by Burak Akinci
ANKARA, May 9 (Xinhua) -- Turkey is deploying considerable diplomatic efforts to mend its frayed relations with Arab nations, a move aiming to break its isolation which has become detrimental to the nation's regional interests, experts said.
A high-level Turkish delegation held talks in Cairo last week with Egyptian officials, the first in several years, in a bid to repair their relationship fractured over their diverging policies on Libya and maritime borders in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Relations between the two regional powers have been tense since Egypt's army toppled the elected Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi, who was close to Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, in 2013.
Both countries expelled ambassadors and Erdogan has vehemently criticized Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
Turkey has supported the Muslim Brotherhood, a political movement seen by Arab governments as a threat to the ruling order.
In another positive gesture toward another U.S.-allied Arab nation, Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu will visit Saudi Arabia in the coming days, as Ankara seeks to repair the bilateral relations hurt by the killing in 2018 of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul and by Ankara's support for Qatar in a Gulf dispute.
"After a difficult decade in foreign policy, it is encouraging that Turkey is taking new initiatives in a bid to repair ties. But, obviously, it takes two to tango," Serkan Demirtas, a foreign policy expert, told Xinhua.
"This will surely take time as the past period had ruined confidence between Turkey and its regional partners in the Middle East," he said.
Demirtas, the Ankara bureau chief of Hurriyet Daily News, stressed that the regional political and economic isolation of Turkey in the Arab world has seemingly "pushed the government to undergo a holistic restoration of the foreign policy."
Ankara has faced serious international and regional backlash over its hydrocarbon explorations in disputed areas in the Eastern Mediterranean, now suspended to allow a dialogue with NATO partner and neighbour Greece to flourish. Cairo sided with Athens in this conflict.
"Having good relations with Egypt, Saudi Arabia or other nations in our region is not only good to Turkey's interests but also to those of the countries that we are reaching out to," a Turkish diplomatic source told Xinhua on the condition of anonymity.
"Our foreign policy is based on deepening our ties with countries which are close to or far from us, we are acting upon this vision," this source said, adding that diplomatic gestures are often the cure for the differences among countries.
Erdogan and Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud also discussed the ways to improve relations in a phone call on Tuesday.
Experts also believe that Turkey's efforts to repair ties with the Arab world aims to end Ankara's more assertive foreign policy in the Middle East.
"Turkey has shown how mature and skillful it is in foreign policy ... by opening a dialogue window at a time when a confrontational language is in demand," Ismail Numan Telci, vice president of the Ankara-based Center for Middle Eastern Studies (ORSAM), said in written replies to Xinhua's questions.
He argued that Turkey's normalisation move is beneficial not only for itself but also the nations it targets, politically and economically weakened by regional conflicts or global events such as the war in Yemen and the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Economic factors should be evaluated not only for Turkey but also mutually as a motivation for this need for change," Telci emphasized.
Batu Coskun, an independent researcher on the Middle East, echoed this argument, indicating that there is a broad strategic realignment taking place in the Middle East.
"Israel has normalized relations with several Arab countries and the Gulf dispute (mainly between Saudi Arabia and Qatar) has also come to an end," he told Xinhua, adding that Turkey's push to mend ties with Egypt and Saudi Arabia should be viewed as a "pragmatic" move.
Coskun stressed that repairing ties with Egypt would serve Turkey's regional interests as Libya "is finally entering a process of political transformation."
"Turkey will also seek to negotiate a maritime delimitation deal with Egypt, similar to the one that Ankara maintains with Tripoli," which has been criticized by Turkey's rivals, Greece and Egypt.
"Egypt is arguably the centre of the Arab world, and any broad normalization between Turkey and Arab world should start in Cairo," Coskun added. Enditem
