Last week, Russian planes killed three Turkish soldiers and wounded 11 in “friendly fire” on the same day as the new head of the CIA visited Turkey.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to Turkey further exposed the rift and tension not only between Ankara and Berlin, but also between Turkey and the Western world in general.
I have to admit that I have started to appreciate the election victory of Donald Trump. No, mine is not a non-Westerner’s Schadenfreude, although even that might be justifiable. But I could imagine that there are many people in non-Western countries who were happy to see that the Western superpower is not immune to the populist surge and that such developments were not particular to our “backward” countries after all
Turkey’s transition to some kind of a presidential system has been debated as the establishment of full-scale one-man rule.
Paradoxically, the end of the secular republic in Turkey also marks the end of Islamism or Islamist politics in Turkey and elsewhere
The truth is the least important matter in politics. It is widely believed that “the truth is the first casualty of war,” but it is also true in peacetime.
Global opinion leaders and observers of politics all agree that 2016 was a “terrible year.”
I don’t know who invented the term “frenemy” to refer to the implicit alliance of Israel and Saudi Arabia against Iran in the wake of the U.S.-Iran deal, but it seems well-suited to describing the new Russia-Turkey friendship as well.
Within the span of just a week, two terror attacks have killed dozens of police, soldiers and civilians, first in central Istanbul and then in Kayseri. The blast in Istanbul felt like an earthquake in my flat, which is located just a 10-minute walk from the site of the explosions
