What does Turkey want in the Middle East? It wants a stable prosperous Middle East that has a two state solution in Israel and sees a non-nuclear Iran. Despite all the rhetoric despite the UN Security Council vote that caught many people off guard. What the Turks are saying and what the Turks are pushing for is an engagement of the Iranians. Something that the Americans have been unwilling to do for over the last past 30 years and its clear to me that with the Obama administration and it’s own domestic politics, it has to continually push forward. I don’t necessarily think that the Obama administration and Turkey are at odds today. I think that there’s a deep resentment I think there’s a mistrust on the part of both the Turks sometimes and on the part of the administration of what Turkey is doing and I think that has more to do with miscommunication than it has to do with actual policy and so when we come to the question who can America work with in the Middle East? Clearly the picture to me when you look at the vision what Israel has for the middle eats with its current government and what Iran has in terms of what it likes to see in the Middle East those are not things that America seems to be all that interested in pursuing in terms of a greater Israel project or a greater Iranian empire or a Shia led block of some sort
Turkey doesn’t have that interest I think Turks are very much driven by their pocket books. Turks are very much driven by their business they are the largest construction companies the largest investments. Anywhere you travel in the Middle East you see the rise of soft power in Turkey. The soap operas of Turkey have dominated the headlines throughout the Arab world and when you look at the way in which the neighbors of Turkey are looking towards Turkey there is no longer this sense of oh they’re the Trojan horse of the Americans. There is a real sense of wow Turkey has emerged on the stage
They are able to say no to America they are able to really work with America and I think its important for Turks to understand that the self confidence they have is a good thing first and fore most and we are not scared of it Washington. But second and that self confidence comes from its anchor in the West. If Turkey decides to break off its relationship with the West and decides that it doesn’t want. It wants to kind of have no relationship with America and criticize America all the time or criticize the Europeans. This is going to cause trouble because the reason Turkey is such an important [IB] is because it has a relations with everybody it has relations with the west, it has relations with Iran, it has relations with Israelis, with Arabs I can go on but I think its important to understand these kind of geo-strategic factors and that’s what the report tries to lay out. [IB] even more of these controversial issues later but I just want to lay that out from my perspective thank you.
Moderator: No thank you, so.
Juliette Tolay: Thanks, so I am going to try to complement a little bit what Joshua has been saying by taking a more European prospective on planes because the EU is still in this triangular relationship between the Turkey the US and the EU an important partner and I think it’s important also to understand how they frame the issue. In very different ways to kind of see the alternative ways of looking at Turkey. In many ways I would of like to start with kind of the way the debate has been shaped in Europe in the last month or so because it is in many ways much less kind of radical than the way it has been especially here in DC but in the US more in general and whereas here we almost have seen kind of. Two months ago Turkey was this very great ally and everything was fine and suddenly it has completely shift and become kind of almost an enemy and something that we really should be worried about.
The debate in Europe are much more new and so much more complex like they can. It is based of course on the fact that. We are talking about 27 countries so they all have a slightly different prospective but also because they [would] view they are less interested in strategy issues and more kind of dealing with a larger range of issues and so they have a kind of a more complex understanding of what the world is about. So in a way for Europe there has been less of a shift in terms of what Turkey means. Turkey used to be, not so good, not so bad kind of in between depending on the issues and it is still so now. So this is interesting to understand in that context.