President Obama’s best friend in Turkey is surrounding himself with guards dressed like the 15th century Turkish soldiers who captured Byzantium, the Roman Empire’s last capital city. The garish display of imperial grandiosity was staged Jan. 12 by President Tayyip Erdogan, the recently re-elected president of Turkey, as he welcomed Arab strongman Mahmoud Abbas to Turkey’s new imperial palace. Erdogan descended a staircase toward cameras, while flanked by guards dressed in military costumes of the Turkish military, dating back to 1299. Erdogan’s display spotlighted the unbridgeable gap between his ethnic ambitions and Obama’s early hopes of working with Turkey to suppress the various Islamic and ethnic wars in the Middle East. Back in January 2012, Obama described Erdogan as one of his best five friends among foreign leaders. ”The bonds of trust that I’ve been able to forge with a whole range of leaders is precisely, or is a big part of, what has allowed us to execute effective diplomacy,” Obama told Time magazine.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 00:08:27 +0000
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