The Truth about Turkey, and the Muslim Brotherhood Turkeys - TopicsExpress

The Truth about Turkey, and the Muslim Brotherhood Turkeys Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu makes no apology for a foreign policy that has left his country isolated. His dream of a Middle East with political Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood and Turkey at its heart seems to be fading as chaos in Syria and Iraq threatens its borders and diplomatic ties with Egypt, the Arab worlds most populous nation, remain broken. Turkeys bet on Syrian President Bashar al-Assads rapid demise and its outspoken support for Egypts ousted Islamist president Mohamed Mursi appear to have been miscalculations, hobbling its ambition to be a regional superpower. If anything, he has dug in, blaming the rise of Islamic State militants partly on the short-sightedness of the international community and rebuffing suggestions that Turkeys failure to police its borders played a major role. Ankaras decision to back the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups during Arab Spring pro-democracy protests has meanwhile put them at odds with established powers that proved more resilient than Turkish policy makers predicted. When Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, then prime minister, visited the White House in May 2013, he was determined to push President Barack Obama for a military intervention which would weaken Assad to the point of forcing him from power. Officials cited the 11-week NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 during the Kosovo war as a possible template. The underpinnings of Davutoglus policies were largely laid out in his 2001 book Strategic Depth. Its emphasis on Turkey coming to terms with its past and reviving long-neglected regional relations led some to label it neo-Ottomanism, a charge Davutoglu himself strongly rejects. Turkeys support for the Muslim Brotherhood as a popular movement despite the harm it does to regional relations is part of a long game, an ethical foreign policy that has become Davutoglus trademark, according to Saban Kardas, a professor in international relations at Ankaras TOBB University. There is nothing noble about this isolation; instead of defending human rights or individual liberties, Turkey has pursued an expansionist foreign policy for ideological reasons, Ozkan wrote in the July edition of Survival, the journal of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. There are countries which have a vision for the region they live in and for the world. They will be the rising stars, Davutoglu told the Istanbul conference on Monday. Then there are countries which have the capacity to rule but which do not have the vision. They will be the status quo and, in time, will regress. Turkey is in the first category. https://news.yahoo/turkey-frustrated-west-clings-fading-vision-middle-east-060257370.html