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Bloomberg
President Joe Biden had a brief, unannounced meeting Tuesday with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The two men met on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Bali, Indonesia. Turkish media posted pictures of them together on Twitter, but the White House didn’t announce the meeting in advance and US journalists accompanying Biden to the G-20 weren’t allowed to cover it.
Erdogan has periodically frustrated the US and Turkey’s other Nato allies. He has cultivated close ties with Moscow, buying a Russian air defense system over Nato objections. And he has recently blocked the admission of Sweden and Finland to the alliance over concerns about US and European support for Kurdish militants that Ankara regards as terrorists.
Asked for comment, White House spokespeople did not immediately respond. Biden didn’t respond to a question about the Erdogan meeting shouted at him during a subsequent event with Indonesia’s leader, Joko Widodo, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
Turkey’s relationship with the US was further strained after a bombing in Istanbul on Sunday that Erdogan’s government blamed on the Kurdish group PKK. On Monday, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said that a message of condolence from the
US over the bombing should be viewed as “the murderer returning to the crime scene.†The US has designated the PKK a terrorist organization.