“Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu grandly proclaimed a few days ago “If the world is on fire, Turkey is the firefighter. Turkey is assuming the leading role for stability in the Middle East.”

Such ambition is new for Ankara. In the 1990s, it contentedly fulfilled its NATO obligations and followed Washington’s lead. Starting about 1996, relations with Israel blossomed. In all, Turkish policy offered an attractive exception to the tyrannical, Islamist and conspiracist mentality generally dominating Muslim peoples. That the country’s political leaders were corrupt and fumbling seemed of little consequence.

Those faults, however, proved extremely consequential, leading to the repudiation of longestablished political parties and the victory of an Islamist party, Adalet ve Kalkýnma Partisi (AKP), in the elections of November 2002. By March 2003, in advance of the coming war in Iraq, the government signaled that a new era had begun by refusing to permit American troops to traverse Turkish territory.”

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