How Can Turkey Bounce Back In the Middle East?
Turkey's AKP government must alter its Islamic-based “exclusionary policies,” stabilize political and economic ties with Iraq and Iran and restore normalcy to its relations with Israel.
Turkey’s Middle East policy under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has effectively ended in a dead end. First, there were Ankara’s miscalculations over Syria, and now there is its regional isolation over Egypt. There is an almost celebratory mood in some quarters in the region over this, which belies the assumption in AKP circles that Turkey under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is the darling of all Arabs.
It may appear to have been so momentarily after Erdogan chastised Israeli President Simon Peres at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2009 over Israel’s brutal operation against Gaza. Arab sympathy for Turkey also peaked after the killing by Israeli commandos of nine pro-Palestinian Turkish activists on the Mavi Marmara aid ship in May 2012.
