But no doubt once the razzmatazz of the visit fades, he will try to figure out what the whole thing was all about. It was just one week ago that Mr. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party (AK Party) emerged from a nationwide local election with a less than its accustomed share of the vote, but still with a sufficiently wide gap between themselves and the main opposition to claim credibly that their mandate to govern is still intact. And for the next two days, a government no less than the country it serves will receive another sort of endorsement when the president of the United States comes to call. The charismatic leader could have chosen any number of important allies to pay a symbolic visit so early in his presidency. But he chose Tayyip's Café Américain. The reason, no doubt, has to do with Turkey's position on the edge of what to American eyes is the "known world." Mr. Obama's predecessor snarled at Iran and Syria, the two most westerly points of the infamous post-modern axis of evil. He went so far as to invade Iraq, another of Turkey's neighbors, at horrendous human and economic cost and for no easily discernable reason. The current American administration has the sense to pause to reconsider. It is committed to try wooing its ideological foes back into the congress of reasonable nations. From Washington's point of view, Ankara is the base camp in the safari park of rogue nations, a safe platform from which to view the wild.
Mr. Obama arrives in Ankara fresh from London, where the G-20 summit exceeded the admittedly low expectations that it could begin to restore credibility to shell-shocked world markets. As the representative of the country whose bad habits were center of the economic storm, he wisely declared himself the "listening" president -- there to help build rather than dictate the new consensus. In Turkey, Mr. Obama will discover a nation disillusioned with American might. Mr. Bush managed to infuse an important strategic relationship with mistrust. By the time he was re-elected, there was a new genre of bestselling apocalyptic revenge fantasy literature in Turkey, in which aggrieved Turkish Rambos worked out their frustration with Washington using suitcase-sized thermo-nuclear devices.
Admittedly, towards the end of his presidency, Mr. Bush managed to reassure many in Turkey that it was never American policy to support a Kurdish nationalist insurrection, that the US was not propping up Mr. Erdoğan's AK Party as its Islamic poodle in the Near and Middle East and that it was not actively seeking to avenge itself on the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK), who had never supported the US invasion of Iraq. All the same, one of Mr. Obama's urgent tasks in Ankara will be to reassure his hosts that bygones really are bygone. In so doing, he will be trying to make a good impression at the threshold of the Islam-professing world.
Ankara has already offered its good services in trying to resolve some of the region's intractable conflicts in the Middle East and more recently between Islamabad and Kabul. It will no doubt be under pressure to prove its own credentials by consolidating a modus vivendi with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq as well as normalizing its relations with Armenia. Mr. Obama, as well as using Turkey as an honest broker, will want to first re-cement the friendship with Turkey itself. He should be encouraged that he will not find the job all that difficult. The last Democratic president to visit Turkey won hearts and minds when he paid a visit to the victims of the 1999 earthquake and (why had no Turkish politician thought of it before?) actually kissed a baby.
The stakes are higher than they were for Mr. Clinton then. At its most basic, Mr. Obama's first priority in visiting Turkey will not be to win over America's enemies so much as to win back America's friends.
