This rhetoric which too many in the West sounded very new and very scary, is not new at all in the Turkish context. We’ve heard this before in the idea of Cuasal but what is different? What’s different is us in a lot of different ways. I’m going to talk a lot about the US strategic focus and try to focus on that relationship. I’m going to let Juliette focus mostly on the European Union side of things and maybe some of the more domestic factors but it’s important to understand that in the post 9/11 environment. The United States began to see Turkey through a very different lens. The idea that after 9/11, the Bush administration was seeking a partner to wage a war on terror, that would not be perceived as a war on Islam. Turkey fit that motif very well. It’s the only Muslim majority nation that is a NATO member. It’s the only nation that’s with us in Afghanistan with combat troops on the ground that is a Muslim majority. It fits our interest in a lot of different ways. And when you think about what the Bush administration with the neo-conservative movement did, they saw Turkey more or less like a model, as kind of the model or the moderate Islam that we were trying to promote and in fact I would say this, as much as we may be upset about some of the actions of the current government, we created this monster. In 2002 when the AKP swept to power in December of that year, the current prime minister who was only the party leader at that point in time was invited on an official visit to Washington in December. First time this has happened in the US history [IB] we invited a non government official for an official visit because we understood that he was a real primary political power there and we invited him and this was seen in Turkey among the different factional groups
Anybody who understands Turkish politics knows how important Washington’s approval and also the legitimacy that this visit gave to Tayyip Erdogan. And so when he came and he met with bush and there was a strategic dialogue. There was an understanding in Turkey that okay this is the guy that’s going to lead Turkey. This is the most important factor. Clearly with the Iraq war vote, the prime minister who was the party leader and the and AKP was in support of the resolution for American troops to go through northern Iraq. It failed because he was not able to bring his own party and the opposition parties together and the US in many ways failed to articulate what our agenda and why we were doing what we did
And in many ways the Turks have felt validated and as a result of the downturn of events in Iraq. So when you look at kind of America’s strategic focus, its clear to me that Turkey is, may becoming increasingly more important, not necessarily because of anything that Turkey is doing but because of what’s going on in the world for America. When we look at Afghanistan when we look at Turkey, when we look at Iran when we look at the Arab Israeli peace conflict, peace process. Its clear that Turkey has a vital role here and the bottom line is that Turkey has also being changing. Since 2002 when the AKP’s has come into power whether you like them or not you give to give them credit. They have helped the economic growth in an unprecedented manner. They have kind of reasserted a sense of Turkish pride
I’d like to say anybody studied Turkey for a while, you see in Turkey extremes. You either watching Turkey that’s completely depressed about life, ‘We have no power we can’t do anything.’ or you are seeing a completely self confident Turkey. We clearly are seeing a self confident Turkey. I would even warn that what we are seeing in the prime minister’s current behavior might even border on arrogance because of the language that he’s using