Is Erdogan hindering Turkey's foreign policy reset?
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan seems to be undercutting the efforts of his foreign minister to get Turkey’s Middle East policies back on track.
Are Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in tune on foreign policy? This is a question diplomats in Ankara are asking after some mixed signals on this score. Turkey’s relations with Israel and Egypt are two cases in point which indicate that Erdogan and Davutoglu may not be speaking from the same script.
Davutoglu told the Turkish A-HBR news channel on Feb. 9 that the Turkish-Israeli relationship “was closer to normalization than ever.” His remarks followed press reports indicating that a compensation deal was near closing for the nine Turks killed by Israeli commandos on May 31, 2010, when their aid ship the Mavi Marmara tried to break the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip.
“With the compensation paid, there would be yet another step taken toward shipping humanitarian aid to Gaza and Palestine,” Davutoglu added. Although he referred to the Gaza Strip, his words hardly suggested that the Gaza blockade was a major obstacle to normalizing ties with Israel at this stage.
At any rate, as Al-Monitor’s Tulin Daloglu indicated in her Feb. 10 post for Turkey Pulse, Davutoglu’s comments during an interview in November 2013 also suggested that Turkey was more flexible in this regard. Initially Ankara had made the lifting of the blockade one of the conditions for normalized ties.
