President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is now in Washington mainly to attend the World Nuclear Security summit hosted by U.S. President Barack Obama. More than 50 countries are attending this summit as global terrorism is challenging all human values and showing no respect for life.

We are living in a world where a child can become a suicide bomber and kill innocent masses as a tool of terrorist organizations. These people have no regard for human life, which means for them killing dozens of civilians is no different than murdering a million people. Thus the minute they can lay their hands on a dirty bomb - a crudely built nuclear device - they will hardly hesitate to use it and, of course, they will do this against the most populous targets, and the U.S. is on top of the list.

So keeping nuclear material away from terrorists is becoming a growing challenge when we have a mad man running North Korea, potentially dangerous extremists who want to control Pakistan's nuclear program, religious fanatics in Israel who could justify the use of a nuclear device against all Arabs and a strong mafia that could grab a nuclear device in Russia and elsewhere.

Illicit trafficking of nuclear material in view of the growing terrorist threat in the world shows nowhere is safe and so world leaders have to rise up to the challenge. The summit in Washington will be a major forum where global leaders will be expected to face the mounting challenges head on. How and to what extent they can rise up to the occasion remains to be seen.

Turkey being in one of the most volatile regions of the world, riddled with chaos and crises, will be attending the important gathering at this critical time. This on its own makes the visit to Washington extremely important.

Then of course there are the side issues where leaders attending the summit meet each other and review their bilateral ties. Turkey will be doing this with the U.S., but as the Americans are hosting the event it is obvious that there will not be enough time or any real occasion where Turkish and American leaders can sit down in earnest and discuss outstanding issues at length.

So writing too much into the visit to Washington regarding its impact on U.S.-Turkey ties would be overdoing it. Certain quarters in Washington have already shown their utmost enmity toward Erdoğan and his administration from asking for his resignation to threatening him that they would support a military coup in Turkey. This chorus seems to be a well-orchestrated salvo against Turkey and Erdoğan by a team of the old guard in Washington. So much for supreme American values laid down by the founding fathers.

These people have always pretended to support the Erdoğan administration but have never really done so in the past 13 years. They have always used every opportunity to stall Turkey, but they have watched with dismay how Erdoğan has emerged even more powerful every time they tried to dispose of him.

Now they have discovered a new element in their fight against Erdoğan: Using the Gülen Movement and its extensions in the Turkish military.

In the past three years the Gülen Movement has tried every way to undermine the Erdoğan administration, and each time they have failed badly with the Turkish people giving Erdoğan sounding victories in successive elections. The only time they were a bit successful was in the June 7 elections when the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) suffered a setback at the polls. Then we saw how these people cheered and declared that Erdoğan is finished. But they were red faced soon after in November when the AK Party won a landslide victory with 49.5 percent of the vote.

Now is the time to build some inroads into the U.S. network and show our friends in Washington the real picture that Erdoğan is here to stay and could be an excellent asset for them in a world where growing challenges like nuclear security need good leadership, especially in the Middle East. Turkey, for its part, has to understand the realities of Washington and play the power game.