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U.S. President Joe Biden’s distancing of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is becoming more tangible and a crisis within NATO, created by Turkey’s objections to the membership of Sweden and Finland, begs the question of whether years of appeasement of Erdoğan by the West has reached a dead end, said Merve Tahiroğlu, Turkey Program Director at the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED).

It is very difficult to see an endgame for Turkish foreign policy, because for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, there is no endgame, said Hamit Bozarslan, Director of the Centre for Turkish, Ottoman, Balkan, and Central Asian Studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris, France. Turkey, under Erdoğan's leadership, escalates series of challenges and crisis within NATO, in the neighbourhood and region. Pushing Sweden and Finland into a corner, Erdoğan ups the ante also with the United States and seems all set for a large-scale incursion into Syrian and Iraqi soil. What's at stake? Has Erdoğan passed the Rubicon? How can NATO react? Will the region's Kurds once more end up as losers of the grand power game? Ahval’s Editor in Chief Yavuz Baydar talked to a top expert, Prof Bozarslan on the issue, for Hot Pursuit podcast series on Wednesday.

President Erdoğan's announcement of an imminent incursion onto northern Syria has complicated his spat with NATO. What will Sweden and Finland do, to meet Turkey's conditions to lift its veto on NATO membership? What is the prime reason for Sweden to keep its relations with the Syrian Kurdish YPG forces? At the end of the day, will the USA be able to cut Gordion's Knot? Jan Hallenberg, a top Swedish expert on NATO and a senior researcher with the Insititute of International Relations (UI) explains the context to Yavuz Baydar, Editor of Ahval News.

Yavuz Baydar speaks with Suat Kınıklıoğlu, a top expert on Turkish foreign policy.

Turkey’s decades old neo-Ottomanist ideology has been transformed and strengthened under the administration of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said Cengiz Çandar, a senior Turkish columnist and Middle East expert. In a discussion with Ahval editor-in-chief Yavuz Baydar for the Hot Pursuit podcast, Çandar spoke about his latest book “Turkey’s Neo-Ottomanist Moment - A Eurasianist Odyssey”.

Turkey’s crisis of democracy may not end with the departure of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as there is ample reason to question whether fair elections would occur in a post-Erdoğan Turkey, said Steven Cook, Eni Enrico Mattei Senior Fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relation. Turkey may struggle to emerge as a healthy democracy due to the transformation of the country’s institutions under two decades of Erdoğan’s rule, Cook told Ahval editor-in-chief Yavuz Baydar in the media outlet’s Hot Pursuit podcast series.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan sees it as a success to secure a bilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. However, he may well be walking into a trap, Aykan Erdemir, senior director of the Turkey Program at the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies (FDD) in Washington D.C., told Ahval’s editor-in-chief Yavuz Baydar for the Hot Pursuit podcast series.

The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe’s latest decisions on jailed politician Selahattin Demirtaş and jailed human rights defender and businessperson Osman Kavala, show that Turkish judiciary is not independent, Yavuz Aydın, a judge and a former judicial councillor with Turkey's European Union delegation, said. The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, which is responsible for overseeing the implementation of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) rulings, has pronounced its decisions concerning Demirtaş and Kavala on Friday, who have not been released despite ECtHR judgements. The Committee of Ministers has extended time given to the Turkish government about the imprisoned former leader of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) Selahattin Demirtaş until September 30. It has also decided to wait for Osman Kavala’s release before imposing sanctions on Turkey. Aydın discussed CoE’s decisions with Yavuz Baydar, Ahval's editor-in-chief, in the Hot Pursuit podcast.

Hasan Kahvecioğlu, journalist from Cyprus, spoke to Yavuz Baydar.

Turkey is never going to have a great relationship with the United States as long as Erdogan continues to behave in autocratic ways, Nicholas Danforth, a non-resident senior research fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy, ELIAMEP told Ahval paper’s editor-in-chief Yavuz Baydar in Ahval’s Hot Pursuit YouTube interview series on Tuesday. Baydar has interviewed Nicholas Danforth about the bilateral meeting on Monday between President Joe Biden and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan following a meeting of NATO leaders in Brussels.

Even if Turkey manages to come up with a solution to the S400 issue or the eastern Mediterranean issue during the NATO meeting on June 14 between U.S President Joe Biden and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, there is not going to be a new page within the U.S. Turkish relationship without real democracy and reforms, Merve Tahiroglu, the Turkey Program Coordinator at the Project on Middle East Democracy, told Ahval’s editor-in-chief in Ahval on Saturday. Tahiroglu said that Ankara really wants an image out of this meeting on Monday of positive U.S-Turkish relations.