![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/10\/turkish_airforce.jpg\")
<\/p>\nAli Yenidunya in EA Middle East and Turkey<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Our question for today: is Turkey still a pro-Western country looking forward to entering the European Union. Or\u00a0has Ankara,\u00a0“unfortunately, joined the radical axis formed led by Iran and supported by Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah”.<\/p>\n
Let’s start with a\u00a0statement by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu on 11 October:<\/p>\n
We also had wonderful, friendly relations with another country, with military cooperation, with full diplomatic relations, with visits by heads of state, with 400,000 Israeli visitors to that country. That country is called Turkey.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
What prompts Netanyahu to use the past tense?\u00a0Is it because Turkey\u00a0ejected Israel\u00a0from a planned international air force exercise or because Turkey and Syria held joint military exercises in late April? Is it because Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told off Israeli Prseident Shimon Peres over Israel’s bloody war in Gaza in World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2009 or because Turkey did not stop the Freedom Flotilla\u00a0which tried to break\u00a0the Gaza siege?<\/p>\n
Is it\u00a0because\u00a0Turkey conditionally accepted NATO’s planned anti-missile system, saying that \u00a0it should not be presented as a defence against Iran?\u00a0(On Friday, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said: “We do not perceive any threat from any neighbour countries and we do not think ouur neighbors form a threat to NATO.”) Or is it because of\u00a0a joint Turkish-Chinese air-force exercise held two weeks ago?<\/p>\n
If I may offer an alternative to the “radical axis” thesis at this point….<\/p>\n
Ankara’s new foreign policy under the Justice and Development Party is not a revisionist manoeuvre but a reflection of\u00a0its rising autonomy due\u00a0amidst Washington’s decreasing power — from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Iraq to the rest of the Middle East —\u00a0coupled with regional powers taking more initiative, economically and politically.\u00a0Ankara,\u00a0like its\u00a0regional neighbours, wants to get benefit from this international conjuncture.<\/p>\n
And in order to become a stronger regional power, Ankara had to give up its discourse based on antagonism towards its neighbours (no\u00a0need even to mention the need to solve its Armenian, Kurdish and\u00a0ecumenical Greek Orthodox problems). The next step was to increase trade, boost bilateral relationships, build trust with old enemies, and\u00a0raise your credibility with statements showing you are standing with the “weak”. Erdogan did this for Gazans and for Uighur Turks in northwest China. (How fast do we forget that Erdogan blamed a Chinese official of committing a \u201ca near genocide” after the killing of 184 people last year in the conflict?)<\/p>\n
Some other facts: Turkey signed eight new trade agreements with China in early October, bypassing\u00a0the\u00a0US dollar\u00a0for direct business between the\u00a0Turkish Lira and Yuan. The goal is to achieve a\u00a0trade volume of $100 billion in ten years from the current amount of $17 billion. As for the “existential threat” of Iran,\u00a0the trade volume between Iran and Turkey was $1.4 billion in 2000 but it was $8 billion in 2008. (And of this, only $236 million in 2000 were Turkish exports; by 2007, the figure was\u00a0$1.3 billion.)\u00a0Turkey is now carrying out\u00a0around 14 to 15% of its trade with its neighbours as opposed to 3 to 4% in the previous decade.<\/p>\n
As a champion of privatisation, Turkey is still a relatively “liberal” — perhaps\u00a0neo-liberal\u00a0— country,\u00a0both economically and politically.\u00a0This is still the\u00a0same Ankara trying to be a part of European Union, following the adjustment of domestic law to the\u00a0harmonization code of the EU\u00a0in 2001 and in 2004. That is not to say\u00a0Ankara is doing a great job fulfilling all of the democratic criteria\u00a0to become\u00a0a member state of the EU, but it\u00a0has a pro-Western\u00a0identity.<\/p>\n
I call my closing witness. Who would like to see a stronger Turkey (with\u00a0reduced tension with Israel, of course) that has close relationships and is diplomatically and economically capable of holding negotiations with Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan?<\/p>\n
Talking to BBC’s \u201cRecord Europe\u201d, US Foreign Secretary\u00a0Hillary Clinton said: “Turkey is becoming a greater global and regional power. Its economy is growing dramatically. They are extending to countries and try to be effective on their own as well as with us.”<\/p>\n
Increasingly autonomous? Yes. Radically evil? No.<\/p>\n
Article originally appeared on EA WorldView (http:\/\/www.enduringamerica.com\/).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ali Yenidunya in EA Middle East and Turkey Our question for today: is Turkey still a pro-Western country looking forward to entering the European Union. Or\u00a0has Ankara,\u00a0“unfortunately, joined the radical axis formed led by Iran and supported by Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah”. Let’s start with a\u00a0statement by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu on 11 October: We […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":23978,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[146,62,56],"tags":[3851],"class_list":["post-23977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-china","category-iran_","category-syria","tag-turkey-china-military-exercise"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23977\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}