Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has long been a darling of the West.

Erdoğan's Western Enablers

by Burak Bekdil
Western words about Erdoğan and Turkey make for a colossal anthology of how not to deal with Islamists.

The question [of who lost Turkey] is no doubt too late and futile to ask. A quick, but realistic answer, is probably "the Turks themselves," or, related to this, "it was destined to get lost." After all, how Turkey is being governed today is a perfect reflection of what constitutes the predominant cultural, sociological and political values/norms in the country – each with economic derivatives of same or similar variables.

We are all accountable by how rightly or wrongly we assessed the political phenomena; journalists by what accuracy their archives dating back to 10 or so years ago would produce, and politicians by their statements in the same retrospect. Any randomly selected opinion in this column since 2002 would too boringly portray the gloomy country we live in today, often with a note that "wished to be wrong."

Then there were the naïve and/or myopic and/or morally corrupt enablers who cared more about a "transactional plus," often the product of short-sighted miscalculation based on the self-deception "yeah, but we can work with them." Today, their fancy words in recent political history could make a colossal anthology of "how not to deal with Islamists." Here is an extremely summarized selection (due to space limitations):

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