Turkey's outcry falls on deaf ears in Washington

U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to give a green light to liberate the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) stronghold of Raqqa in cooperation with a Syrian Kurdish militia came as a blow to Turkey-U.S. ties ahead of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's visit to the White House next week. Now, policy experts on both sides are discussing whether the two countries have hit a nadir in ties with the United States getting ready to provide heavy weaponry to the YPG, whose ties to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) are no secret to anyone with an average IQ. Frankly, nobody really remembers the last time relations between the two countries were impeccable. There has always been some form of tension, mostly because of conflicting national interests in our wider region. "There has never been a golden age in Turkish-American relations" is a phrase Turkey watchers like returning to these days. 

However, the talk of the town in Washington is that there is no way things will get better in the foreseeable future with such huge gaps between the basic positions of two allies on key issues. Furthermore, almost everyone in the U.S. capital has a tendency to evaluate everything Turkey says or does through the prism of Erdoğan, whose name is often cited alongside that of Vladimir Putin, Rodrigo Duterte and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. For the U.S. establishment, the image of Turkey under Erdoğan's rule is a country which has proved to be unreliable, unpredictable and openly unwilling to play by the rules of the Western world.

But wait a minute. Wasn't it Donald Trump who came to power by beating the U.S. establishment with pledges of radically changing the American political landscape? And was it not Ankara that was almost cheering for "Trump Reis" against...

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