President Barack Obama will again dominate the news from overseas this week as he starts his highly touted trip to Turkey — a country seen by some as a gateway for the United States to mend tattered fences with the Muslim World.
As this Reuters factbox points out, Turkey is a country “whose help Washington needs to solve confrontations and conflicts from Iran to Afghanistan.” Turkey’s once- stellar relations with Washington suffered a major setback in 2003 when the country adamantly opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
The AP notes that this trip is highly symbolic:
Obama’s two-day trip is as symbolic of unity as it is strategic, following talks and handshakes with heads of Group of 20 nations, NATO and the European Union. His path across Europe leads to a Muslim people with secular ideals, a stable nation in an unstable region, and a city, Istanbul, that straddles a strait between the Asian and European continents.
And there will be one notable omission on this trip — which could bring Obama praise in some quarters and condemnation in others:
Unlike Bush and President Bill Clinton in the past, Obama will not visit Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians. Turkey harbors historical mistrust toward the patriarchate, whose officials have appealed for more religious freedom from their compound on the Golden Horn inlet in Istanbul.
NBC News puts the trip into perspective and gives details on a meeting Obama will hold with young people. He’s essentially the town hall venue that served him so well on the American political stage abroad, which could enhance his imagery abroad. And imagery often translates into discernible clout:
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According to a post by Theodore Couloumbis, Bill Ahlstrom & Gary Weaver on RealClearWorld, the content-heavy foreign news site, strong U.S. Turkey ties are vital for a middle east peace. Here are a few excerpts:
The US president’s upcoming visit to Turkey can pave the way for renewed good relations between the two traditional allies and help Turkey play a more effective, enlarged role in a reinvigorated Middle East peace process.
In recent months, Turkey has fostered renewed Israeli-Syrian contacts, has identified Hizbollah and Fatah elements that would agree to participate in dialogues on the two-state Israeli-Palestinian solution, and has made it clear that it will facilitate safe passage for withdrawing American troops and equipment from Iraq. Turkey is playing a more active regional role, and it is in both regional and US interests that it continue to do so.
But Turkey’s effectiveness and its relationships with both the US and the EU depend on five key factors.
The authors detail the five factors then write:
The symbolism of President Obama’s trip to Turkey will not be lost on the Muslim world. To reinforce that symbolism, he would do well to repeat what he told New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in a 2007 interview, which Kristof reiterated in a 2008 column in the heat of the campaign: “Mr. Obama praised the Arabic call to prayer as ‘one of the prettiest sounds on earth at sunset,’ and he repeated the opening of it.”
The US and the EU have a common stake in Turkish success: A Turkey that consolidates its democracy, stabilizes its economy and its population growth, and fulfills the EU membership criteria, will go far to destroy the myth that Islam and democracy don’t mix.
Read it in full.
While in Turkey, in addition to meeting with government bigwigs and holding his sure-to-be-popular town meeting, Obama will also meet opposition leaders, the Turkey blog on MEMRI reports:
The ambiguity over the meetings between U.S. President Barack Obama and opposition party leaders in Parliament on Monday has been solved through a formula to allocate five minutes to each party’s chairman.
Parliament will be an important stop for Obama during his Ankara talks, not only for his address but also his scheduled meetings with opposition leaders. Obama will arrive at Parliament at 2:30 p.m. and will be welcomed by Parliament Speaker Köksal Toptan.
Then he will meet with Deniz Baykal of the Republican People’s Party, or CHP; then Devlet Bahçeli of the Nationalist Movement Party, or MHP; and then Ahmet Türk of the Democratic Society Party, or DTP. Obama will meet with each leader for five minutes. In the initial program, Obama would meet with leaders all together, but the opposition parties did not accept the plan.
While Obama’s turkey trip may be just one more foreign news story here in the United States, the story will have a different context when viewed from other nations. Writes Oceanstrike blog in India:
Turkey’s accession to the EU would send an important signal to the Muslim world and firmly anchor the country in Europe.But French President Nicolas Sarkozy said it was up to the EU itself to decide who joined the bloc.
The visit is Mr Obama’s first to a majority Muslim country as president, and only his second purely bilateral visit after Canada.The BBC’s Sarah Rainsford in Ankara says the fact that he chose to come to Turkey so early has been welcomed as a sign that he wants to re-engage with it.Public support for the US dropped to a record low during the Bush administration, fuelled mostly by fierce opposition to the invasion of Iraq.
The United States and Europe must approach Muslims as our friends, neighbours and partners in fighting injustice, intolerance and violence, forging a relationship based on mutual respect and mutual interest.Moving forward towards Turkish membership in the EU would be an important signal of your commitment to this agenda and ensure that we continue to anchor Turkey firmly in Europe.
Obama has had an eye to ties with Turkey during his tour. In Prague on Sunday, Obama urged the European Union to accept Turkey as a full member, in remarks rejected outright by France and met coolly by Germany.
And Turkey said it dropped objections to Anders Fogh Rasmussen becoming the next head of NATO after Obama guaranteed one of the Dane’s deputies would be a Turk.
Obama may unlock the kind of goodwill generated by former U.S. President Bill Clinton when he came to Turkey in 1999, but risks dissipating it all if he uses the word genocide to describe the fate of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915.
But lest you think it’s all positive reaction for Obama, here’s the view of EU Referendum:
… President Obama backing Turkey’s membership of the EU will be seen as unwonted interference in European affairs. After all, whenever President Bush made statements of that kind, there was outrage in the land.
Then again, there seems to be no outrage or sneering contempt at the fact that the self-same ultra-brilliant President Obama thinks that they speak Austrian in Austria. Somebody should tell the highly internationally minded statesman that the language they speak in that country is German….
Fausta reports that there are likely to be some bad feeling in the Czech Republic though, presumably, President Klaus will not be given an iPod with President Obama’s speeches.
We shall have more of what has come out of the NATO Summit and the various negotiations behind the scenes. For the moment let us just report that Turkey has dropped her objection to the Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who will be the next Secretary-General of NATO. (In Denmark he will be succeeded in the prime ministerial position by the Finance Minister, Loekke Rasmussen. Makes it relatively easy for bloggers to have prime ministers of the same surname succeeding each other.)
Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports that Obama used personal diplomacy to avert a NATO stalemate:
President Barack Obama waded into a diplomatic stalemate for the second time on his European trip and once again succeeded in bringing his more senior peers into harmony.
With a North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit facing potential deadlock yesterday over Turkey’s opposition to Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen as the next head of NATO, Obama brought Rasmussen and Turkish President Abdullah Gul together for a talk.
After an hour-long session, they rejoined the summit with beaming faces that telegraphed the result: Turkey would drop its objections in exchange for a promise from Rasmussen to “ensure the best relations possible between NATO and the Muslim world” — and shut down a Kurdish TV channel if Turkish claims of links to terrorism were proven.
At a news conference afterward, Obama said his debut on the international stage had convinced him that “political interaction in Europe is not that different from the United States Senate,” where he served before entering the White House.
“There’s a lot of — I don’t know what the term is in Austrian — wheeling and dealing, and people are pursuing their interests, and everybody has their own particular issues and their own particular politics,” he said in response to an Austrian reporter’s question.
However, Bloomberg notes that it wasn’t all roses for Obama on his first foreign trip: he failed to achieve some goals such as a big NATO show of support for his strategy to make a big push in Afghanistan. NATO committed some 5,000 non-combat trainers for the military and police — essentially a perfunctory and tepid response.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.