The sentinel swivels

Turkey Long the west's most reliable Mideast ally, Ankara insists it is not turning its back by cultivating other ties - but the push for regional leadership carries risks, write Delphine Strauss and David Gardner

Toronto, Brussels, Bishkek and London in one week; in another, visits ranging from Lisbon to Kabul. Since he became Turkey's foreign minister just over a year ago, Ahmet Davutoglu has clocked up more than 100 international trips as he hyperactively pursues his vision of Turkey as a rising regional power. Not for nothing does he hail from Konya, ancestral home of the whirling dervishes. His message has been largely unexceptionable: expounding with a professorial air and an academic fixation with numbers and dates his doctrine of a "zero problems" rapprochement with Turkey's neighbours - a slogan similar to the "peace at home, peace abroad" favoured by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the republic. To that end, Mr Davutoglu has sought to mediate in conflicts from the Balkans to Baghdad and has used Ankara's fast-growing economic clout to further new friendships, whether with emerging powers including Russia and Brazil or with formerly antagonistic neighbours such as Syria, Iraq and Greece. But in recent months, tensions between Turkey's regional aspirations and its traditional alliances with the west have burst into the open. First, the failure of an initiative to end a long stand-off with Armenia has left Turkey fighting renewed efforts by Armenian diaspora communities in the US and elsewhere to categorise the massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turkey during the first world war as genocide. Then came May's Israeli raid on a Turkish-flagged aid flotilla seeking to break the Gaza blockade, in which nine Turks died. Ankara has stepped back from its threat to sever ties altogether with Israel - but Mr Davutoglu is firm there will be no revival of a once-close alliance without an international investigation and unless Israel apologises and compensates the victims' families. "Without those questions being answered there can be no improvement in our relations with Israel," he said in London this month. From a US perspective, the more telling shift in Ankara's stance came with a United Nations Security Council vote last month for new sanctions against Iran. Slighted by the west's dismissal of the nuclear fuel swap with Tehran that it had arranged alongside Brazil, and anxious to keep Iran at the negotiating table, Turkey did not simply abstain to underline its opposition to sanctions: it voted No. The storm that followed has, if nothing else, highlighted Turkey's growing importance to its western partners. The country has long mattered; as a Nato member, energy corridor and with a large Muslim population demonstrating the compatibility of Islam with secular and democratic values. Now, a US engaged in two regional conflicts can even less afford to alienate a pivotal partner in fostering stability in Iraq and Afghanistan. By emerging as a popular champion of Palestinian rights, Turkey has for now ended Iran's ability to make the running in the region. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkish prime minister, has eclipsed Hassan Nasrallah of Hizbollah, Tehran's most potent ally, in the fickle affections of the Arab street. "In Syria, people say that when Damascus feels threatened it goes to Tehran, and when it seeks opportunities it goes to Turkey," says Nathalie Tocci of the German Marshall Fund, a Washington-based think-tank. Ankara's evident willingness to assert its independence from Washington has enhanced its regional credibility. The government is on a firmer footing in Moscow and Baghdad because it resisted US pressure to use Turkish territory for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and restricted American warships entering the Black Sea during Russia's 2008 clash with Georgia. Conversely, the perception in Washington is that Ankara is becoming a volatile and unreliable partner. Some in Congress view the breakdown of relations with Israel as proof of an eastward tilt by an authoritarian Islamist government. US officials, usually careful to keep differences behind closed doors, are expressing doubts. Philip Gordon, assistant secretary of state and one of Turkey's strongest supporters in the state department, says the country's commitment to Nato, the EU and the US "needs to be demonstrated". Yet the eruption of Turkey in the stormy geopolitics of the Middle East should hardly have come as a surprise. Once the cold war ended and the Balkans, central Asia and the Caucasus as well as the broader Middle East reopened as natural regions of political and commercial influence for Turkey, Ankara was bound to seek a bigger stage than its role within Nato as the sentinel of the eastern marches. Mr Davutoglu is offended by any suggestion that his country is somehow on probation. "Turkey is not an issue, Turkey is an actor," he says. "We were an actor when we used hard power to defend the west inside Nato and we are an actor today, using soft power to defend EU values in the eastern Mediterranean". Turkey is not just a member of Nato but chairs the 57-state Organisation of the Islamic Conference, a dual identity its current government believes obliges it to be activist in a combustible region plagued by a vacuum of leadership. The Turkish view is that Israel's belligerent intransigence and the stand-off over Iran's nuclear ambitions are two potentially deadly regional triggers. Hence Ankara's past efforts to mediate between Israel and Syria, and between Israel and the Palestinians (including Hamas), as well as the deal Turkey and Brazil arrived at with Iran on holding its low enriched uranium in escrow. This is not just a fit of pique at the European Union's reluctance to advance Turkey's accession negotiations. Neither is it a strategic turn east, nor an ideological tilt by the governing neo-Islamist Justice and Development party (AKP) towards Muslim countries. Mr Erdogan does want to demonstrate that a confident and dynamic Turkey has options and is proficient in the "soft power" that Europe seems to have forgotten how to use in its Middle East backyard. But, says Mr Davutoglu, there is no turn east or against the west: "Still our first and most strategic objective is [integration with] Europe". Other commentators, including those critical of AKP diplomacy, point out that Turkey's influence and appeal in the Arab world will depend in large part on its maintaining its western ties and identity. "What is liked about Turkey is the western image it projects, an image which is lacking in the Middle East," writes Semih Idiz, a columnist for Milliyet newspaper. The television melodramas that shape Arab perceptions of Turkey are popular viewing precisely because they depict the romantic freedoms and westernised lifestyle that are in short supply in Islamic countries, he notes. So the question should not be whether Turkey is drifting east but rather whether it is pursuing its interests effectively, managing to balance old and new alliances as it assumes a bigger role in regional affairs. Thus far, the results of Mr Davutoglu's doctrine have been mixed. Successes include the new friendship with Syria, reasonable relations with Kurdish politicians in northern Iraq and the first steps towards the grand vision of a Middle Eastern customs union. Foreign diplomats in Ankara say Turkey's involvement in the Balkans and between political factions in Iraq has been helpful. But they also talk of hubris and say Ankara may be overreaching. Turkey's role in the Iranian uranium swap deal, initially hailed as a triumph, may make western partners reluctant to include it in any further talks with Tehran. Ankara has ruled itself out of further mediation between Israel and Syria. Initiatives to improve relations with Armenia and Greece, which would have helped convince sceptics that the AKP was not simply pitching to the Islamic world, are no further forward. As for Turkey's 40-year-old bid to join the EU, Suat Kiniklioglu, the AKP's deputy chairman for foreign affairs, diverges from the official line to suggest that both sides are "happy with low-level engagement that doesn't force a decision". Technical negotiations on food safety standards began this month but the fig leaf of progress is looking flimsier. One problem is that while Turkey's strategy of greater regional engagement makes sense, its coherence is at the mercy of periodic outbursts by the fiery Mr Erdogan. Anger at Israel after the flotilla raid was understandable but Turkish diplomats prefer not to comment when Mr Erdogan invokes the 10 commandments in lambasting Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, or insinuates that Israel sponsored attacks in Turkey by Kurdish rebels. Even the urbane Mr Davutoglu has courted controversy. According to anecdotes circulating in Washington, the ex-academic thumped the table and shouted at Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, when he went to demand US help in securing the pro-Gaza activists' release. The foreign minister refuses to be drawn on this, merely observing that "no country should have the feeling it is above the law". Much of the grandstanding is aimed at a domestic audience. Foreign policy until the 1990s was guided largely by security concerns. Now it increasingly aligns with the views of a public suspicious of all external influence and fiercely anti-American. "What we are witnessing", says Omer Taspinar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, "is not the emergence of an Islamist foreign policy but rather the rise of a populist government that caters to and exploits Turkish frustration with America and Europe". Some think populist instincts are leading Mr Erdogan and his AKP to squander Turkey's big opportunity to gain global influence. "They were handed the world on a silver plate and they chose Gaza," fumes Soli Ozel of Bilgi university in Istanbul. "Their responsibility is not to placate public sentiment. Their responsibility is to run the foreign policy of this country, and my fear is that between the Arab street and the Turkish street, they have lost control of the process." The official line in Ankara is that Turkey's partners will simply have to get used to its new assertiveness. Even so, Mr Davutoglu is at pains to correct the impression that he cares only about the Middle East. Last week's appointment of a Turkish diplomat to a senior Nato post proves Turkey's importance in the organisation, he maintains. Yet Mr Davutoglu may soon be forced to limit his foreign adventures to attend to events closer to home. This summer is proving one of the bloodiest for years in Turkey's southeast, where the rebel Kurdistan Workers party (PKK) is launching one raid after another from its mountain bases across the Iraqi border. As PKK violence mounts, so does the pressure on the government to secure help from all its allies to curb the group. Mr Erdogan wants more direct military assistance as well as intelligence sharing from the US, action from the EU to cut off funding sources, and more effort by the Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq to cut the PKK's supply lines and dislodge it from mountain bases. Ilker Basbug, Turkey's outgoing chief of general staff, said this month he expected the renewed conflict to strain relations both with Iraqi authorities and with the US. For all their international ambitions, in other words, Mr Erdogan and Mr Davutoglu may be about to run up against the old dictum that all politics is local. Crescent tense: a demonstrator stands behind the Turkish flag during a protest outside Israel's consulate in Istanbul in May, after Israeli warships killed nine Turks in storming a flotilla of aid ships bound for Gaza. Ankara warned then of 'irreparable consequences' for bilateral ties AFP