Watch Webinar – Erdogan’s Break with Israel
Click here to read a transcript.
Turkey announced on August 29 that it was severing all remaining economic and commercial ties with Israel, barring Israeli vessels from Turkish ports, prohibiting Turkish ships from calling at Israeli harbors, and closing its airspace to Israeli government planes and arms shipments. The move represents the latest escalation in President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s increasingly confrontational approach toward Israel, building on Ankara’s May 2024 suspension of $7 billion in annual bilateral trade.
This came just two weeks after Turkey and Syria signed a defense agreement and two days before Erdogan joined the leaders of Russia and China at a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization billed as “pooling the strength of the Global South.” At home, Erdogan’s government has continued its crackdown against the main opposition Republican People’s Party. Most recently, a court annulled the party’s selection of provincial leadership in Istanbul and is preparing to potentially do the same at the national level—effectively sidelining some of Erdogan’s most likely political challengers.
To discuss Turkey’s escalating clash with Israel, what it reveals about Ankara’s broader foreign policy ambitions, and how it relates to Turkey’s ever-eroding democracy at home, JINSA hosted a conversation featuring JINSA Distinguished Scholar and former Ambassador to Turkey Amb. Eric Edelman and Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Member of JINSA’s Eastern Mediterranean Policy Project Alan Makovsky.
Amb. Eric Edelman Amb. Eric Edelman is a Distinguished Scholar at JINSA’s Gemunder Center for Defense & Strategy and the Co-Chair of its Iran Policy Project and Eastern Mediterranean Policy Project. Amb. Edelman served in senior positions at the Departments of State and Defense as well as the White House where he led organizations providing analysis, strategy, policy development, security services, trade advocacy, public outreach, citizen services, and congressional relations. |
Alan Makovsky Alan Makovsky is a senior fellow for National Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress. From 2001 to 2013, he served as a senior professional staff member on the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he covered the Middle East, Turkey, and other related issues. At the State Department, from 1983 to 1994, Makovsky variously covered southern European affairs and Middle Eastern affairs for the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. |
Blaise Misztal Blaise Misztal is the Vice President for Policy at JINSA. His research interests include Iran and its nuclear program, U.S.-Turkey relations, countering extremism, and strategic competition. Misztal previously served as the Executive Director of the Task Force on Extremism in Fragile States, a congressionally mandated project convened by the U.S. Institute of Peace, and Director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s National Security Program. |