Turkey Running Amok

The National Interest makes the case that “Turkey needs to be sobered up.”

Turkey’s President Erdogan has had a whopping seventy thousand people detained, fired or suspended. Aside from military personnel and police, this number includes thousands of teachers, deans, journalists and judges. The speed at which these individuals were rounded up has left many questioning when the lists of detainees were actually complied.

Turkey has used its NATO membership to make a mockery of democracy for decades. NATO has been an enabler, allowing Turkey to run amok in the region, and, indeed, fuels Turkey’s delusions of reviving the Ottoman Empire.

Under the protection of NATO, the increasingly Islamized nation has joined the ranks of Saudi Arabia and Iran in relying on proxy terrorist groups to advance its foreign policy. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Turkey has pushed into overdrive its own self-interest at the expense of the military union, becoming the tail that attempts to wag the dog, often achieving remarkable success.

Under NATO’s umbrella, Turkey has made its southern border all but nonexistent, allowing the free flow of weapons, militants and mercenaries into Syria and the Middle East with no regard for the consequences.

Turkey needs to be sobered up before it makes a bigger mockery of the United States, NATO and Europe—or, worse yet, before they force the West into a confrontation based solely on Turkish national interests, which seems to be the revival of the decrepit Ottoman Empire.