Pompeo in Turkey for Fraught Visit With No Official Talks

SMA News – Turkey

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo paid a fraught visit to Istanbul on Tuesday that included no official meetings and an agenda focused on religious freedoms that Ankara dismissed as “irrelevant”.

Ties between Washington and its strategic NATO ally have remained tense despite a personal friendship between US President Donald Trump and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Pompeo had publicly criticized Erdogan’s controversial conversion of Istanbul’s emblematic Hagia Sophia monument into a mosque in July.

“An incredible privilege to be here,” Pompeo told the patriarch.

The foreign ministry declared ahead of Pompeo’s arrival that the US should “first look in the mirror” before making an issue of the “completely irrelevant” subject of the freedom of faith in Turkey.

Pompeo’s seven-nation tour has been complicated by his unabashed support of Trump’s unsubstantiated claim of election fraud — and attempts by US allies to position themselves for Joe Biden’s incoming presidency.

The US diplomat’s two-night stay in Paris included a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron but no press conference that usually follows such talks.

Yet the Turkish leg seemed destined for problems from the start, The Associated Press reported.

Officials said Pompeo wanted to visit Istanbul to see the patriarch and was only ready to meet Erdogan and Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu on the condition they come to him from the capital Ankara.

A meeting seemed possible after intense negotiations before the talks fell apart.

“This was a scheduling issue,” a senior US official said.

“President Erdogan’s schedule shifted and made it impossible to fit the parameters that from the very beginning we had set out”.

It is difficult to gauge whether the election of Joe Biden — whom Erdogan congratulated three days after his victory was called by US media — played a role in the imbroglio.

But it will mean Pompeo will fail to discuss with Turkish officials the very problems he pointed to Monday after a meeting in Paris with Macron.