Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan will visit the United States on Monday, his ministry announced on Sunday. The ministry said in a statement that he will attend talks with U.S. officials on bilateral and regional issues.
The visit comes at very short notice and coincides with an inaugural visit by Ahmed al-Sharaa, president of Türkiye’s neighbor Syria. The latter is the first visit by a sitting Syrian president to the U.S. in decades. Al-Sharaa is a close ally of Türkiye, like the United States, and Fidan was one of the first high-ranking officials to visit Syria in the aftermath of the December 2024 revolution that toppled the Baathist regime.
Fidan’s last official visit to the U.S. was in September, when he joined a Turkish delegation led by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to the U.N. General Assembly in New York. Previously, Fidan met his counterpart, Marco Rubio, in March in Washington D.C.
At a news conference on Nov. 7, Fidan announced that they were engaged in talks with international partners, including the United States, for rebuilding Gaza, devastated by Israeli attacks.
Turkish-U.S. relations have been strained at times during the tenure of U.S. President Donald Trump's predecessor, Joe Biden. Erdoğan met Trump in the White House in September in his first visit since Trump's election. The two leaders' meeting ended on a positive note for the future of relations, as the U.S. president heaped praise on Erdoğan for improving ties and as a key actor in global issues.
