I think one of the important factors to pay attention to is. Are we looking at are looking at rhetoric or we’re looking at action? In this town in the recent days particularly since the Davos incident. The language of the prime minister has dominated the head lines. What I would point to is what is the actual actions? Turkey has not cut off its relations with Israel despite the fact that nine of its citizens were killed in international waters. Turkey has continued a dialogue with Israel. Just today or recently the foreign minister of Turkey had a meeting with the trade Minster from Israel. There was a discussion going on so clearly that relationship is not dead. And to kind of prematurely say that Turkey Israel relations are dead is premature. I think that that’s not the case

There’s no denying that there is the trouble in the relationship. Clearly in the past Turkey was always working with Israel they had strategic alliance in the 90s but I would argue that that alliance was in and of itself kind of untenable. As long as Syria was supporting the PKK in terms of national terrorists. In Turkey they were going to continue to squeeze Syria and one of the best ways to do that was through Israel. Now that that period has changed in terms of Syria becoming one of Turkey’s strongest partners economically and looking at the strategic vision of the Middle East since the kind of the collapse of Iraq. Israel is now being conditioned by Turkey. There is an indexation in some ways of whether Turkey has good relations with Israel based on its peace process. And so given the current composition of the Israeli government. The Turks don’t believe that there is a real peace process in place and therefore they are going to put more pressure and what we saw with the Gaza blockade. Flotilla incident what we saw in Davos

Prior to the Davos incident, this government was directly involved in peace negotiation between the Israeli and the Syrians. So to say that it’s all ideological and it’s the AKP that hates Jews as anti-Semitic. There is an element of that I’m not denying it there is ideology here, but the bottom line is strategic interest in Turkey’s case in terms of economic prowess as it looks at the Middle East. It wants to have a stable market for its goods. So I would argue that whether it’s AKP or any government the nationalists’ kind of popular sentiment in Turkey is pushing in one direction. Now that’s in terms of actions the rhetoric on the other hand is concerning to me

Turkey is clearly beginning to feel very self confident it feels that it has a seat at the table, indeed it should have a seat at the table. It’s a founding member of the G20. It’s on the UN Security Council for the first time in many years. it’s an EU aspirant country it’s a head of the organization of Islamic conferencing. It’s an important player and for the United States or west there anybody to treat Turkey without the deference that it deserves is always going to cause a reaction. Now whether or not the rhetoric has gone too far and maybe they are projecting themselves more than they’re capabilities that’s something that we can have for discussion. But I just wanted to put up some of those highlights

The last point that wanted to make in terms of when we talk about Turkey in this town and we think about Turkey as a strategic ally. I want to point out the fact that not much has changed Turkey still represents in my opinion the best ally of the United States in the region. Now I don’t mean best in the sense that it is going to always do what we want them to do. During the Cold War that was the way in which we judged our allies. You are either with us or you’re against us, you either do what we ask you to do or you don’t do it. Nowadays it’s become a much more kind of a back and forth. I think that America and Turkey have a fundamentally identical view of the Middle East in terms of what it looks like. I don’t mean identical in the sense that we are always going to get to the same; we’re going to have the same means to get to the end. But I think our ends are fundamentally the same