A tale of two wars, two Turks and a nation riding a wave

Gaza is yet another memorable diplomatic letdown for the international community. Once again, Israel rampages through the beleaguered Strip. Once again, the rest of the world watches impotently. Arab countries refuse to so much as recall their ambassadors from Tel Aviv and the death toll on the ground inches towards 1,000.

But diplomatic history will remember the conflict for two Turks: the animated Tayyip Erdogan, accusing Israel of committing “a dark stain on human history”, and the bookish Ahmet Davutoglu, working behind the scenes to effect a ceasefire and imprint the weight of a newly energised Turkey on the region. Erdogan’s New Year’s Eve dash to the region drew the media spotlight, but it was the composed Davutoglu – an academic and former ambassador – who continued the shuttle diplomacy between Damascus, Paris and Cairo, passing on messages from Hamas’s leadership in Damascus to the French president Nicholas Sarkozy, the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and the EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.

At times, they cancelled each other out. Erdogan’s angry rhetoric erased much of the good achieved by Davutoglu. The Turkish prime minister refused to take Ehud Olmert’s phone calls before a ceasefire was negotiated and pointedly omitted Israel from his regional tour. His behaviour prompted Turkish commentators to say that he was playing to the Arab gallery. Turkey is anxious to lead a post-conflict stabilisation force in Gaza that will police the peace, and its popularity in the Muslim world has increased rapidly.

Should Ankara ultimately put boots on the ground in Gaza, it will mark the return of Turkish troops to the region 90 years after they left amid the floating ashes of the Ottoman Empire. It would be the first palpable success for a foreign policy dubbed neo-Ottomanist for its focus on former imperial provinces that have emerged into crucial strategic crossroads. The Ottoman empire’s Iraq province contains fabled oil resources; the Syrian province defiantly continues to influence the regional agenda; and Palestine has been transformed into a civilisational battlefield. In refocusing Turkey’s energies on its Middle Eastern back yard after close to a century of Ataturkist pro-westernism and republican isolationism, Turkey is reconnecting with its cultural and religious roots.

But where Davutoglu’s foreign policy goes beyond Ottomanism is in its reaching out to powers that were once bitter rivals. Turkey’s navy has just completed training exercises with a similarly resurgent Russia in the Mediterranean. Iran’s National Security Council chief, Saeed Jalili, was in Ankara last week to transmit Tehran’s views to the West as part of a new partnership that began with military cooperation in fighting Kurdish separatists and is now entering a phase of diplomatic collaboration.

Turkey’s foreign policy has been radically revamped by Davutoglu, who embraced Turkey’s cultural and religious links in a bid to refashion it into an “imperative power” in the region. Davutoglu argues that only the inclusion of Turkey in the EU can turn the economic bloc into a political one too. He lays out this doctrine in his book Strategic Depth and argues that Turkey’s unique combination of geostrategic positioning at the crossroads of the Middle East, Central Asia, Europe and the Caucasus, its history of playing a leading role in the Islamic world and its current pro-western orientation can transform it into the region’s pivotal diplomatic power.

The doctrine has been behind improved relations with countries such as Armenia, Greece, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and other former Ottoman dominions as Turkey seeks to transform its soft economic power into more tangible diplomatic influence.

But Tel Aviv is unlikely to view Erdogan as an impartial broker after he condemned Israeli actions as “a crime against humanity”, discontinued his country’s mediating role in peace talks between Syria and Israel and broke ranks with the generally pro-Israeli Turkish General Staff to express his sympathy for the Palestinian side. The fresh tension will compound existing frictions between the two allies over Israel’s unstated policy of supporting northern Iraq’s Kurdish leadership and Ankara’s closer ties with Damascus, Tehran, Hamas and Hizbollah.

But losing Israel may be a small price to pay at a time when Turkey is emerging as the primary regional power broker. Whether acting as a diplomatic channel for Syria and Iran, a facilitator for Washington or Brussels or playing the role that Egypt once did, it appears that Turkey is riding a wave. The tension was palpable when an Egyptian foreign ministry spokesman denied that the Turks were involved in hammering out an Egyptian and French-negotiated ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel, even as Davutoglu arrived in the Egyptian capital having held fresh talks with the Hamas leadership in Syria.

And what is Turkey’s payback for all its diplomatic exertions? One is certainly its transformation from a powerful but isolated pro-western military power in the north Middle East to a country respected and feted throughout the region. But soft power aside, there may already be some early signs of the benefits accruing to Ankara. Over the weekend, Hurriyet newspaper carried an intriguing announcement from the Iranian Kurdish guerrilla movement Pejhak, an offshoot of the PKK that has been launching raids inside Iran since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The announcement was a statement by the Iranian state news agency IRNA reporting a Pejhak-affiliated TV channel saying that the organisation was ceasing anti-government activities because of a “lack of power”.

After the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 2006, what a difference two years, two wars and two Turks make.

Iason Athanasiadis is a writer based in Istanbul