Erdogan welcomes decisive Trump meeting amid ‘row’

Bloomberg

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he’s looking forward to a “decisive meeting” with his US counterpart Donald Trump, whose decision to arm Kurdish groups against IS in Syria has stoked tensions between the two NATO members.
“If we are strategic allies, then we should make decisions in alliance,” the Sabah newspaper cited Erdogan as telling reporters on Sunday during a trip to China. He is due to meet Trump in Washington on Tuesday. “If our alliance is going to be overshadowed, then we should take care of ourselves,” he said. “We can’t allow this alliance to be taken over by policies against Turkey.”
The Turkish government opposes the US plan to provide equipment including mortars and armored cars to the Kurdish militia group YPG in Syria, which it regards as a terrorist group linked to the separatist Kurdish PKK in southeast Turkey. The US sees the Syrian Kurds as the only force capable of quickly capturing IS self-declared capital of Raqqa in Syria. It’s not clear, however, whether Erdogan expects to be able to dissuade Trump during their meeting, and what action he is prepared to take if the US goes ahead with the policy. In an interview with the Financial Times last week, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim struck a more conciliatory tone after receiving assurances from US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis that the US is committed to protecting Turkey.
“Trump is unlikely to change his mind, and arming the Kurds in Syria will further strain relations between them,” Nihat Ali Ozcan, an analyst at the Economic Policy Research Foundation in Ankara, said by phone on Monday. “Turkey may prefer to wait and see, knowing that even the capture of Raqqa won’t eradicate IS, and the war will linger for years and years.”
While Turkey and the US saw their close ties as critical to halting Soviet expansion during the Cold War, their military relations have been more strained since 2003 — when Turkey refused to let the US use it as a base from which to invade Iraq.