Yesterday the delegation headed by the Turkish Prime Minister arrived in Washington DC. According to the media the key themes of the Erdogan-Obama meeting were the nuclear issue of Iran, normalization of relations with Armenia, NKR conflict resolution, Cyprus issue and the Kurdish issue, deployment of additional military force to Afghanistan and tension between relations of Turkey and Israel. As of the Armenian-Turkish relations the US media report that the protocols signed in October may be considered one of the big successes of America’s foreign policy by meaning the personal investment of the US State Secretary Hillary Clinton in this process. “Obama will put pressure on Erdogan so that the Turkish Parliament ratifies the protocols as soon as possible,” writes the Times.com. Erdogan made clear, however, that the Karabakh conflict settlement remains “important in the context of Turkish-Armenian relations” and indicated that he and Obama looked at their future through the prism of the Armenian-Azerbaijani dispute. “We have discussed the Minsk Group and what the Minsk Group can do – the United States, Russia, and France – to add more impetus to that Karabakh process,” he said. The Turkish and Azerbaijani media in their turn expressed an opinion that Erdogan will ask the US president to pressure on Armenia to remove its troops from Karabakh and adjacent territories. Of course the declarative statements following the meeting wouldn’t allow us to know what exactly Obama and Erdogan agreed on. Only after the further analysis of the meeting will it become possible to guess what they actually spoke about. By the way, due to the “bright diplomacy” of Armenia of the past years all we have got left to do is only guess from the side what others have agreed on regarding Armenia and what decisions have been made on behalf of us. And our diplomats can with “kind jealousy” follow how the Turkish prime minister reads a lecture at John Hopkins University on the theme of “Turkey striving for peace through diplomacy in the 21st century.” Maybe for hearing carefully they may even deserve a “doughnut.”
