish neighborhoods. These oversized billboards depicted a burnt-out child’s sneaker, with a sign saying “humanity is slaughtered in Palestine” over it. Under the sneaker, in large print, the billboard quoted the Old Testament commandment “Thou shall not kill” and added “You cannot be the Children of Moses.” What on earth does the Gaza war have to do with Jewish law? Is it an accident that a day after these billboards appeared in Istanbul’s cosmopolitan Nisantasi neighborhood, vigilantes distributed fliers calling for a boycott of Jewish businesses? Or that the next day, Jewish businesses in the neighborhood took down their names?

The outrage sparked by the Gaza war has failed to subside. In early February, the AKP government of Istanbul opened a cartoon exhibit in the city’s downtown Taksim Square metro station―Taksim Square is to Istanbul what Times Square is to New York City―which included many cartons depicting bloodthirsty Israelis killing Palestinians with American help, such as one in which a satanic-looking Israeli soldier with white pupils washes the blood on his hands of a faucet, labeled the United States. Each month, millions of Turks pass through the Taksim metro station—a government-owned public service.

Unsurprisingly, such black propaganda is not without consequences. A sage once told me that a society is truly anti-Semitic when teachers say bad things about Jews in school. Last month, a group of Turkish schoolteachers distributed sweets in the Central Anatolian town of Kayseri to commemorate Hitler’s blessed memory. During the Gaza war, Israelis, including Israeli teenagers who were visiting Turkey to play volleyball, were attacked. Shops plastered signs on their windows, saying that “Americans and Israelis may not enter.” What is more, Turkish Jews felt physically threatened for the first time since they found refuge in the bosom of the Ottoman Empire.

All this has nothing to do with whatever historic causes one might seek for such developments. Popular anti-Semitism is driven in Turkey by the acts of the AKP government—and that is a fact. Analysts should follow Turkey’s current politics closely in explaining the Turks’ shifting political attitudes. If we fail to point out how anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are spiked up by the AKP, once such sentiments lay roots, we will have no other explanation but to say that anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are intrinsic to Turkish society and, god forbid, the Turks’ religion, Islam.

I call on fellow liberals to think twice before they bypass Turkey’s political transformation and turn to historicizing anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism in Turkey. The surge of these sentiments since 2002 demonstrates that, when in power, Islamists can corrupt even the most liberal of the Muslim societies. The singular example of a Muslim society that is friendly towards Jews and Americans risks disappearing in front of our eyes if we do not point out the political nature of Turkey’s current transformation.

If we ignore the political forces changing Turkey today, others will blame the change on the Turks and Islam tomorrow.

MESH Pointer: See the earlier thread, Behind the blow-out at Davos.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

That Turkish-Israeli relations are experiencing a crisis became apparent to all the world at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland where Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Israeli President Shimon Peres exchanged harsh, emotional, and even insulting words Such public and personal recriminations between ostensible allies are virtually unheard of. In the immediate wake of the incident, both sides took modest steps to downplay and contain, albeit not reverse, the damage incurred at Davos.

This led some observers to conclude that ultimately the blow-out at Davos would amount to little. After all, the lynchpin of Turkish-Israeli relations is military cooperation. Both the Turkish and Israeli militaries have derived significant benefits from their cooperation. And as everyone knows, the Turkish military is highly autonomous in setting Turkish security policy and it has little sympathy for Erdoğan or the party he leads. Thus, according to this line of thinking, even if Erdoğan’s outburst was in fact more than a clever ploy to boost his party’s chances in the upcoming Turkish elections this March, the core of Turkish-Israeli relations, military cooperation, would still be preserved.

This is, I think, far too complacent an interpretation. As I suggested here, the deterioration in Turkish-Israeli relations that was revealed at Davos is rooted in part in structural changes, and the causes behind Turkey’s alienation from Israel are broader than Erdoğan’s personal inclinations or the religious sympathies of his party’s base, however important those may be.

This weekend Turkish-Israeli relations took another tumble. The Commander of Israeli Ground Forces Avi Mizrahi was quoted in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz as saying that Erdoğan “should look in the mirror” before he criticized Peres at Davos for “knowing very well how to kill”—words described by the newspaper as “a clear allusion to the massacre of the Armenians [in World War One] and the suppression of the Kurds.” Mizrahi added also that Turkey’s invasion of northern Cyprus deprives it of any basis by which to criticize Israel as an occupying power.

The following day, February 14, the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned Israel’s ambassador to Turkey and demanded an “urgent explanation” for General Mizrahi’s words. That same day the Turkish General Staff (headquarters pictured above) issued a statement declaring Mizrahi’s remarks to be factually distorting, inappropriate, unfortunate, unbefitting for someone of Mizrahi’s authority and responsibilities, and potentially damaging to the national interests of the two countries. The General Staff expects an explanation from the Israelis. The Israeli General Staff has said that Mizrahi’s remarks do not represent its own views.

Undoubtedly, strong incentives to preserve cooperation remain on both sides. Yet now with senior Turkish and Israeli generals on the verge of a public quarrel, cracks are appearing in the very lynchpin of Turkish-Israeli relations. Given the categorical nature of the assertions and demands being made by each side, the damage can be smoothed over, but it cannot be undone. Neither side can completely satisfy the other without backing down and backtracking in some form. And swallowing humble pie is something for which no military trains its officers.

Origins of cooperation. For the past two decades, cooperative relations between Turkey and Israel had been one of the constants of international relations in the Middle East. While it would be incorrect to describe those ties as equivalent to an alliance, they were close and multi-faceted. Turkey recognized Israel in 1949, the first Muslim majority state to do so, but it was at the beginning of the 1990s that the two countries began to develop close ties. Bringing them together was a shared opposition to Syria and, to a lesser extent, Iran. Turkish-Israeli cooperation against Syria replicated a common geopolitical pattern whereby two non-contiguous states align against their common neighbor. Syria’s support for the Kurdistan Workers Party (the PKK) and its military struggle against Turkish control of eastern Anatolia made Ankara eager to cooperate with Israel to contain Syria.

Although outside observers often overstated the degree of hostility between the Turkish Republic and Islamic Republic of Iran by extrapolating straight from their irreconcilable ideologies, a mutual interest in blocking Iran’s export of Islamic revolution and influence did also serve to bring Turkey and Israel together. The two shared a general antipathy to revisionist radicalism of any sort and were both (relatively) comfortable with the status-quo in the Middle East.

The fact that they enjoyed close ties to the United States facilitated their cooperation; indeed, their bilateral ties cannot be understood in isolation from their ties with America. Their pro-American orientation was reinforced by their identification with liberal democracy and even lent their relationship a broader “civilizational” sheen. Finally, their cooperation was complementary in very practical ways in a number of areas, ranging from the military-security field to planned projects to bring natural gas and water to Israel.

Beginnings of estrangement. Recent years, however, have seen a definite deterioration in Turkish-Israeli ties. Several reasons explain this, but perhaps the most fundamental lies in the post-9/11 shift in United States’ policy under George Bush from support of the status quo in the Middle East to revision of it through the toppling of multiple regimes in the Middle East, starting with Saddam Hussein’s. Although no one in Washington even imagined targeting the Turkish Republic in the project to remake the “Greater Middle East”—to the contrary, American policy makers saw the goal of creating more secular, democratic, and thus pro-American regimes as one complementary to Turkish interests—Turkish opinion across the board was profoundly skeptical of American motives and fearful of American plans.

Not a few Turks, including those in think tanks and the military, believed that the ultimate target of Operation Iraqi Freedom was not Middle Eastern despotism but the Turkish Republic. Once the United States was in Iraq, it would proceed to incite and agitate Kurdish groups inside Turkey. Then, in the name of democracy, it would detach Turkey’s eastern provinces to form a Kurdish state. By breaking the Middle East up into a greater number of smaller, more pliable, states, the United States could maintain its hegemony over the Middle East more easily. Because Israel, in turn, would be a prime beneficiary of this fracturing of Middle Eastern states, it was seen as complicit in this project.

It is an utterly fantastic, not to mention paranoid, reading of U.S. (and Israeli) policies and capabilities. But it is a worldview embedded in the institutions of the Turkish Republic, from the schools to the Turkish military. These institutions did not spring forth whole-cloth following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. Rather, they were forged in the long struggle to prevent the empire’s break-up and division. That struggle ultimately was successful to the extent that the new republic managed to retain control of Anatolia despite the intentions of the Great Powers to partition it, most notably in the Sykes-Picot (Sazonov) agreement of 1916 and the Treaty of Sevres of 1920.

The Turkish Republic, in other words, was the direct response to the problem of Ottoman decline. Indeed, the republic’s founding elites embraced secularism and Turkish nationalism—the two main pillars of republican ideology—not because of their intrinsic appeal but rather because they saw them as essential to arrest the process of break-up and partition. Secularism was needed to ensure the technological progress and economic growth that a strong state required, and nationalism was needed to maintain unity, bind the people to the state, and immunize society against dissension that more powerful states always looked to exploit.

The belief that outside forces are steadily and consciously working to undermine Turkey and divide it is thus almost hard-wired in Turkish institutions. The U.S. invasion of Iraq activated these circuits of suspicion. Pentagon national security strategy papers that spoke of maintaining America’s global hegemony through the suppression of peer competitors, maps in U.S. military journals showing a partitioned Turkey, a surge in PKK attacks inside Turkey, the U.S. military’s disinterest in cracking down on the PKK in Iraq, and reports of PKK acquisition of American arms, among other things, served to confirm the suspicions of many Turks that the United States was a new predatory “Great Power.” Far from being a trustworthy ally, the United States began to loom as the single greatest threat to the unity of their country.

Suspicion also fell upon Israel, primarily because it was the country in the region closest to the United States, but also because it was known to have cultivated ties to the Kurds of Iraq in the past and is presumed to have an interest in the break-up of Iraq and Iran. The result, in short, has been a steady deterioration in Turkish trust toward the United States and, by extension, to Israel.

Some pin the blame for this breakdown in trust on the rise of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), and trace it to the AKP’s origins in Turkey’s Islamist movement. The reality is that the causes for distrust are both broader and deeper than the AKP or Turkey’s Islamist movement. It is worth noting that the AKP’s secularist-nationalist opponents commonly portray the party and its leaders, including Turkish President Abdullah Gül and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, as tools of American foreign policy, products of an American project to cultivate “moderate Islam.” Perhaps inevitably, they have even published books identifying Erdoğan and Gül as key actors in Zionist conspiracies against Turkey.

Ankara’s growing unease with American behavior and intentions coincided with and stimulated a growing conviction that Turkey should engage its neighbors and play a more active role in its neighborhood, including the Middle East. Engagement would raise Turkey’s profile and provide it a hedge in case of any clash with the United States. Ankara’s pursuit of closer ties to Syria and Iran, however, in turn began to erode American and Israeli confidence in Turkey. Following Syria’s cessation of support for the PKK in 1999, Turkey’s relations with its southern neighbor shifted from confrontational to conciliatory. Although Ankara contends that building relations with Syria and Iran will allow Turkey to play a valuable role as mediator, Ankara’s rapprochement with Damascus and dealings with Tehran have unsettled American and Israeli policymakers concerned with isolating Syria and Iran. Tehran’s demonstrated willingness to attack PKK-affiliate bases inside Iraq, however, highlighted Washington’s passivity on Turkey’s predominant security concern and further sullied America’s reputation as a reliable ally.

As part of the effort to play a more active role in the Middle East, Erdoğan and his government have been noticeably sympathetic toward Hamas, condemning the assassinations of Hamas leaders, defending Hamas’s legitimacy as the elected representatives of the Palestinians, and receiving Hamas emissaries in Ankara. Defenders of this policy argue that by engaging Hamas, Turkey will ultimately be able to moderate it. Turkey will then be able to use its unique position as a Muslim country with long-standing ties to Israel to help broker a final resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Critics of Ankara’s policy contend that lending even moral support to Hamas only encourages it to stick to its avowed aim of destroying Israel, and they question what motivates Erdoğan and his government in their support of Hamas: Is it really a desire to play a more responsible role in the Middle East? Or it the reflection of religiously rooted sympathy for Hamas and antipathy toward Israel? Or is it a cunning populist politician’s instinct for what mobilizes his electoral base and delivers votes? Erdoğan’s failure to criticize Hamas beyond issuing stock phrases abjuring the use of force, combined with his emphatic condemnation of Israeli actions and religiously inflected language, suggest to some that the latter two motives are predominant.

The Turkish public’s sympathy for the Palestinians is long-standing, but it was never ardent. In the past two to three years, however, that sympathy has grown in inverse proportion to a decline in Israel’s reputation. Israel’s massive retaliation against Lebanon during its war with Hezbollah in 2006 gravely damaged Israel’s image across all sectors of the Turkish public. Turkish citizens watched during that summer as the Israeli armed forces pounded not just Hezbollah but targets throughout Lebanon, seemingly at will. Israel’s declaration that it held Lebanon responsible for Hezbollah’s provocations (Hezbollah being part of the Lebanon’s government) underscored that Israel’s punishment was willful and deliberate.

Israel’s use of overwhelming force against Gaza in its most recent campaign against Hamas further tarnished Israel’s reputation, as it generated images again of the gratuitous use of violence, this time against a Muslim people who were effectively defenseless. These images, along with with those of American “shock and awe” in Iraq, Abu Ghraib, and more recent operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere have all combined to reinforce the suggestion that the greatest threat to Turkey and regional peace and stability come from the United States and Israel.

Responding to Operation Cast Lead, Erdoğan employed exceptionally loaded language to condemn Israel’s operations in Gaza, describing them as “savagery,” “a crime against humanity,” and deserving of divine retribution. The Turkish Ministry of Education directed that schoolchildren should observe a minute of silence for the victims of Israeli arms in Gaza. These actions caused Turkey’s tiny Jewish community to feel besieged. Israeli officials responded with veiled hints that Jewish American organizations might withdraw their support for Turkish efforts to block passage through the U.S. Congress of a resolution recognizing an Armenian genocide.

Clash at Davos. The most spectacular episode in the deterioration of Turkish-Israeli relations took place this past week, when on January 29 Erdoğan and Israeli President Shimon Peres sat on a panel to discuss Gaza and Middle East peace at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Also sitting in on the panel were the UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon and the head of the Arab League, Amr Musa. (See the video clip here or at the end of this post.)

The panel was charged with tension from the beginning as first Moon, Erdoğan, and then Musa all directed criticism toward Israel. An exasperated Peres then ratcheted emotions up further, lecturing to Erdoğan in a dismissive tone at moments and shouting toward the end. His rambling presentation made the case for Israel poorly, the low-point being his citation of Husni Mubarak’s approval, as if the Egyptian president were a disinterested and impeccable moral authority. Peres came across alternately some times as condescending and at other times bewildered as to how some could find fault with Israel’s use of force.

When Peres finished, Erdoğan insisted on getting in the last word. Ignoring the request of the moderator David Ignatius to speak no more than a minute, he proceeded to lash into Peres, declaring that his shouting betrayed a guilty conscience and imputing to him expertise in killing children at beaches, before going on to cite the Torah’s prohibition against murder and throwing in criticisms of Israel from Israelis for good measure. Not content with blasting Peres, he declared that those audience members who applauded Peres too were guilty of a “crime against humanity.” Offended by Ignatius’ insistence that he stop speaking and let the panel conclude, Erdoğan stormed off.

The public exchange of such harsh and emotional words between leaders of two states that enjoy ostensibly close relations was extraordinary, perhaps unique in modern diplomatic history. Yet Erdoğan in a later press conference was wholly unrepentant, declaring that he was neither an effete “mon cher”diplomat, nor some “tribal leader” to be belittled but the Prime Minister of the Turkish Republic and had defended Turkey’s honor. Although afterwards Peres allegedly called Erdoğan in an attempt to smooth over the incident, it is difficult to see how the damage to Turkish-Israeli relations can be contained.

The fact that several thousand cheering supporters greeted Erdoğan upon his return to Istanbul is itself not very telling; Erdoğan is a charismatic politician and can easily rally that many on any given issue. More indicative is that columnists from a wide spectrum of newspapers and political positions have expressed their support for the frankness of Erdoğan’s message, if not his style of delivering it.

If, as many now predict, the U.S. Congress this spring does pass a resolution recognizing an Armenian genocide, the effect will not be to spur Turks to critically examine late Ottoman history. To the contrary, the Turkish public will interpret the resolution as nothing more than a cheap insult against the whole of Turkey delivered by an imperious America and facilitated by vindictive supporters of Israel. Because the issue commands considerable emotional resonance across all sectors of Turkish society, the possibility that Congress might pass the resolution right before Turkey’s municipal elections on March 29 could hand Erdoğan an irresistible opportunity to demagogue the issue. For one, playing up the issue would reinforce his contention that Turkey’s honor is under assault and that he is the man to defend it, thereby immunizing him against criticism that his habit of indulging in inflammatory drama has harmed Turkey’s image and interests. But more significant is that the issue would force even his hard-core opponents to rally behind him in a show of defiant national unity. The damage to Turkish-American and Turkish-Israeli relations could be considerable.

Salvaging the wreckage. If Turkish and Israeli policymakers are to salvage anything from Davos, they will have to start by acknowledging the uncomfortable reality that the opinions expressed by the leaders of the two countries were heartfelt and reflect the dominant public sentiments in their respective countries.

Polls demonstrate that the overwhelming majority of Israelis supported Operation Cast Lead. They did so not because they enjoy bombing Palestinians (Erdoğan’s claim at Davos that two former Israeli prime ministers boasted of receiving pleasure when riding into Palestine on tanks notwithstanding), but because they see Hamas as unremittingly hostile and bent on the destruction of their society. Whereas outsiders see Israel as a robust and powerful state and ask why they must resort to massive force so readily, Israelis themselves are acutely conscious of their small country’s vulnerabilities and believe they must demonstrate an unyielding will to defend themselves lest they lose the ability to deter their enemies.

If Erdoğan and other Turks truly aspire to a more influential role for their country in the region, they will have to address directly Hamas’s refusal to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist and condemn Hamas’s use of violence against innocents with the same intensity that they have condemned Israel’s. They might remind themselves that whereas the Kurdistan Workers Party (PPK) has never aimed for the destruction of Turkey, Ankara has consistently refused to negotiate with it. Turkey is indeed in a unique position to contribute to the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but to do so it must act deliberately and responsibly.

For their part, Israeli officials would do well to recognize that, no matter how justified they believed Israel to be, the campaigns in Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2009 have done tremendous damage to Israel’s image in Turkey. The attempt to achieve absolute deterrence can be counter-productive. While anti-Semitism exists in Turkey and is a concern for the Turkey’s Jewish community, it cannot explain the recent broad declines in Turkish support for Israel.

In remarks addressed to Ankara on February 1, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni suggested, “It is possible to fix everything, we have to talk, put things on the table, keep our common interests as well as our differences in mind.” Livni’s proposal is sound, and Ankara would be wise to take it up, for the sake of Turkey’s relationship with Israel but also for the sake of the Palestinians and the rest of the region. A frightened and further isolated Israel is not one that will benefit Turkey or any of Israel’s neighbors.

Finally, given that Turkish-Israeli relations are bound up with bilateral American relations with both states, American officials have little choice but to be involved in repairing those ties. The Bush administration’s aborted project to remake the Middle East started a process of estrangement that inevitably spilled over into Turkish-Israeli relations. The rift in Turkish-Israeli relations, if not repaired soon, may develop into a chasm between America and Turkey.

MESH Pointer: See the subsequent thread, In the name of Islam: a liberal appeal.

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The outbreak of the Russian-Georgian War earlier this month apparently caught Ankara as poorly prepared as it caught Washington. The Turkish Foreign Ministry’s section dealing with the Caucasus reportedly was virtually unstaffed. The head of the section was in Mosul on temporary assignment, the section’s number-two spot is empty and has been for the last six months. The number three was also away on temporary assignment in Nakhichevan and the other assigned section members were on vacation, thus forcing on-duty diplomats from other desks to scramble.

This may surprise. There are abundant reasons for one to expect that Turkey would have been following events in Georgia and the Caucasus with great diligence. The two countries share common borders and intertwined histories. Istanbul ruled large chunks of the Caucasus, including much of Georgia, for centuries, and today there remains inside Turkey a small but vibrant community of Abkhazians and related Caucasian peoples. Russia for most of the past three centuries has loomed over Turkey as its greatest rival and threat, yet at critical times, such as during the Turkish War of Independence (1919-22), it has been a key ally. Today Russia supplies somewhere around 70 percent of Turkey’s natural gas and is Turkey’s second-largest trading partner.

Georgia is a transit point for Caspian and Central Asian oil and gas and as such is critical to Turkey’s ambitions to become an energy hub and to diversify its own energy supplies. As a member of NATO, Turkey has been involved in training and supplying the Georgian military. Finally, given Turkey’s own struggle with Kurdish separatists, other instances of ethno-separatism and border revision logically should command Ankara’s keen attention. In short, both Russia and Georgia are of great strategic, economic, and historic importance to Turkey, and the principles of territorial integrity and self-determination over which the Russo-Georgian War was (nominally) fought are directly relevant to the most sensitive of Turkey’s security concerns.

Turkey’s lack of preparedness for the Russo-Georgian war is not coincidental, but instead reflects a long-standing legacy of Kemalism. The fundamental precept of the foreign policy course laid out by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, summed up in his famous phrase, “Peace at home, peace in the world,” was that Turkey should bury its imperial past, avoid foreign entanglements, and focus on internal development. Thus the Turkish Republic deliberately isolated itself from its neighbors, especially those to its south and east. It cut cultural and other ties across the board, and preferred cordial but distant relations over close involvement and interaction. As a result, Turkey today has a strong cadre of diplomats, professors, analysts and others fluent in English and familiar with the United States and Western Europe, but it lacks the sort of expertise about its own neighborhood that one might assume it would naturally possess given its imperial history. Although challenges to this policy of isolation have emerged on occasion (briefly in the 1950s and perhaps during the early 1990s), a preference for cool detachment and inward focus has remained dominant in the Turkish bureaucracy.

There is much to be said for avoiding foreign entanglements, and the reasoning behind “Peace at home, peace abroad” was anything but frivolous. Yet self-imposed isolation carries its own costs. Those costs rose precipitately for Turkey following the end of the Cold War as its neighborhood underwent tremendous political and economic transformation. Ignoring the events taking place around it was no solution. At this time, Turkey’s self-confidence began to grow, and more Turks began to advocate that their country play a more active role in its region. One positive development has been the emergence in Turkey of think tanks, both official and non-governmental, dedicated to foreign and domestic issues.

Old habits and institutional practices die hard, however, and playing an active role in such a complex region is no simple matter. As a way to break out of the old mindset and gain experience in regional affairs without great risk, Turkey has been trying to play the role of mediator in regional conflicts. The architect of this approach is Ahmet Davutoğlu, a former professor and close adviser to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who now holds the rank of ambassador. Thus Turkey has involved itself in negotiations between Syria and Israel. Similarly, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ali Babacan has at times tried to position himself as a broker between the West and Iran.

Erdoğan in the midst of the Russo-Georgian War tried to apply a slightly more advanced variant of this formula by flying to Moscow, Tiblisi, and Baku and proposing a “Caucasus Stability and Cooperation Platform.” The idea of the platform, which is sometimes also called a pact, is to bring together the three South Caucasian states of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan with Turkey and Russia, and enable them to mediate and solve their conflicts among themselves.

The idea sounds attractive, but it will not go far. Such pacts can work only if all members are willing to prioritize stability and good relations over their other interests. Yet if there is one thing we know, it is that there is no consensus for stability in the Caucasus. Russia just mounted a calculated and successful effort to overthrow the status quo in the Caucasus at the expense of another putative pact member, Georgia. Russia’s war aims, moreover, extend beyond altering the balance of power in the Caucasus, to restoring its position as the dominant power in Eurasia and restructuring its relations with the United States and Europe. Abkhazia and South Ossetia are pawns in a game bigger than the Caucasus. The notion that what Russia and Georgia need in order to come to a mutually satisfactory agreement is a nearby neutral venue for their diplomats to meet verges on the surreal. Perhaps for this reason, the Russian press chose to give short shrift to Erdoğan’s call for a stability pact, and instead interpret his visit as signifying support for Russia in South Ossetia. It was not the finest moment in Turkish diplomacy.

Azerbaijan is another state in the Caucasus that has for some time been voicing an intense dissatisfaction with the status quo. In recent months, Baku has been dropping subtle threats that it might seek to revise it by going to war. In particular, Azerbaijan is dissatisfied with the outcome of the war it fought with Armenian forces over Nagorno-Karabakh (to use the most widespread English rendering of the region’s name), a predominantly Armenian enclave (technically it held the title of “autonomous oblast” in the Soviet Union) inside the Republic of Azerbaijan. The Karabakh War started in 1988, i.e. when the Soviet Union was still in existence, and ended with a ceasefire some six years later in 1994. During the war not only did Karabakh break free of Baku’s control, but Armenian forces managed to seize roughly fifteen percent of the Republic of Azerbaijan’s territory and expelled the Azeri inhabitants thereof, some 800,000 people.

Since that time, Baku has not been able to achieve any redress through diplomatic measures. But thanks to foreign investment in its oil industry it has accumulated some wealth, and has used that wealth to engage in a military build-up. Whether or not Azerbaijan’s military is capable of defeating and driving out Armenian forces and restoring the occupied territories and Karabakh to Baku is by no means clear, but building frustration among Azeris might tempt them to test their luck.

Turkey and Armenia are the two states in the Caucasus that have the greatest interest in preserving and building upon the status quo. The Armenians, i.e. the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR) and the Republic of Armenia, won the Karabakh War and wish to keep their gains. They would like Azerbaijan and the wider world to acknowledge the de facto independent NKR as sovereign Armenian territory (either as part of the Armenian Republic proper or as a separate republic).

Armenia in addition would like to see Turkey lift the blockade it imposed in 1993 in response to the Armenians’ seizure of Azerbaijani territory. That blockade has stunted land-locked Armenia’s economic development, leaving it dependent upon Georgia and Iran for surface routes to the outside world. The disruption caused by Russia’s invasion to the operations of Georgia’s ports, rail lines, and roads (ironically, Turkish goods are among the biggest commodities imported along those roads into Armenia) has hit Armenia’s economy especially hard. and underscored Armenia’s isolation and fundamental vulnerability. Indeed, even before this most recent war, it was clear that Armenia’s lack of relations with Turkey had left it excessively dependent upon Russia—an unhealthy situation for any state pretending to sovereign status. (Indeed, with Armenia already virtually in its back pocket, one might imagine that Russia may seek to woo Azerbaijan to its side by compelling Armenian concessions on Karabakh.)

For its part, Turkey since the end of the Cold War has benefited in numerous ways from the retreat of Russian power and had reason to be generally satisfied with the state of affairs in the Caucasus prior to this war. The big exception is the state of its relations with Armenia. Although Turkey was one of the very first states to recognize Armenia’s independence in 1991, it never followed up to establish relations. Several difficult issues divide the two states. One bone of contention between them is Turkey’s insistence that Armenia definitively renounce any claims on the territory of the Turkish Republic. Another is Armenia’s insistence that Turkey recognize the massacres and deportations from Anatolia of Ottoman Armenians during and after World War One as a genocide. A third is Turkey’s demand that Armenia withdraw from the territory of Azerbaijan that it occupies.

A fourth issue is, of course, the blockade. Although the imposition of the blockade was greatly appreciated by Azerbaijan, which sees itself as the victim of Armenian aggression, it has harmed Turkey’s image worldwide by reinforcing the stereotype of the “Terrible Turk” as a bully. This is something the Turks, never mind the Azeris, find particularly irksome given that it is the Armenians now who are occupying territory seized in war. Turkish support for Azerbaijan has impaired Turkish efforts to counter the lobbying by Armenian diaspora groups of legislative bodies worldwide to classify the mass deaths of Ottoman Armenians in 1915 as genocide. Opening the border with Armenia, some Turkish officials believe, would enable Turkey to thwart these efforts more effectively.

Economics provides another incentive for Turkey to open its borders. Turkey’s east is isolated, distant from markets, and remains underdeveloped. Opening the border with Armenia would provide a boost to the local economy by enabling cross-border trade. It would also make available better routing options for oil and gas pipelines from the Caspian and export corridors to the Caspian and beyond, and thereby provide a boon to Turkey’s national economy as well.

In a gesture intended perhaps to break the stalemate in Turkish-Armenian relations, the Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian invited his Turkish counterpart Abdullah Gül to come to Yerevan on September 6 to watch the national soccer teams of the two nations play a World Cup qualifying match. Gül, some Turks hope, will seize the moment to initiate a major shift in the region’s diplomacy. Gül has not yet committed. Were Gül to do so, it would mark a significant change not just in Turkish-Armenian relations, but even more so in Turkish diplomacy, which has a tradition of working slowly and with exceeding caution, and of letting opportunities slip by.

Indeed, with Russian forces now inside Georgia, both Turkey and Armenia (as well as Azerbaijan) probably already have missed an opportunity to overcome their differences and to chart a path toward more secure and prosperous futures for their societies. The Russian state, whether in its Tsarist, Soviet, and contemporary forms has demonstrated substantial skill in manipulating ethnic and other cleavages on its borderlands to weaken its competitors. It is worth remembering that Russia was involved in the emergence of all of the conflicts mentioned above (Turkish-Armenian, Azeri-Armenian, Ossetian-Georgian, and Abkhazian-Georgian) among others. That is not to say that Russia invented these conflicts. Hardly. At times Russia has expended considerable efforts to contain and resolve them. But Russia is not an outsider to them and possesses an intimate familiarity with them—a familiarity that it can, has, and will deploy to its advantage.

Strength is a relative thing. Sapping the cohesion and power of one’s potential rivals is often as effective, and occasionally even more useful, a method for overcoming them than is building up one’s own strength. There are more fissures for Russia to exploit in the Caucasus. The Turkish-Armenian-Azerbaijani fissure is an easy one to exploit. For reasons of history, memory, and culture, all of these societies remain deeply conflicted regarding relations with each other. Pushing the buttons to poison the atmosphere and disrupt any move toward reconciliation is not difficult.

Russia exerts tremendous influence over Armenia, and considerable influence over Azerbaijan. Turkey, too, is vulnerable to Russian pressure. Already Turkish businessmen are fretting over the way increased scrutiny by Russian customs of their goods is harming Turkish exports and are wondering if such scrutiny is intended as a message to Turkey to refrain from close cooperation with the United States against Russia.

Keeping Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan at loggerheads serves Russia by neutralizing the power and options of its Caucasian neighbors, keeping them dependent, and blocking the development of the Caucasus as an alternative corridor for energy and trade. It also serves varied domestic interests in each of those states. But it does nothing for those societies aside from depriving them of options for future development.

It is not clear that Russia’s defeat of Georgia will restore it to the position of hegemon in the Caucasus, but it will increase Moscow’s ability to play the role of regional spoiler. Although many Turks and Armenians retain doubts about the propriety of closer relations between their countries, important constituencies inside the governments and societies of the two nations recognize the multiple benefits better ties would bring. Their difficulty is convincing others that improved relations are, in fact, conceivable. Thus were Gül and Sarkisian to meet this September and announce together that they intend that their states should, together with Azerbaijan, overcome their differences, their words would have a real impact.

As the larger, more senior, more established, and more powerful state, Turkey is the better candidate to take the lead in the drive toward reconciliation. But it is not likely to happen. With Russia inside Georgia, and the Caucasus reverting again to a theater of Great Power confrontation, time is running out. Boldness is required. Yet whereas Moscow drew from its imperial collapse the lesson that fortune favors the bold, Ankara took from the Ottoman experience the lesson that extreme discretion is the better part of valor.

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At the time of the Russian invasion of Georgia, Russia was following a policy of encouraging the main anti-American forces in the Middle East—Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran—while at the same time trying to cultivate the major Sunni Arab states of the Middle East, especially Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, and drawing them away from their alignment with the United States. The invasion of Georgia, coming as it has in the midst of the Russian diplomatic offensive in the Middle East, is likely to have the most impact on Russia’s relations with Syria, Israel, Turkey and Iran.

Syria. In an almost classic case of political opportunism, Syrian President Bashar Asad seized upon the Russian invasion of Georgia—and the fact that Israel (along with Germany, France, the United States and Turkey) had provided military equipment and training to the Georgian military—to try to convince the Russians to sell Syria the weapons they have long wanted and that the Russians have so far proved unwilling to sell them, especially the short-range, solid fuel Iskander-E ground-to-ground missile that can reach virtually every target in Israel, and the SAM-300 anti-aircraft missile system which, if installed in Syria near Damascus, could control most of Israel’s airspace. As Asad told the Russian newspaper Kommersant on the eve of his visit to Moscow when Georgian-Russian hostilities were still going on, “I think that in Russia and in the world, everyone is now aware of Israel’s role and its military consultants in the Georgia crisis. And if before in Russia there were people who thought these (Israeli) forces can be friendly, now I think no one thinks that way.” It is clear that Asad was referring to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who on repeated occasions stated that he had denied the Iskander missiles to Syria because they could harm Israel.

In backing the Russian intervention in Georgia—one of the few countries in the world to do so—Asad was repeating the policy of his father Hafiz Asad whose Syrian regime was one of the few in the world to support the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. While Asad senior was richly rewarded with Soviet military equipment for his support of Soviet policy in Afghanistan, it remains to be seen what Bashar Asad will get. All Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov would say after the Asad visit was that Moscow would “consider” Syria’s appeal for new weapons sales, and that in any case Russia would not sell any weapons that would affect the Middle East strategic balance. Since sale of both the Iskander-E and SAM-300 systems would definitely affect the regional military balance, Syria is unlikely to get these weapons—that is, if Lavrov is telling the truth or he is not overruled by his superiors. What may come out of the visit are the sale of short-range anti-aircraft missiles (perhaps to make it more difficult for Israel to conduct raids on suspected Syrian nuclear installations as it did in September 2007); the sale of additional anti-tank missiles, such as the ones Hezbollah used effectively against Israel in their 2006 war; and a more robust agreement between Russia and Syria for the Russian use of the Syrian port of Tartus for the expanding Russian Navy,

Israel. Russian-Israeli relations have had their ups and downs under Putin, but in recent years it is clear that relations have deteriorated. Russian support for Hamas, its turning a blind eye when Syria transferred anti-tank missiles to Hezbollah, and its military and diplomatic support for Iran at a time when the Iranian leadership has been calling for the destruction of Israel, have all soured relations. Yet, as a high-ranking Israeli diplomat who specializes in Russian-Israeli relations told me in 2007, “relations are not as bad as they could be.” Indeed, Moscow has a bifurcated if not schizophrenic relationship with Israel. While on the one hand Russian regional policies vis-à-vis Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and Syria, have clearly hurt Israel, on the level of bilateral Russian-Israeli relations, the ties between the two countries are developing surprisingly well.

Thus, on the eve of the Asad visit to Moscow, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had a telephone conversation about Israeli-Syrian relations and about the situation in Georgia. Trade between Russia and Israel has exceeded $2.5 billion a year, much of it in the high tech sector which Putin needs to develop the Russian economy so that it is not dependent on dwindling energy exports. Cultural ties are thriving, and Moscow just established a cultural center in Tel Aviv. The two countries have signed a visa-waiver agreement to facilitate tourism. Negotiations are underway for the return to Russia of Czarist property in Jerusalem. Russia and Israel cooperate in the sale of weaponry to third countries, such as an AWACS aircraft to India (Russia supplies the airframe and Israel the avionics). And Israel’s ruling Kadima Party has just signed an agreement with Putin’s United Russia Party to establish party-to-party relations. While some in the Russian military such as Russia’s Deputy Chief of Staff Anatoly Nogovitsyn publicly complained about Israeli aid to the Georgian military, Foreign Minister Lavrov went out of his way to praise Israel for stopping arms sales to Georgia.

What then explains Russia’s bifurcated policy toward Israel, and how will the Russian invasion of Georgia affect it? It appears clear that Russia has three goals vis-à-vis Israel. First, it is the homeland of more than a million Russian-speaking citizens of the former Soviet Union, and Russia sees Russian-speakers abroad as a source of its world influence. Hence the emphasis on cultural ties between Russia and Israel, in which Israelis of Russian origin play the dominant role. Second, Putin badly wants to develop the Russian economy, and high-tech trade with Israel is a part of his plan. Third, the Arab-israeli conflict is a major issue in world politics, and Putin would very much like to play a role in its diplomacy, if not in finding a solution to the conflict. For this reason he has called for an international peace conference in Moscow in November and he would like Israel to attend, so as to build up the role of Russia as a world mediator. In this context, one should not discount the possibility that Putin has told the Israelis (and the message may be reinforced if Olmert makes a rumored trip to Moscow in September) that Russia will overlook Israeli arms sales to Georgia, and will not sell the feared Iskander-E or SAM-300 missiles to Syria, if Israel agrees to attend the November peace conference in Moscow.

Turkey. In the case of Turkey, the Russian invasion of Georgia should awaken past memories of Czarist and Soviet military pressure against both the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. The Ottoman Empire fought a dozen wars with Czarist Russia, losing the northern shore of the Black Sea, the Crimean Peninsula, and extensive territory in the Balkans. While relations improved after the collapse of both the Ottoman Empire and Czarist Russia, relations chilled again at the end of World War Two when the Soviet Union exerted pressure on Turkey to grant Moscow bases in the Turkish Straits—a demand that drove Turkey into the arms of the United States and NATO.

Relations improved between the USSR and Turkey in the 1980’s as the two countries signed a natural gas agreement, and by the time of the Russian invasion of Georgia, Russia had become Turkey’s number one trading partner, with trade exceeding $25 billion per year and Turkey now dependent on Russia for more than 60 percent of its natural gas imports. On the other hand, Turkey had been a major ally of Georgia, and along with Germany, France, Israel and the United States, had cooperated militarily with Georgia. In addition, Turkey’s hopes of being a major energy hub rest not only on plans to tranship Russian and Iranian natural gas, but also on the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline and on the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum natural gas pipeline, both of which cross Georgian territory. In addition, the Turkish leadership can’t be too happy over the precedent set by South Ossetian and Abhaz independence, given the demands of Turkey’s Kurdish minority for independence.

Torn by these conflicting pressures, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan sought to mediate the Russian-Georgian conflict by proposing a “Caucasus Cooperation and Stability Alliance,” composed of Turkey, Russia, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. However, given the fact that Georgia and Russia are still actively hostile to each other, and Armenia and Azerbaijan remain near war over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, the Turkish president’s proposal seems little more than an attempt to prevent the Georgian-Russian relationship from deteriorating further, a development that would pose significant problems of choice for Turkey. Nonetheless, the Russian move into Georgia may, in the long run, prompt a rethinking of policy in Ankara, something that could reverse the deterioration of Turkish-American relations which was caused by the 2003 Iraq war.

Iran. In the short run at least, the Russian invasion of Georgia, with its accompanying diplomatic clash between the United States and Russia, may well work to the benefit of Iran. Any chance of Russia agreeing to further UN Security Council sanctions against Iran seems to have gone by the wayside, although given the very limited sanctions which the Russians had agreed to in the past, this is probably not too important a factor. In addition, Russia may now more willing to sell Iran the SAM-300 missile system. On the other hand, with sanctions no longer being considered, the chances of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear installations are enhanced, particularly if an Israeli national unity government is formed following the Kadima primaries in mid-September.

In the longer term, however, the Iranians may share some of the concerns of Turkey. Iran, like Turkey, has suffered Russian invasions in the past, and the cautious Iranian response to the Russian invasion of Georgia may reflect that concern. In addition, Iran, like Turkey, has restive minorities, and the independence of South Ossetia and Abhazia could set a negative precedent for Iran. Perhaps for this reason the Iranian Fars News Agency ran a story citing the Georgian ambassador to Tehran’s praise of Iran for its position in the Russian-Georgian conflict.

In summation, the Russian invasion of Georgia was the culmination of an increasingly aggressive foreign policy on the part of Putin in the Middle East and elsewhere. While Syria quickly supported Moscow, most of the rest of the Middle East, including Russia’s ally Iran, withheld support, calling only for a quick cease-fire. While there has been a good bit of speculation that the invasion will lead to an improvement of American-European relations in the face of the new Russian threat, the American position in the Middle East could also improve as a result of the heavy-handed Russian policy in Georgia, although that improvement may have to wait until a new American administration takes office in January 2009.