Turkey

Following yesterday's news that the White House had radically changed its strategy involving Syrian military intervention, and that it had decided to provide weapons to Kurdish militants in the region, we were curious to see just how livid Turkey would be when it inevitably responded to Trump's announcement. One day later we got the answer when the Turkish Defense Minister Fikri Isik was quoted by Reuters that the U.S. decision to provide weapons for Kurdish militants in the fight against ISIS "is a crisis" and warned it would not benefit the United States or the region.

Over the last year, as Turkey's 'sultan-for-life' Recep Tayyip Erdogan has increased his dictatorial powers, so the nation's "misery" has increased to record highs. Soaring inflation (amid a collapsing currency) and stubbornly high unemployment have combined with government crackdowns to see increasingly active protests in the streets.

Two weeks after winning the Turkish constitutional referendum by a modest but decisive margin, president - or perhaps it is now despot - Erdogan decided to take his newly decreed powers for a spin and overnight in rapid succession surprised foreign observers when Turkey decreed that it would ban TV dating shows, fire an additional 4,000 public officials and also ban Wikipedia.

TURKEY BANS DATING PROGRAMS ON TV AND RADIO: OFFICIAL GAZETTE

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) April 29, 2017

Just three days after Turkish warplanes killed at least 20 US-backed Kurdish fighters along the Turkey-Syria border as well as several Kurdish peshmerga troops on Mount Sinjar in northwestern Iraq, footage posted by Syrian activists showed the US has deployed troops and APCs in the contested region, in a move that could potentially drag the US in a conflict where it already finds itself mediating between two so-called US ally forces in the proxy war against Syria.

Authored by Sukru Hanioglu via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The historic breakdown in Anglo-Ottoman relations is a useful model for evaluating today’s troubled alliance between the United States and Turkey