Newly minted Secretary of State John Kerry is on his first trip abroad, and it’s a marathon. According to the State Department’s “Travels With Secretary of State John Kerry,” after stops in the UK, German, France, Italy, and most recently Turkey, Kerry is planning to hopscotch across the Middle East, notably skipping Israel and Jordan, where he will accompany President Obama later this month.
Kerry’s morning today began in Ankara, where he has been forced to confront an increasingly antagonistic Turkey – one that has drawn increasingly and appropriately harsh rebukes from U.S. Ambassador Frank Ricciardone for human rights abuses and mass arrests of military leaders, journalists, professors and students by its pro-Hamas Islamist regime, and which this week again sought to deepen its self-inflicted diminished status with comparisons between Zionism, i.e. the existence of Israel, and “crimes against humanity” and “fascism.”
Joining The Washington Post, The New York Times, Reuters, CBS, the Associated Press and many others, the Wall Street Journal reports today that U.S. officials called Erdogan’s remarks “corrosive” to the U.S.-Turkey relationship, and “warned that Washington’s ties with Ankara could suffer if the attacks [on Israel] continued.”
As The Tower reported earlier this week, diplomatic sources are increasingly seeing a tension between Turkey’s status as an ally and member of NATO with its repeated calls for Syria to militarily attack Israel in response to a raid on a weapons transfer convoy allegedly attempting to cross a Western red line of transferring sophisticated weapons systems from the collapsing Assad regime to the Iranian-backed terror army Hezbollah. Naturally, the UK, France, the United States and others praised the raid. Turkey and Iran were not pleased. Writing in the Israeli daily Haaretz, respected military analyst Amos Harel noted that Israel’s move against the convoy came only one day after Iran proclaimed would regard “any attack on Syrian territory as an attack against Iran itself.”
From one Islamist regime to the next, Kerry lands today in Cairo, where the opposition movement, led by Mohammed ElBaradei and Hamdeen Sabahi, a leader of the National Salvation Front (NSF), refused a meeting with Kerry, in protest of “Washington’s call for the opposition to reconsider its boycott of Egypt‘s parliamentary election in April,” according to Agence France Press. Amr Mussa, former head of the Arab League and another leader of the NSF, also said he would not attend a meeting with Kerry.
According to the State Department , after departing Cairo, “the Secretary will then travel to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to meet with the Saudi leadership and discuss our cooperation on a broad range of shared concerns. He will also participate in a ministerial meeting with counterparts from Gulf Cooperation Council nations. He will then visit Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, to meet with senior officials and discuss our continued close coordination on issues of mutual interest…[and] will conclude his trip in Doha, Qatar, where he will meet with Qatari leadership to discuss shared bilateral and regional issues of concern such as the ongoing crisis in Syria, Afghanistan, and Middle East peace.”
[Photo: U.S. State Department / Flickr]