The New York Times
In Turkey, Middle Powers Ponder Diplomacy With a Rogue U.S.
The U.S. remains an essential player. The problem, one analyst said, is how to deal effectively with a power that is “indispensable, coercive and unpredictable at the same time.”
Ben Hubbard reported from Antalya, Turkey, where he attended Turkey’s annual diplomatic conference.
At Turkey’s showcase diplomatic conference in the Mediterranean resort town of Antalya over the weekend, the United States was rarely the official topic of conversation.
But coursing through the discussions among the thousands of participants — including dozens of heads of state and other senior officials from Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia — were questions about how to respond when the United States disregards its allies and the global order it long professed to represent.
The foreign policy chaos of President Trump’s second term, and the vast disruptions caused by the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, have put new urgency behind the idea that Turkey and other so-called middle powers should count less on global heavyweights and instead partner with their neighbors to manage their own regions.
The desire for such cooperation surfaced repeatedly at the conference, the Antalya Diplomacy Forum, which concluded on Sunday.
“If this region continues to wait for a savior, in the end it is going to continue facing these problems until eternity,” Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, said at the closing news conference.
Instead, states must come together to “own regional issues,” he said.
Since his return to the White House, Mr. Trump has cast off long-held tenets of U.S. foreign policy. He has bashed the United Nations, threatened to withdraw from NATO and given up on promoting human rights and democracy abroad.
But the war in Iran, which he launched with Israel despite fervent efforts by other countries to prevent the conflict, has disrupted the global economy and turned several U.S. partners into targets for Iranian retribution.
“America acted in Iran against its allies’ interests,” said Timothy Ash, an economist at RBC Bluebay Asset Management in London, who attended the conference. “That reinforces the idea that there needs to be an alternative to the Americans.”
The Antalya conference served not just as a foreign affairs gabfest but also as a venue for Turkey to lay out its view of the world and Turkey’s place in it.
In its fifth year, the gathering attracted an array of mostly non-Western officials and showed off the wide diplomatic network that Turkish officials say makes the country a valuable mediator.
On day one, Ukraine’s top diplomat updated a packed room about his country’s efforts to push back Russia’s invasion. The next day, his Russian counterpart held forth to a similarly large audience on the ways he said the West had mistreated Russia.
Despite the Iran war, now on hold with a temporary cease-fire, U.S. and Iranian officials both traversed the crowds queuing for coffee and sandwiches to reach their respective meetings. They did not meet.
Addressing the opening ceremony on Friday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey said the global system was in “a moral and existential crisis” and repeated his mantra that “the world is bigger than five,” his oft-repeated criticism of the limited number of permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council.
He criticized Israel for what he called its genocide in Gaza and its military expansion into Lebanon, Syria and Iran.
Turkey was ready to help negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, he said, without criticizing Russia for starting it.
He blasted the war in Iran, but without mentioning the United States or Mr. Trump, with whom he has a cordial relationship.
Many participants expressed frustration with the Iran conflict.
“We find ourselves subject to Iranian attacks that were unprovoked in a war that we tried to prevent,” Jordan’s foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, lamented during one panel.
Two senior American officials attended. One of them, Tom Barrack, Mr. Trump’s ambassador to Turkey and special envoy for Syria, ruffled feathers by saying during a public interview: “This part of the world respects only one thing: power. And if you don’t reflect power, if you reflect weakness, you are on your heels.”
He added that the only governments that had worked in the Middle East were “benevolent monarchies” and republics that were run in similar ways.
“Countries that have put on this cloak of democracy or that we have gone after for human rights have failed,” he said, mentioning the Arab Spring uprisings that began in 2010 and produced short-lived, democratic governments in Egypt and Tunisia.
The clearest example of steps toward greater regional cooperation was a meeting on the sidelines of the conference on Saturday between the foreign ministers of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan, who hope to deepen their cooperation.
Experts said such coalitions could not fill all the gaps left by the United States.
“The trouble that the region feels vis-à-vis the U.S. is that the U.S. still is indispensable for many regional actors, but it is also unreliable and coercive,” said Galip Dalay, a senior research fellow at Chatham House who was at the conference. “How do you deal with an actor that is indispensable, coercive and unpredictable at the same time?”
He predicted that Turkey and other countries would continue to pursue such initiatives, but only with countries that the United States would approve of.
Ben Hubbard is the Istanbul bureau chief for The Times, covering Turkey and the surrounding region.
