Word: erdogan
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...ended hostilities in Gaza earlier this year. Turkey has also been approached by Tehran to mediate in its standoff with Washington over Iran's nuclear program. A day after Secretary Clinton's Ankara visit, a high-profile Turkish delegation flew to Tehran, with whose regime Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's moderate Islamist-rooted government enjoys good relations...
...Turkey's rising star in Obama's Washington could also help keep the country's democratization process on track. Elected twice on a platform of change, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government has been faltering on democratic reforms in recent months. Having been frustrated in its efforts to expedite its acceptance into the European Union, Turkey's government has instead put greater emphasis on looking east, burnishing its influence in the Islamic world. The Kurdish conflict in the southeast, which spills over into Iraq, remains unresolved and reforms have stalled, while a recent U.S. State Department human rights report...
...Turkey is the only country in the region with strong military and economic ties to Israel, which supplies Ankara with defense equipment estimated at $100 million annually. The two countries also have a long-established relationship of intelligence cooperation. So, though Erdogan lambasted Israel's Gaza attacks as a "crime against humanity," he also affirmed that long-term relations between the two countries would not suffer...
...Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey's chief foreign policy architect and Erdogan's top adviser, summarized Turkey's new strategy as "zero problems with its neighbors." The reclusive Davutoglu wrote last year: "A central country with such an optimal geographic location cannot define itself in a defensive manner. It should be seen neither as a bridge country, which only connects two points, nor a frontier country, nor indeed as an ordinary country, which sits at the edge of the Muslim world or the West...
...Ankara's changed orientation is not without its detractors. Secularist Turks, worried about what they see as Erdogan's Islamicizing agenda, accuse the government of pulling away from the West and abandoning its E.U. membership drive, pointing to controversial decisions like Ankara's hosting of Hamas leader Khaled Meshal in 2006 as proof...