Analysis
Smart, independent reporting on Turkey's politics, economy and foreign affairs.
The first bilateral visit by a Canadian prime minister yields deals on defense, energy and air transport as Ottawa seeks to reduce its reliance on the US and makes a sharp U-turn toward finding alternative partners.
Turkey and the United States have signed a grant agreement to evaluate next-generation nuclear energy technologies, expanding bilateral cooperation in the energy sector.
On Friday — a day of particular symbolic weight for the Islamic world — President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif put their signatures to a trilateral defense agreement in Mecca, Islam’s holiest city.
Makkah Joint Defence Agreement including collective defense provision raised eyebrows as the full text of the agreement was not disclosed.
“Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will have several bilateral meetings in the margins of the NATO summit; yet all of them will be very short. His longest meeting will be with Antonio Costa and Ursula Von Der Leyen,” a Turkish diplomat told a European expert at a side event that took place in Ankara.
Bilateral ties with the United States have seen many ups and downs. Currently, the Turkish-US relationship is going through one of those up periods, according to a high-level Turkish official.
Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan made a high-profile, two-day visit to Russia, sitting directly across from President Vladimir Putin to signal stable bilateral ties amid speculation that Turkey was distancing itself from Moscow.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has fueled hope for progress in the Kurdish process but his stance doesn’t amount to real movement, according to the DEM Party. Soon after dismissing claims of a deadlock in the "Terror-Free Turkey" process as "noise" at the April 23 reception, Erdoğan reiterated that the process is advancing as intended and urged all actors to act responsibly during a turbulent regional period.
The two consecutive meetings between the leaders of Cyprus’s Turkish and Greek communities, held after a five-year hiatus, generated cautious optimism about the prospects for renewed engagement. Yet this momentum is overshadowed by parallel efforts to consolidate trilateral cooperation among Israel, Greece, and Greek Cyprus.
There is a way of establishing a working relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump. First you have to make sure you see him as a smart, respectable world leader. That’s the easy part. Then you have to lure him with trade deals, making sure he is the winning side. Therefore, it comes as no surprise when Turkey unilaterally dropped its retaliatory tariffs on U.S. products on Sept. 22, a few days before the scheduled meeting between President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House. Buzzwords are important for Trump, and tariff is one of them. The tariffs, which covered products including passenger cars, fruit, rice, tobacco, alcoholic beverages, solid fuels, and chemical products, were introduced in 2018 in response to U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum imports enacted during Trump's first term in office.
Some Turkish words are as sharp and clear as a gleam of a knife. Others confuse you. Yakışır is a particular gem in the latter category. Literally, it means “befitting” or “suits well.” But intonation does all the heavy lifting here. With a twinkle in the eye, yakışır becomes high praise: a friend gets a long-deserved promotion? “Yakışır!” A suave female CEO in her sixties starts dating a younger man with abs and ambition? “Yakışır vallahi!” But delivered with a dry brow and pursed lips, the very same yakışır morphs into biting derision, the sort you might lob at a corrupt bureaucrat who gets caught rigging tenders again or the son of one of the president’s close allies landing an ambassadorial job.
The name of Beşir Atalay, a founding member of the ruling AKP and a former interior minister, has been removed from a university campus in Kırıkkale, causing controversy within the party.