Mideast ambitions: Turkey and Egypt seek alliance

The image of an Ottoman sultan glowered at the gridlock from a highway billboard in the Egyptian capital, hands clasped, his feathered headgear and gold-hewn epaulettes in elegant contrast to the grind of traffic below. The poster for a Turkish-made movie about the 1453 fall of Constantinople recalled the early feats of an empire that eventually ruled the Middle East and beyond.         

Egypt, like Turkey, has its own grand history  evident in the pyramids and other monuments that its ancients left behind, and in a national pride that's distinctive in the Arab world.

The descendants of yesterday's sultans and pharaohs, so to speak, also have ambitions of an outsized role for their respective countries. Each wants to speak for the Middle East.               

But they can't go it alone so Turkey and Egypt now talk of working together. In some ways, it's an odd couple.            

Turkey is relatively stable and prosperous, though its foreign outreach has soured in some quarters, forcing it to tone down ambitions to become a statesman above the Mideast fray.     

Egypt, the most populous Arab country, is struggling with problems at home. Analysts believe it will be at least several years before Cairo can play a robust role in a region that rolls from one crisis to the next, divided over everything from religion to modernity.            

Their alliance could work if Egypt follows Turkey's moderate creed of reform and pragmatism, along with Western ties and Islamic piety. Then again, once Egypt gains more confidence, the two nations might jostle for influence.        

Turkey's outreach (in this case, deep pockets) was on show Monday in Cairo. Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said his government would give $2 billion in aid to Egypt to "increase trust" in its economy, beset by a drop in productivity, a tourism slump, strikes and protests since the fall of authoritarian leader Hosni Mubarak in an uprising last year.              

The two nations both want President Bashar Assad of Syria to quit and Iran, his ally, to stay out of the civil war there.            

In the Middle East, though, diplomacy and compromise seem in perpetual peril.             

Israel ponders a military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities, fearing its enemy wants to build a bomb. Syria's civil war resembles a proxy conflict with a sectarian edge. Violence surrounding a film that insults Prophet Muhammad and was produced in the United States points to old tensions between Western and Islamic thought.            

AP