The Gaza panel at this year's Davos meeting will be remembered as one of the most dramatic moments in the entire history of Davos. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's face-to-face blasting of Israeli President Shimon Peres was unprecedented, as was his storming out of the meeting. 

Today is President Barack Obama's third day in the White House. I have no idea what he will be doing today or if he has figured out the layout of his home and office for the next four years; but I know that his task of meeting expectations is already weighing heavily on his shoulders.

The 2009 Gaza massacre is not the first incident where Israel has killed, pillaged and destroyed Palestinian lives. In 1982 the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) under Ariel Sharon allowed the killing of more than 2,000 Palestinians in two Palestinian refugee camps in Sabra and Shatila.  

The meeting between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and President George W. Bush at the White House last Monday was expected to be a turning point for Turkey’s war on Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) terrorism as well as for US-Turkish relations; at least some on the Turkish side thought so. While Prime Minister Erdoğan said he was happy with the outcome of the meeting, it is simplistic to interpret this as a watershed event in US-Turkish relations.  

There is a discrepancy and even contradiction between Turkey's foreign policy activism and the polarization of its domestic politics. While the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) keeps surprising everyone with its bold and decisive foreign policy moves, it is losing its grip on the domestic pulse.   

Writing forty years ago in the "Journal of Contemporary History" Andrew Mango, the prominent British historian of modern Turkey, noted Turkey's potential new role in the Middle East as a "middle-power." He observed that "Turkey is socially and technologically the most advanced country of the Muslim Middle East.

Perhaps the most consequential and drastic decision in Turkish foreign policy in recent months was to engage in direct negotiations with Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq. This is significant because, since the onset of Iraq War in 2003, Turkey has sought to ignore or marginalize Iraqi Kurds, and has refrained from all acts that could be viewed as concessions or de facto recognition. Although the Iraqi Kurdish leadership has received red-carpet ceremony in Ankara in the1990s, Turkish foreign policy toward northern Iraq, since the war, has been stymied by anxiety and emotional rhetoric. Indeed, the fear of Iraq’s disintegration and the rise of an independent Kurdish enclave in the north, inspiring or even assisting separatist sentiments in Turkey, have appeared to cloud the possibility of rational evaluation of the pros and cons of policy alternatives. As a result, the policy of projecting illegitimacy to the Kurdish Regional Government has cost Turkey a significant loss of clout not only in northern Iraq but also in the wider Iraqi political affairs, as Kurds have come to occupy significant positions in the central government as well.

Turkish policymakers exhibit a high degree of self-confidence and willingness to pursue intensive diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East. Turkey pursues a multi-dimensional policy line to foster peace and stability in the region, and has already enjoyed some degree of success. Turkish policymakers seek to utilize Turkey’s good relations with Syria and Israel to wield an influence on these countries to facilitate Israeli-Syrian negotiations. The increasing level of trust to Turkey’s new image of civil-economic power in the Middle East and the U.S. support for Turkey’s potential contribution to chronic problems of the region have made Turkey a potential mediator in the decades-long Syrian-Israeli conflict.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a Turkish world from the “Adriatic Sea to the Chinese Wall” became a new topic of discussion in Turkish policy circles. While Turkey tried to develop close political, economic and cultural relations with the newly independent Central Asian Republics, the mid and late 1990s witnessed a steady decline in the relations and failed to produce any concrete results. With its new foreign policy outlook, Turkey is seeking to increase its field of sphere in Central Asia by revitalizing its efforts to reconnect with the sister Turkish states. Security, economic cooperation, energy and civil society initiatives are the new dynamics of the Turkish-Central Asian relations.

The two-day summit in Annapolis ended on 29 November, 2007. Israel and the Palestine Authority agreed to start a new peace initiative