It was only a few years ago that Turkey's Middle East foreign policy, as orchestrated by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), showed so much promise. At one point, Ankara was mediating between Israel and Syria, negotiating a resolution to the standoff over Iran's controversial nuclear program and was involved in one way or another in helping resolve a host of other regional problems. As many analysts saw it, with its growing economy, strong democracy (at least compared to its Middle Eastern neighbors) and proactive foreign policy that focused on promoting "soft power" approaches, Turkey was set to play a defining regional role in the coming years.
Recent events, though, have raises some significant questions about whether Turkey can become the regional superpower it had set out to become. Writing in a Nov. 25 column in Today's Zaman, analyst Yavuz Baydar sums up Turkey's current position in rather uncharitable terms:
Turkey, once full of promises as a leading regional power, no longer leads; it only follows. It started to send signals as an old style state whose voice is a blend of anger, threat, resentment and disappointment. This must be addressed.
The ongoing crisis in Syria, for example, has shown the limits of Turkish power -- both soft and hard -- and also called into question the AKP leadership's ability to correctly read regional developments. But the recent flareup of hostilites between Israel and Hamas made even clearer how diminished Ankara's voice is in the Middle East right now.
In what may be a somewhat questionable act of architectural preservation, Baku's historic Sabunchu rail station, a Moorish-influeneced stone structure built in 1926, now has the distinction of the being largest fried chicken shack on the planet. Opened with great fanfare -- check out the this YouTube video from the restaurant's high voltage ribbon-cutting ceremony last month, -- this latest KFC outpost was reportedly built with an investment of 3 million euros, used to restore the railway station, which had been falling apart after years of neglect.
Considering the glee with which Azeri officials are bulldozing historic parts of Baku in order to make way for ever-taller buildings, the opening of this new monster KFC may ultimately be a good thing. Azerbaijan, that land of ironic twists, may be one of the few places in the world where turning a classic railway station into a fried chicken restaurant may actually be considered a step in a positive direction.
After six years of living with an onerous embargo, will Russian consumers soon be able to again get their fix of Borjomi mineral water and sweet Khvanchkara wine from Georgia? Statements coming out from both Moscow and Tbilisi make it sound like that could be the case.
"Russia and Georgia are ready to solve practically the issue of returning Georgian wine into the Russian market. The supply of Georgian wine into Russia was banned in 2006", Andrey Denisov, Russia's First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, was quoted as saying earlier this week.
“We are talking about the restoring the position of Georgian winemaking in our market. At least the both sides are ready to solve the issue.”
Meanwhile, according to the state-run Voice of Russia website, Georgia's Minister of Agriculture, David Kirvalidze, yesterday said his country is ready to negotiate with Moscow in order to enable Georgian wine and mineral water to return to Russian supermarket shelves.
Reporting on these developments, the Independent suggests that what is likely helping along this wine detente between Moscow and Tbilisi are the results of last month's Georgian Parliamentary elections:
In Georgian parliamentary elections last month, the party of pro-Western President Mikheil Saakashvili was defeated by a coalition led by Bizdina Ivanishvili, a zebra-keeping billionaire who made his fortune in Russia and has promised to improve relations between the two countries. One of the first steps could be the return of the wine trade.
Under the guidance of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), Turkey completely abolished the death penalty in 2004, one of several reforms enacted with an eye towards meeting the criteria required for joining the European Union. So what to make of the suggestions made recently by the AKP's leader, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that Turkey should consider reintroducing capital punishment?
First, the background. Erdogan got the debate going earlier this month when he told an annual gathering of AKP members that, in response to recent upsurge in attacks against Turkish forces by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), public opinion now supports reintroducing the death penalty. Soon after, Erdogan told a crowd in Ankara, "In the face of deaths, murders, if necessary the death penalty should be brought back to the table (for discussion)." While Turkey's Minister of Justice has said that there are no plans to bring the death penalty back, the fact that Erdogan -- Turkey's most powerful politician -- has brought up the issue, was enough to raise concern among many Turks and some European politicians.
Writing in the International Herald Tribune's Latitude blog, veteran Turkey correspondent Andrew Finkel describes how he recently found out that one of his favorite kebab restaurants recently stopped serving booze. Rather than due to political pressure, it turns out the owner made a business decision: in the part of town where the restaurant was located, many locals will no longer frequent an establishment that serves alcohol.
But Finkel points out that while that restaurant owner's clientele may be shunning booze, a number of well-to-do Turks are investing their time and money in projects that are supporting a small boom in Turkey's wine industry. Writes Finkel:
In all, there some 800 varieties of grape in Turkey, 30 of which are cultivated commercially. The country is the sixth-largest producer of grapes, but most end up eaten as is or as raisins. Only 3 percent are turned into wine. For now.
“Small wineries are transforming the whole industry,” says Isa Bal, the head sommelier of The Fat Duck, the three Michelin star restaurant in Berkshire, who was named Best Sommelier in Europe in 2008. Originally from Adana, a city in southern Turkey known for its pickled red carrot juice, Bal describes a Turkey on the brink of discovering the finer things.
At the moment, for most Turks the good life means owning a house and a car. Bal predicts that in time it will mean “sealing a business deal over lunch with a good wine.”
I, for one, was further reassured over lunch in Urla, about 20 miles from Izmir, at another state-of-the-art winery run by Can Ortabas, who took up growing grapes after he discovered ancient sets of vineyards on his land. Ortabas is not worried that Turkey might turn into Iran.
American President Barack Obama and his challenger, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, have been spending this election season working hard to portray themselves as each representing a starkly different choice for American voters. But as the October 22 debate in Florida between the two candidates made clear, when it comes to foreign policy issues, Obama and Romney are not really that different. During the debate, Romney frequently agreed with positions that the Obama administration has taken on many key foreign policy issues, or offered only mild criticism on others, leaving very little distance between the two.
When it comes to the question of Turkish-American relations, the debate – which featured hardly any discussion of Turkey itself – ultimately answered very little, leaving observers to continue their guessing game as to what the election would mean for the ties between the two countries, particularly if Romney were to win.
In the case that Obama is reelected, the picture is fairly clear. Although Obama presided a rocky period in Turkey-US relations, particularly during 2010 after the Mavi Marmara incident and the Turkish “no” vote in the United Nations Security Council on tightening sanctions on Iran, the period since then has seen a dramatic improvement in the ties between Ankara and Washington.
“I think President Obama’s views are well known. He has worked hard to cultivate a strong personal relationship Prime Minister Erdogan. At all levels, Turkey-US relations are better probably today then they have ever been in history,” Ross Wilson, a former US ambassador to Turkey and currently director of the Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council in Washington, told me.
Istanbul is often billed as the city where “East meets West,” but to many it is a place where those geographies pass each other on the way in and out of town. Afghans, Iranians, sub-Saharan Africans, Bosnians, Bulgarians, Armenians, Filipinos and many other nationalities end up in Istanbul struggling to get by or move on. Though not always understood and much less frequently welcomed, the migrant communities of Istanbul represent significant cultural diversity and could make a much greater contribution to the city’s cosmopolitan culture, if embraced.
In Kurtuluş where the streets start sloping down toward Dolapdere, there are enough African migrants to make up an entire soccer league. In Kumkapı, call center windows are plastered with tiny flags and by-the-minute rates for phone calls to dozens of countries. Follow your nose through these neighborhoods and you may find a big lunch of injera and dibs taking place in one of the many makeshift community centers tucked into the middle floors of a building. Though struggling, these communities survive and the simple act of cooking the food of their homeland, day by day, helps to hold them together. One migrant cook told us that cooking helps you to “forget where you are.”
As the crisis in Syria drags on and Turkey's security concerns become more pronounced, there have been suggestions from various quarters that Ankara might want to shore up its own interests by mending its strained ties with Israel, which have been frozen since the 2010 Mavi Marmara incident.
The latest such suggestion appears to have come from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who reportedly pressed Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan during a Berlin meeting the other day about patching things up with Israel. As Today's Zaman columnist Abdullah Bozkurt reports today, Erdogan told reporters after his meeting with Merkel that he told the German leaders that, along with an apology for the incident and compensation to the families of the nine Turks killed, Ankara also expects Israel lift its blockade on Gaza if it wants to restore relations with Turkey. In other words, don't expect much to happen. From Bozkurt's column:
Later on, when he shared his recollection of the meeting with reporters, Erdoğan said: “I told her that all three conditions must be fulfilled. I said to her in very clear terms that we are not open to options like agreeing to a deal on an apology and compensation while discarding the lifting of embargo condition.”
The indispensable Hvino News website has just released a superb resource for anyone who wants to learn more about the rapidly improving Georgian wine scene, a detailed "appellations" map for Georgia's wine-growing regions. Mapping out eighteen distinct regions, from Akhasheni to Vazisubani, the map also provides detailed notes on each region's geographical characteristics and descriptions of the types of grapes grown there. Curious to know more about the Goruli Mtsvane white wine grown in the Ateni region near Gori? Check out Hvino's map, here.
Turkey's forcing down of a Syrian civilian jet earlier this month on it way from Moscow to Damascus on suspicion that it was carrying military cargo was certainly a bold move by a country intent on showing its regional leadership. But two weeks later, the issue of the plane's cargo appears to remain a bone of contention between Ankara and Moscow, which has been both increasing its political and economic cooperation with Turkey while, at the same time, watching its growing regional ambitions with some concern.
