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Turkey’s Balancing Act

A few months ago, many Americans were livid at what they perceived as Turkey’s betrayal, reflected in the country’s deteriorating relations with Israel and improving ties with Iran. But America’s anxiety wrongly assumes that it is a contradiction for Turkey to seek good relations with both the West and the Muslim Middle East.

EAST LANSING, MICHIGAN – Turkey has over the past few weeks become the spearhead of a joint Western-Arab-Turkish policy aimed at forcing President Bashar al-Assad to cede power in Syria. This is quite a turnaround in Turkish policy, because over the past two years the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had gone out of its way to cultivate good relations with neighboring Syria, with whom it shares a long land border.

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