Erdogan seeks to sway Trump in talks
Turkish president wants to strengthen crucial but increasingly strained ties
ISTANBUL: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan meets Donald Trump tomorrow in Washington for the first time as president, hoping to entice the American leader into major policy shifts to solidify a crucial but increasingly strained relationship.
Ties became poisoned in the last months of the Barack Obama administration by venomous disputes over US support for Kurdish fighters in Syria and the presence in the United States of the Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen whom Erdogan blames for last year’s July 15 failed coup.
But analysts say that Erdogan faces a major struggle to convince Trump to change tack, raising the prospect of long-term tensions between the United States and Nato’s main Muslim member.
Preparations for the visit were inauspicious, with Washington announcing for the first time it would arm Syrian Kurdish fighters whom Ankara considers to be terrorists.
Ankara initially had high expec- tations of the relationship between Erdogan and Trump, preferring to forget the new US leader’s most radical campaign utterances and banking on a strong personal chemistry between the two men.
The Turkish president was hugely encouraged when Trump congratulated him on winning the April 16 referendum on enhancing his powers, an enthusiasm that contrasted with the reticence of not just EU leaders but the US State Department.
Burhanettin Duran, head of the pro-government Seta think tank, described the meeting with Erdogan as a “golden opportunity” for Trump to “fix his predecessor’s mistakes”.
But Erdogan will now have to untangle a web of problems, which also includes the arrest in the United States of Turkish Iranian businessman Reza Zarrab and the chief executive of Halkbank Mehmet Hakan Atilla on charges of helping Iran violate sanctions.
“I am afraid the meeting could devolve into a diatribe of complaints ranging from the YPG to Reza Zarrab to Halkbank,” Aaron Stein, resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, said.
Turkish officials repeatedly spoke of a “new page” in relations after the bickering under Obama but the Trump administration’s announcement that the United States would arm the Syrian Kurdish Peoples’ Protection Units cast a heavy shadow over such optimism. — AFP