Turkey and the Middle East in the ‘New Era’ [Full Text]

In March 2009, Turkey’s then foreign minister, Ali Babacan, told the Turkish TV audience that the installation of Barack Obama as America’s new president had opened a ‘new era’ in relations between the two countries.¹ The president expressed the same hope one month later, on April 6, with an official visit to Turkey — his first to a Muslim country — which included a speech to the Grand National Assembly in Ankara. In this speech, he alluded to the serious tensions in the Turkish-American relationship caused by the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and urged that the two countries must now come together.² He drew particular attention to the Middle East as a region in which the United States needed to stake out new policies, re-awakening a longstanding debate as to whether Turkey should uncouple its regional policies from its relations with its most important ally.