The prime foreign minister

After Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s elevation to the seat of the prime president minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu is taking over as the prime foreign minister.

Readers should know this column has often hosted Professor Davutoğlu; sometimes, perhaps, it has been unfair to him.

When the world’s foreign policy intelligentsia had the habit of mentioning his name with euphemisms such as “Turkey’s Kissinger,” “champion of Turkey’s greatness” and “always the hero of his own narrative”; here, in this column, he was one day “Dr. Strangelove,” another day, “The Man Who Made Tomorrow,” and another day, “The Man Who Rides the Thunder.” One title was “Dr. Davutoğlu of Turkey or the [atomic] bomb party,” borrowed from Graham Greene’s “Dr. Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party.” Once, this column portrayed Turkey’s foreign policy like “a not-so-funny Turkish opera buffa with the main characters resembling those of [Miguel de] Cervantes’s famous book.”

All of which should suffice to make this columnist, to put it mildly, a not-so-favorite for Mr. Davutoğlu. But his new job could be an opportunity both for himself and Turkey, not merely because he may now be distracted from trying tirelessly, and in most cases in the most futile of ways, to craft a world order that might fulfill his glorious dreams – his heartfelt tribute to the utopia of his younger years.

All the same, the criticism of Professor Davutoğlu in this column has never been personal. On the contrary, this columnist knows well enough that Mr. Davutoğlu is a fine gentleman; an honest, modest, hard-working man who wants the best for his nation –...