Victor Davis Hanson strikes again:

We are an ascendant Turkey’s new best friend, without much recognition of what that means, given its growing Islamization, especially for our friends who traditionally fear its ascendance — whether the Kurds, Greece, Armenia, or now Israel.

U.S.-Turkish relations have steadily deteriorated since 2002, and it has only been in the last year or so that there has been any sustained attempt to repair them. That hardly makes the U.S. Turkey’s “new best friend.” It would be more accurate to say that the U.S. has stopped trying to sabotage a useful alliance. Things have worsened for the PKK in recent years, that’s true, but the Turkish government’s treatment of Kurds has been improving under the AKP government. Once again, the United States is not particularly a “friend” of Armenia. Armenia is a military and political client of Russia, Armenia’s economy is closely linked to Russia’s, and Armenia also has reasonably good relations with Iran. The U.S. has consistently inclined toward Azerbaijan and Turkey in the region. Hanson avoids discussing any of these things in any detail because his sweeping generalizations would fall apart as soon as he did.

Hanson continues:

No one believes that U.S. outreach, often to the embarrassment of our allies, to Russia, Syria, Venezuela, or Iran has brought us dividends; tensions with all have not abated — or are becoming much worse.

Of course, quite a lot of people believe that the U.S. has benefited from improved relations with Russia. Providing an alternative supply route for the war in Afghanistan is the most obvious and undeniable result, which is the sort of thing that one would think hawks could appreciate, but that would require them to acknowledge that improved relations with Russia have helped the U.S. on a policy they support, and they’re clearly not interested in doing that. It is a mistake to believe that there were ever serious policies of “outreach” or engagement with Venezuela and Iran.