I have recently subscribed to Foreign Affairs, which costs only $20 a year
including access to the their website which includes much material from the
influential (more so these days than in the first five years of Bush)
Council on Foreign Relations.
At any rate, despite the URLs I "helpfully" provide, you usually cannot
access full articles without a subscription. Thus I will submit the full
article when length permits.
When the article is longer, as in many cases, I will submit a sufficient
section to establish reasons to pay attention, and offer to send the full
article to anyone who requests it.T
This article confirms my strong conviction that the victory of the
"Islamist" capitalist party reflected overall (and allowing for the
possibility that these conservative or reactionary politicians may
eventually rally around antiwoman measures, not without intense resistance
from women and their allies we may be sure) a positive development in
Turkey's politics.
I think it is positive overall for instance that there is growing opposition
to joining the European Union, which has been the axis of Turkey's
governmental orientation for many years. Even though the breadth of this
opposition includes those unwilling to admit cruelties of repression going
back to the Armenians in the World War I period.
Fred Feldman
(http://www.foreignaffairs.com)
Is Turkey Leaving the West?
An Islamist Foreign Policy Puts Ankara at Odds With Its Former Allies
Soner Cagaptay
SONER CAGAPTAY is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Turkish Research
Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He is the author
of Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism in Modern Turkey: Who Is a Turk?
In early October, Turkey disinvited Israel from Anatolian Eagle, an annual
Turkish air force exercise that it had held with Israel, NATO, and the
United States since the mid-1990s. It marked the first time Turkey's
governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) let its increasingly
anti-Western rhetoric spill into its foreign policy strategy, and the move
may suggest that Turkey's continued cooperation with the West is far from
guaranteed.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's prime minister and the leader of the AKP,
justified the decision by calling Israel a "persecutor." But only a day
after it dismissed Israel, Turkey invited Syria -- a known abuser of human
rights -- to joint military exercises and announced the creation of a
Strategic Cooperation Council with the Syrian regime. A mountain is moving
in Turkish foreign policy, and the foundation of Turkey's 60-year-old
military and political cooperation with the West may be eroding.
Starting in 1946, when Turkey chose to ally itself with the West in the Cold
War -- later sending troops to Korea and joining NATO -- successive Turkish
governments have pursued close cooperation with the United States and
Europe. Turkey viewed the Middle East and global politics through the lens
of their own national security interests. This made cooperation possible,
even with Israel, a state Turkey viewed as a democratic ally in a volatile
region. The two countries shared similar security concerns, such as Syria's
support for terror groups abroad -- radical Palestinian organizations in the
case of Israel, and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in Turkey. In 1998,
when Ankara confronted Damascus over its support for the PKK, Turkish
newspapers wrote headlines championing the Turkish-Israeli alliance: "We
will say 'shalom' to the Israelis on the Golan Heights," one read.
The AKP, however, viewed Turkey's interests through a different lens -- one
colored by a politicized take on religion, namely Islamism. Senior AKP
officials called the 2004 U.S. offensive in Fallujah, Iraq, a "genocide,"
and in February 2009, Erdogan compared Gaza to a "concentration camp."
But the AKP's foreign policy has not promoted sympathy toward all Muslim
states. Rather, the party has promoted solidarity with Islamist,
anti-Western regimes (Qatar and Sudan, for example) while dismissing
secular, pro-Western Muslim governments (Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia). This
two-pronged strategy is especially apparent in the Palestinian territories:
at the same time that the AKP government has called on Western countries to
"recognize Hamas as the legitimate government of the Palestinian people,"
AKP officials have labeled Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas the
"head of an illegitimate government." According to diplomats, Abbas' last
visit to Ankara in July 2009 went terribly -- now, these diplomatic sources
say, Abbas does not trust the AKP any more than he trusts Hamas.
As the cancelled military exercises with Israel show, the AKP's moralistic
foreign policy is not without inherent hypocrisies. An earlier example came
last January, when, a day after Erdogan harangued Israeli President Shimon
Peres, as well as Jews and Israelis, at the World Economic Forum for knowing
"well how to kill people," Turkey hosted the Sudanese Vice Presid
