{"id":47276,"date":"2022-01-01T00:24:05","date_gmt":"2022-01-01T00:24:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=47276"},"modified":"2022-01-01T00:24:05","modified_gmt":"2022-01-01T00:24:05","slug":"senior-ennahdha-party-official-held-in-tunisia-lawyer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=47276","title":{"rendered":"Senior Ennahdha party official held in Tunisia: lawyer"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\nANKARA: Turkey made significant efforts in 2021 to normalize its relations with Armenia, Egypt, the Gulf, and Israel after years of disagreements.<\/p>\n

\nThe big question now is whether Ankara\u2019s efforts to thaw the ice with these countries by de-escalating regional conflicts will continue with the same vigor in 2022.<\/p>\n

\nOn Thursday, Armenia announced its embargo on goods from Turkey would be lifted on January 1 and that Yerevan-Istanbul charter flights would soon begin again after decades of closed borders.<\/p>\n

\nTwo weeks ago, Turkey appointed its former ambassador to the US Serdar Kilic as its special envoy to conduct normalization talks with Armenia. This gesture was followed by Armenia appointing Ruben Rubinyan \u2014 who studied in Turkey through a scholarship from a Turkish NGO \u2014 as its special representative for dialogue. Moscow will host the first meeting between the two envoys in January.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cTurkey has been recalibrating its foreign policy in the eastern Mediterranean and the MENA region,\u201d Prof. Micha\u00ebl Tanchum, a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington and an associate senior policy fellow in the Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told Arab News.\u00a0According to Tanchum, Turkey\u2019s focus in the Eastern Mediterranean has been on Egypt and to a lesser extent Israel.<\/p>\n

\nRegarding Egypt, Turkey this year asked all Istanbul-based Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated media channels to soften their criticism of the Egyptian government.\u00a0The two countries held talks in September, while Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently announced that Ankara was considering sending ambassadors back to Egypt and Israel.<\/p>\n

\nDuring his recent meeting with representatives from the Jewish diaspora, Erdogan underlined that Turkey-Israel ties are vital for the stability and security of the region.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\u201cBoth (Egypt and Israel) have become key energy, economic, and military partners to Greece and Cyprus following the deterioration in their respective relations with Turkey in the early part of the previous decade,\u201d Tanchum said. \u201cSimilarly, Ankara has been taken aback by Greece\u2019s developing defense ties with the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The normalization of relations between the UAE and Israel under the Abraham Accords has solidified this alignment of Middle Eastern states with Greece and Cyprus.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nTanchum thinks that, for Egypt, the most immediate stumbling block \u2014 despite Ankara\u2019s diplomatic outreach \u2014 is Turkey\u2019s support for the Muslim Brotherhood.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\u201cBeyond this, the two countries are increasingly rivals for influence across Africa. The fact that Egypt was not invited to Turkey\u2019s recent Africa summit shows the geopolitical limitations. Nonetheless, commercial relations between the two nations will likely increase, barring any major incident. The same is true for Israel-Turkey relations,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nAlthough Turkey and several regional actors backed different sides in the Libyan conflict, Ankara now supports Libya\u2019s political transition towards elections.<\/p>\n

\nTurkish Airlines is also expected to relaunch its flights to Benghazi once technical work and security precautions have been completed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nTurkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu recently noted that Turkey does not differentiate between the west and east of Libya, and that Ankara was prepared to meet with both military strongman Gen. Khalifa Haftar and the speaker of the Tobruk-based parliament, Aquila Saleh.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nTurkey\u2019s moves towards reconciliation with the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel as part of its efforts to break its regional isolation have escalated in recent months.<\/p>\n

\nThe UAE committed to investing $10 billion in Turkey following the visit of Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Muhammed bin Zayed to Ankara on November 24 \u2014 offering a vital boost for the Turkish economy. The Turkish Central Bank is expected to sign deals with its counterpart in the UAE soon and Erdogan is reportedly scheduled to visit the UAE in February.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\u201cThe rapprochement between Turkey and the UAE will likely continue, with expanding Emirati investment in Turkish companies. The Emirati fintech company Tpay\u2019s acquisition of Turkey\u2019s mobile banking and digital financial services firm Payguru is just one example of more investments likely to occur in 2022,\u201d Tanchum said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nMeanwhile, Erdogan announced that Turkey will work to improve its ties with Saudi Arabia. The two countries\u2019 foreign ministers met in May and committed to holding regular consultations. Experts anticipate further such commitments between Riyadh and Ankara in the new year.<\/p>\n

\nOf all its relationships that Turkey sought to improve in 2021, Tanchum sees Armenia as the wild card.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\u201cBecause of the outcome of the Karabakh war, there is a genuine moment of opportunity for Turkish-Armenian reconciliation,\u201d he said. \u201cA grand diplomatic gesture on Turkey\u2019s part that closes a chapter on an old historical wound could reset the tone of Turkish foreign policy with positive spillover effects for Turkey\u2019s relations with its Eastern Mediterranean neighbors as well as with the European Union.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nSoner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish program at the Washington Institute, agrees that 2021 has been a year of significant shifts in Turkey\u2019s foreign policy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\u201cBy re-establishing friendships and forging new partnerships, Ankara has shown that it realizes it cannot stand alone and ignore everybody else in regional and global politics. Therefore, it chose to reset its ties with former rivals,\u201d he told Arab News.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nCagaptay expects Turkey\u2019s next target for normalization of relations will be the US, but considering Ankara\u2019s current power-sharing agreements with Russia in Syria, Libya and the South Caucasus, that process could be trickier and take longer.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\u201cTherefore, I think it\u2019s not a complete pivot (in foreign policy), but the Middle East part of it is an attempt, at least,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nRegarding Turkey\u2019s relations with Egypt, Cagaptay notes that it took Turkey nearly eight years to recognize that its singular support of the Muslim Brotherhood failed to pay off.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\u201cNo one could have anticipated the speed of the Brotherhood\u2019s fall from power. So I don\u2019t blame Erdogan for that, but he should have been in touch with other political actors and I think that\u2019s where the policy is ill-conceived,\u201d he said. \u201cThere is now recognition of this, and 2022 is a pivotal year.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ANKARA: Turkey made significant efforts in 2021 to normalize its relations with Armenia, Egypt, the Gulf, and Israel after years of disagreements. The big question now is whether Ankara\u2019s efforts to thaw the ice with these countries by de-escalating regional conflicts will continue with the same vigor in 2022. On Thursday, Armenia announced its embargo…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spotlight_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47276\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}