Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Washington’s allies are deploring the Biden administration’s mismanaged withdrawal from Afghanistan, and they’re worrying publicly about its implications for Nato. Russian leaders, resisting the urge to gloat, express well-founded concerns over the spread of jihadist terrorism northward into Central Asia. And China is moving in, cutting deals with the Taliban to mine lithium and other critical minerals. The reaction in Turkey has been more ambiguous, but also more interesting. Early in the evacuation, Turkey sent soldiers to Kabul to secure the airport. It is already clear that Turkey’s Islamist government is ready to recognize and work with the Taliban — while also loudly discouraging Afghan refugees from trying to enter Turkey.

Back in 2015, when Turkey downed a Russian jet on the Syrian border, relations with Moscow nosedived. Russia imposed sanctions on Turkey, and its government-controlled media laid bare financial and military links between radical groups in Syria and high-level Turkish government officials. Russian pressure on Turkey was so crippling that Erdogan had to write a letter to Russian president Vladimir Putin to apologize. Putin knows how to handle bullies — because he is one. Not only did Russia's pressure force Turkey to toe line, but it also turned Turkey into one of Russia's biggest allies. Ankara even purchased S-400 Russian anti-air defense systems at the expense of alienating its Nato allies.

Six years ago, at the opening match of the new Basaksehir Stadium in Istanbul, an unlikely soccer star emerged. The red team’s aging, six-foot center-forward lumbered toward the white team’s goal, and a delicate chip over the advancing keeper brought a goal that sent the stadium into ecstasy. The scorer was Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It was the run-up to an election in which he became his country’s 12th president.For Erdogan, a former semi-professional footballer, it was brilliant self-promotion. Like Fidel Castro’s baseball pitching or Chairman Mao’s ‘world-record’ Yangtze river swim, Erdogan’s contrived sporting prowess helped make him as much a cult as a politician.

The Trump administration has the first successful foreign policy of any administration since that of George H.W. Bush. It must be stopped.This, incredibly, is the message from the Democrats. And that, disastrously, is what will happen if Joe Biden wins the elections. Get ready for the revival of the failed foreign policy of the Obama administration, and brace yourself for the return of the Iran Deal.Visionaries like Obama, Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes thought it would be smart to have the Muslim Brotherhood in charge of Egypt. They thought it would be strategic to smash up Libya because the French asked nicely. Obama reckoned he had ‘bonds of trust’ with Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, an Islamist and neo-Ottoman imperialist.

President Trump’s recent moves in northern Syria are already paying off. Overshadowed as it was by the ‘impeachment' kabuki a mile down Pennsylvania Avenue, Trump’s hosting of Turkey's president Erdogan at the White House today signals progress in an area of significant US national interests.Some perspective on the hysteria over Trump’s ‘abandonment' of the Kurds last month. First, the notion that any Kurdish group represents 'the Kurds' anywhere is absurd. The world’s 30 million or so Kurds live in four countries –– Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria, in order of numbers.

Credibility used to be an important thing in US foreign policy, a guiding principle: hundreds of thousands of Americans in uniform died to maintain it. In 1969, with half a million American troops in Vietnam, Henry Kissinger wrote this in Foreign Affairs: '[W]hat is involved now is confidence in American promises. However fashionable it is to ridicule the terms “credibility” or “prestige,” they are not empty phrases; other nations can gear their actions to ours only if they can count on our steadiness. The collapse of the American effort in Viet Nam would not mollify many critics; most of them would simply add the charge of unreliability to the accusation of bad judgment. Those whose safety or national goals depend on American commitments could only be dismayed.

If any other president than Donald Trump had announced the withdrawal of American troops from Syria, he would be lauded for a strategic wisdom rare among American presidents, and for that even rarer achievement, fulfilling a campaign promise. Instead, he is attacked by Democrats and Republicans alike. That alone suggest that he is doing something right. The truth is, American foreign policy experts have been consistently wrong about the Middle East for decades. Who, apart from the culprits of George W. Bush’s wars, seriously believes that Iraq ever was a nation, rather than a cobbled-together state? Who, apart from the apologists of Obama’s appeasement, seriously believes that Iran has no ambitions as a nuclear-tipped empire?

Last year, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan campaigned for a new constitution that would change from a parliamentary to a presidential system. When German officials refused to allow his ministers to travel to Germany and woo its million-strong expatriate vote, he called them Nazis. He later also accused the German Chancellor of Nazism for saying that the European Union should reconsider its relations with Turkey — a veiled threat for suspending talks to bring it into the EU. Ankara and Amsterdam withdrew their ambassadors during a spat over the same campaign.