Overcoming hurdles in Turkey-US relations … A roundtable meeting was held at TEPAV with the participation of Bülent Alirıza, CSIS Turkey Project Director.

04/08/2010 - Viewed 2004 times ANKARA- Bülent Ali Rıza, Turkey Project Director in US based think-tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), participated as a keynote speaker to a roundtable meeting at TEPAV to discuss the future of Turkey-US relations.

Underlining that the Turkey-US relations go through the worse period in history, Alirıza maintained that Turkey's attitude towards Iran and Israel played a significant role in this. Alirıza stressed that this must not be considered as a break of relations between the two countries and said that Turkey-US relations has an upper and a lower boundary and that relations will not break even if gets close to the lower bound.

Bülent Alirıza went on to say that the winds of harmony which started to be felt with Obama-Erdoğan meeting in  2009 turned to the opposite direction along with the domestic policy problems facing Obama and the tension with Iran as well as Turkey's several actions in the Middle East that raised questions and received reaction. Alirıza stated that Erdoğan's efforts to open to the Muslim world, support to Iran's nuclear initiatives and the ever-strengthening reaction against Israel gave way to concerns and discomfort, and emphasized that the current state of the relations is even worse than it was during the Bill crisis in 2003.

Explaining that the tension in the relations between the two countries can elevate further with problems such as Israel's policy in Gaza, fight against PKK terrorism in Iraq, and intervention in Iran's nuclear program, Alirıza maintained that the parties must albeit consider themselves as allies with different points of view.