Politics & Power Quote by Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Diplomacy rarely announces its anxieties, but Erdogan comes close here. The line is packaged as a warm, almost technocratic mission statement: “close and intensive links” among “peoples, scholars and businessmen.” That tidy triad matters. It’s a deliberate widening of the aperture beyond presidents and generals, signaling that the relationship should be too interdependent to casually punish or sideline. When state-to-state ties get prickly, Erdogan is arguing, the connective tissue of commerce and academia can keep the body alive.

The phrasing is also careful about agency. He’s not promising Turkish concessions; he’s “emphasiz[ing] the objective” - diplomatic language that sells aspiration without committing to specifics. “Intensive” does extra work: it implies urgency and density, a push against the episodic, crisis-driven nature of US-Turkey relations (NATO cooperation on one day, public spats and sanctions threats the next). By foregrounding businessmen, he nods to the most reliable constituency in bilateral affairs: investors, exporters, defense contractors, and the broader logic that trade can outvote ideology.

Contextually, Erdogan’s visits to Washington have often occurred amid strategic bargaining - Syria policy, counterterrorism narratives, arms deals, extradition disputes, and Turkey’s balancing act between Western security structures and regional ambitions. In that light, “peoples” is not just kumbaya rhetoric; it’s a pressure release valve. It suggests that even if elites clash, he wants the public-facing story to be partnership, not estrangement, and he wants American institutions - universities, companies, cultural brokers - invested enough to resist a clean break.