Joshua Walker:    Well thank you very much. You’ve done a great job in terms of kind of laying out the historical context so I don’t need to go through that. It’s great to be here. It’s great to be able to have a group to have a discussion with, I see a lot of friends in the audience so we’re going to try to keep this as short as possible but just to try to give you some meat and some kind of, some food for thought since we’ve already had physical food put in our belly. As our moderator has already laid out. The question before us today is one of kind of context. It’s very easy in a Washington environment to be caught up in a crisis and what’s happened in the last three weeks maybe even in the last two years in terms of Turkey and who lost Turkey debate. That’s what you hear around town

Those of us that have been looking at Turkey for a very long period of time go crazy, anytime people begin to ask these questions and who lost Turkey and whose side is it on, are they switching sides? There’s this discussion and this hysteria whether it’s on Capital Hill or on K Street among different think tanks these days. And unfortunately we’re asking the wrong questions. Juliette and I have just finished 10 months at the Trans Atlantic Academy as we’re just introduced as and we just produced the report getting to zero Turkey’s neighbors in the West and getting to zero is a references to zero problems with neighbor policy that the current Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu has been talking about since the moment he came into office and also even before that as an advisor. And so the real question is, is there something that has fundamentally changed in Turkey? And I think our argument is yes. There’s some major fundamental change that need to be understood in this town and around the world. And sometimes when we look at Turkey and the questions that we have for Turkey, we have a cold war mentality in the 21st Century environment

It’s first important to understand that there’s been a major change and I don’t think I need to explain to an audience such as this what’s happened since the cold war. But I do think it’s important to point out a few, kind of key aspects. Turkey has been a NATO member since 1952. It’s been on the road to the European Union or European community since 1963. There was never a discussion of whether Turkey was part of the West or not, it was. It was with us against the communist. There was no question about that. Now in a post cold war environment, the questions began to change. No longer was it a discussion about kind of the West and Capitalism against communism. It became a question of really; do we have a common strategic vision? Do we have a common formula

One of the interesting things that our moderator has already pointed out is before the current party in power, the justice and development party. It wasn’t that Turkey didn’t exist. It wasn’t that there was no political leadership in Turkey. In fact I would argue that the current government in power has continued on the successful policies of the previous administrations. There was a bit disingenuous sometimes on the part of the foreign minister, the prime minister to claim that the new Turkish foreign policy is new. In fact I see a lot of continuation from the period of Tugu Causal. Causal vision of kind of Turkey as a larger player, to reclaim some of its [adamant] past, to be able to go back to a neighborhood that it once dominated