Remarks by Henri Barkey, a professor of international relations at Lehigh University, came on Monday at a speech he delivered at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Barkey said he “found critiques alleging that Turkey has turned its back on the West completely nonsense,” the Anatolia news agency reported.
“Turkey intends to maintain its relations with the EU and US; what they have been doing is expanding their horizon. From many aspects, this is a reasonable policy,” Barkey, also a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said at the talk, which was titled “The New Turkish Foreign Policy: Is There a Place for Israel?”
Recently, the international media have given wide coverage to Turkey’s foreign policy in the wake of a crisis with Israel over Gaza and increasing cooperation with neighboring Iran, which is accused by the West of harboring aspirations to develop nuclear weapons. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s visit to Tehran last month has been interpreted as an additional factor strengthening the idea that Ankara may be slowly turning its back on its Western allies and seeking to regain its status as a regional power in the Middle East. The fact that Erdoğan’s visit to Iran came two weeks after Turkey barred Israel from a NATO exercise -- a decision that angered Israel -- has further prompted such analysis.
“Prime Minister Erdoğan doesn’t mention at all Pakistan, which is another nuclear power holder, while he presses Israel hard concerning nuclear weapons and calls concerns over Iran [and its nuclear program] ‘gossip,’” Barkey said. Recalling Erdoğan’s remarks that “Muslims cannot commit genocide,” and “What happened in Gaza was worse than what happened in Darfur,” he said such an escalated rhetoric would be “a bitter pill to swallow” for the Israelis.
“Crises with Israel took place in the past as well, but this one is a little bit different. Repairing the damage will take a little time,” Barkey was quoted as saying.
