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Is Turkey Leaving the West?

[Foreign Affairs] Soner Cagaptay - 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. 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 PA leader Mahmoud Abbas the "head of an illegitimate government." In September, Erdogan defended Iran's nuclear program, arguing that the problem in the Middle East is Israel's nuclear arsenal. The writer is a senior fellow and director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
2009-10-27 06:00:00
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