More than six decades have passed since Turkey, as the first Muslim-majority and Middle Eastern country, recognized Israel in 1949. Turkish foreign policy was fundamentally shaped by bureaucratic cadres working under the auspices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the 1990s. The rise of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) starting from 2002 and regional developments until the Arab Spring led Turkey to reconfigure its foreign policy-making mechanism. New state institutions were added into decision-making. The relationship between those new institutions and omnipotent decision-makers, i.e. Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the army, the Prime Ministry radically changed while the roles of the latter diminished. My paper discusses changing foreign policy-making process in Turkey. I will analyze the period between 2002 and 2014 with the help of the interviews that I conducted with retired Turkish diplomats who worked in Turkish missions in Israel and the Middle East desk of the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The interview data will help us to understand how the Turkish diplomats perceive the change in decision-making mechanism and the role of diplomats in this environment. Accordingly, this paper will also give extended background on the relationship between classical diplomatic traditions and leader-focused, “fast-track diplomacy” practice.