Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (left) with President Obama
In a sprawling overview of President’s Obama’s foreign policy, The Atlantic, in its April 2016 issue, publishes a heavily-reported feature by Jeffery Goldberg, who delves into the machinations of the Obama’s foreign policy posturing.
In the article, which focuses on the Middle East crisis as upended by the Syrian war, Obama discusses certain world leaders who have frustrated him during the course of his presidency, among them Israeli President Benjamin and Turkey’s leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“Early on, Obama saw Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, as the sort of moderate Muslim leader who would bridge the divide between East and West,” Goldberg writes in his article, “The Obama Doctrine.
“But Obama now considers him a failure and an authoritarian, one who refuses to use his enormous army to bring stability to Syria,” adds Goldberg, who interviewed the president and other high-level administration officials.
On a related note, Goldberg writes that Obama had heard that King Abdullah II of Jordan had complained to friends in Congress about his leadership and “told the king [on the sidelines of a NATO summit in Wales in 2014] that if he had complaints, he should raise them directly. The king denied that he had spoken ill of him [Obama],” writes Goldberg.
The same King Abdullah II warned Senate leaders in January 2015 of Turkey’s pervasive support for Islamic militants and Ankara’s desire for radical Islam to prevail in the Middle East and flow to Europe.
This revelation was made by The Guardian newspaper, which obtained leaked documents from a briefing King Abdullah presented to high-level US lawmakers, among them Senate Armed Services Committee chairman John McCain, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Corker and House Speaker Paul Ryan when he was visiting the US in January.
According to The Guradian, Abdullah told the lawmakers that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan “believes in a radical Islamic solution to the problems in the region.” He went on to say that “that terrorists are going to Europe as part of Turkish policy, and Turkey keeps getting a slap on the hand, but they get off the hook.”
Read Goldberg’s entire article in The Atlanic.
Source: Asbarez
Link: Obama Considers Erdogan ‘A Failure and an Authoritarian’