Journalist-Writer
Türkiye’s Ambassador to Washington, Murat Mercan, announced this week with a message posted on social media that his stint will end due to his retirement age and that he will leave the capital on January 12. As of January 13, Türkiye will be represented at a charge d’affaires in Washington and Türkiye will have no
Strong defence ties and the need for geostrategic cooperation between Türkiye and the US used to provide the main resilience against problems and crises between two countries. The level of economic and trade ties, by contrast, never reflected the strategic cooperation between the two allies. In fact, Türkiye’s purchase of armaments constituted the main bulk
As the leaders of G20 countries are getting ready to go to Indonesia to have their first face-to-face meeting after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Türkiye found itself without an envoy in Jakarta, right in the middle of preparations for the summit due to take place on November 15. Professor Aşkın Asan, a former parliamentarian
As a young journalist, I was assigned to the airport to report on the foreign dignitaries coming to attend Turkey’s 8th president Turgut Özal’s funeral.Some countries came in small delegations, while some others came with two jam-packed airplanes.Seeing my astonishment a veteran diplomat told me: “Set aside the United States, the more advanced a country
For the past decade whenever I heard a Western friend expressing sadness on Turkey’s slide to autocracy and wishing me “good luck,” my response was usually, “Good luck to you too. Things do not look good either in your part of the world.”This was not an irritation against something touching on a nationalist nerve. It
France’s former president Nicolas Sarkozy has partially blocked Turkey’s accession negotiations in mid-2000’s arguing Turkey had no place within the European Union (EU). In a recent televised interview on March 24, Sarkozy said he objected to Turkey’s membership, as the country with a more than 80 million population would have divided Europe from within. “Who
When Chancellor Angela Merkel uttered her famous refugee crisis mantra in August 2015, “we can do this,” she probably did not imagine that this would cost her a sharp fall in her approval ratings while having the exact opposite effect on the anti-immigration party AfD.At that time, hundreds of thousands of refugees were crossing borders
By the time you read this article, Turkey’s new envoy to Washington and Paris will have started their first week in their office.Ambassador Murat Mercan has certainly not been met by good news in Washington, as the last couple of days have seen negative developments taking place one after the other. One of them would
“The European Union should be in no hurry either to engage with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime or to force a diplomatic crisis. Instead, it should deprive Putin of the one thing he craves: political attention. Rather than vacillating between resets and crackdowns, the EU should pursue a strategy of “principled indifference,” wrote Mark Leonard
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