Little progress expected from Erdoğan-Trump talks

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will be at the White House on May 16 for his long-awaited face-to-face talks with President Donald Trump. All the signs are that this will not be an easy conversation. Ankara has set the stakes so high with regard to its demands that it has left itself very little room for diplomatic maneuvering.
  
Washington, on the other hand, has made it amply clear that Turkey's demands are unlikely to be met because the U.S. has firm positions, or obstacles it can't overcome, that make it very hard to please Ankara.
 
The debate as to how these two key allies came to this situation will undoubtedly rage for a long time. Looked at from today's position though, many in the pro-government press are underlining the fact that Erdoğan's talks with Trump will be "a turning point" in Turkish-U.S. ties. 

We can only speculate as to what they mean by this. 

If they mean that Erdoğan will be able to convince Trump to dump the Kurdish groups the U.S. is allied with in Syria - groups that Turkey views as terrorist organizations - the chances are nil at best at this stage.

If they mean that Erdoğan will convince Trump to come up with an executive decision and extradite Fethullah Gülen, the Islamic preacher Erdoğan says was behind last year's failed coup, the chances there appear slim to none as well. The way the system works in the U.S. with its separation of powers makes this extremely difficult.

If Erdoğan hopes Trump will help secure the release of Reza Zarrab, a Turkish-Iranian businessman, and Mehmet Hakan Atilla, the deputy general manager of the Turkish state-owned Halk Bank, who are both on trial in the U.S. for violating sanction on Iran, this also appears unlikely for the same reason. 

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