Turkey's Erdogan Goes Rogue
Turkey’s recent brawl at the U.N fits in perfectly with Recep Erdogan’s new “street credit” foreign policy. To recap, bodyguards of the Turkish prime minister got rough with UN security after it sent back the entourage, which tried to barge forward in the line in order to be present as Abbas’s general assembly speech.
Recently Erdogan and his entourage have not only been putting its physical power into play but also its verbal power. Erdogan has been going on numerous rants against Israel, heating up matters in the Middle East.
The direct outcome of Erdogan’s rants were seen in his latest visit to Egypt, where he was greeted in a rock star manner. Similar ecstatic crowds greeted the Turkish prime minister in Tunis the next stop on Erdogan’s “Arab Spring” tour (Egypt, Tunisia and Libya). The euphoria seems to have engulfed the media as well the Egyptian pundit Mohammed Amin suggested the Turkish government to “lend” out the troublemaker prime minister for a month.
Building on his momentum from Arab sentiments Erdogan seems eager to continue sending flotillas to Gaza ports despite the foreign policy Malheur of 2010. To put some drive behind his punch Erdogan has made it clear that the Turkish navy would escort these new “humanitarian” expeditions.
Apart from the Palestine matter Erdogan has raised some eyebrows in the past when he proclaimed that there is “no moderate Islam” and that the term itself was very “ugly” and an “insult” to Islam. In addition Erdogan deemed assimilation a “crime against humanity" and called democracy was merely the train “we jump on until we reach our goal,” a statement Erdogan recalled from the Turkish author Ziya Gökalp.
The West is well advised to closely observe Erdogan’s future rants, actions and political deals. The Iran nuclear swap deal of 2010 should be a good indicator of the kind of foreign policy an increasingly eastward focused Turkey could pursue.
In the meanwhile Turkey is well advised to focus its efforts on the domestic front coming clean in the Armenian matter. With Turkey taking the moral high ground in the past months it would be well advised to remind itself that there is no statute of limitations on genocide.
