Israel Matzav

Steyn: Contempt for Israel is contempt for the United States

Ten years ago, Turkey's behavior would have been unthinkable. Ankara was Israel's best friend in a region where every other neighbor wishes, to one degree or another, the Jewish state's destruction. Even when Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AKP was elected to power eight years ago, the experts assured us there was no need to worry. I remember sitting in a plush bar late one night with a former Turkish foreign minister. He told me, in between passing round the cigars and chugging back the Scotch, that, yes, the new crowd weren't quite so convivial in the wee small hours but, other than that, they knew where their interests lay. Like many Turkish movers and shakers of his generation, my drinking companion loved the Israelis. "They're tough hombres," he said admiringly. "You have to be in this part of the world." If you had suggested to him that in six years' time the Turkish prime minister would be telling the Israeli president to his face that "I know well how you kill children on beaches," he would have dismissed it as a fantasy concoction for some alternative universe.

Yet it happened. Erdogan said those words to Shimon Peres at Davos last year and then flounced off stage. Day by day, what was formerly the Zionist Entity's staunchest pal talks more and more like just another cookie-cutter death-to-the-Great-Satan stan-of-the-month.

A confident culture can dominate far larger numbers of people, as England did for much of modern history. Bismarck's famous remark that, if the British Army invaded Germany, he'd send the local police force to arrest them, is generally taken as a sneer at the minimal size of Her Britannic Majesty's armed forces. But, in another sense, it's a testament to how much the British accomplished with so little. Erdogan would not be palling up to Ahmadinejad and Boy Assad in Syria and even Sudan's genocidal President Bashir, the Butcher of Darfur, if he were mindful of Turkey's relationship with the United States. But he isn't. He looks at the American hyperpower and sees, to all intents, a late Ottoman sultan - pampered, decadent, lounging on its cushions, puffing a hookah but unable to rouse itself to impose its will in the world. In that sense, Turkey's contempt for Israel is also an expression of near-total contempt for Washington.

Is Erdogan wrong in his calculation? Or is he, in his own fashion, only reaching his own conclusions about what Israel, India, the Czech Republic and others are coming to see as "the post-American world"? Well, look at it as if you're sitting in the presidential palace of some or other Third World basket-case. Iran is going nuclear in full view of the world, and with huge implications for everything, not least the price of oil. Meanwhile, NATO's only Muslim member has decided it would rather be friends with Iran, Sudan and Syria. And all this in the first decade of the 21st century. So much for stability.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:56 AM