Decoding Erdoğan’s visit to Washington
By: Ian Lesser / German Marshall Fund of the US The visit of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to the United States has been animated by the deepening crisis in Syria and its mounting costs for Turkey and the region. The nature of the security challenge facing Turkey was dramatically underscored by the recent terrorist bombings in the Turkish border town of Reyhanli, which claimed dozens of lives. The mounting cross-border instability, with no end in sight, will be difficult to suppress, or even contain,…
Turkey seeks to form working group for U.S. free trade deal
By: Emre Peker / The Wall Street Journal Turkey’s prime minister will seek to form a working group to draft a free-trade agreement with the U.S. during a state visit in May, marking an effort to counter an increasingly onerous customs deal with the European Union, Economy Minister Zafer Caglayan said Tuesday. The push by Recep Tayyip Erdogan comes amid discussions to revise or annul the country’s 1996 customs union with the EU, widely seen as a precursor to Turkey’s entry to the bloc. Turkey’s…
Don't forget free trade with Turkey
By: Kemal Kirisci / The National Interest Last month, both the U.S. and the European Union (EU) took important internal steps to prepare the ground work for negotiations to establish the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. TTIP would create the largest integrated market in the world, bringing together half of the world’s GDP and 30 percent of world trade. If it went beyond eliminating already low-level tariffs and succeeded in aligning regulatory standards on both sides of the Atlantic, it also could generate more than…
Why Turkey Belongs to Transatlantic Economy
This article first appeared in The Hill, on March 12, 2013. Read the original version here. By: Bahadir Kaleagasi, TUSIAD International Coordinator & Representative to the EU; Baris Ornarli, TUSIAD Washington Representative At the President’s Export Council meeting on Tuesday, President Barack Obama reiterated the importance of achieving a U.S.–EU free trade agreement. He said, “Europe is our largest trading partner – the EU as a whole – and we think that we can expand that even further.” The need to expand the economic partnership…