US-Turkey Video & Transcript: Foreign Minister Davutoglu Visits Hillary Clinton

Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu pays a visit to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday. No details here --- the meeting was overshadowed by the WikiLeaks affair, which took over Clinton's later statement (see separate entry). However, both officials were keen to show that the leak of the documents, in which US officials said some less than flattering things about Davutoglu.

And not hard to guess that talks with Iran, which begin on 5 December and in which Turkey is playing a key role as broker, were high on the agenda....

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Wikileaks Video & Transcript: Hillary Clinton "Not Just an Attack on America, But Also on The International Community"

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks to the press on Monday afternoon:

CLINTON: I want to take a moment to discuss the recent news reports of classified documents that were illegally provided from United States Government computers.

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Wikileaks Special: The Consequences for Turkey and the US

I have written often of Ankara's pro-Western tendencies, underlining that Erdogan's government is nothing short of a liberal and pragmatic organisation, seeking relative autonomy in the region without raising an eyebrow in the Oval Office. So have a look at this ridiculous quotation, taken from an adviser to the ruling AKP party and added into a US report: "Turkey wants to take back Andalusia and avenge the defeat at the siege of Vienna in 1683."

There are only two options for an analyst: either some of the American diplomats are seriously ignorant about the politics and strategies pursued in the country where they are authorized to work or they are being asked to report any shred of "information" without filtering it.

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Turkey Analysis: What Does Ankara's New "Red Book" of Threats Mean?

On Wednesday, Turkey's National Security Council (MGK) agreed to make radical changes to a document. referred to as the “Red Book” or the "Secret Constitution", in which the main threats over the next five years to Turkey's security are outlined.  

Is the Erdogan government a new "De Gaulle" which is just pursuing its political calculations or is it the Trojan Horse aligning with "radicals" such as Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah?

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