Perhaps if Obama had questioned Turkey’s credentials earlier, his administration would not have found itself grappling this week with Turkey’s quisling deal in Tehran. It is way past time for Washington to yank Ankara’s license as regional broker, and stop reaching out and start standing up tall to Iran. ~Claudia Rosett

How would Washington go about “yanking” a license it has no power to grant or revoke? What can it possibly mean to say that the administration should “start standing up tall to Iran”? It has been pursuing the same futile and bankrupt Iran policy of confrontation and isolation as its predecessor, and all the while it has been accused of capitulating to Tehran. Even when it is slapping down the Turkish and Brazilian nuclear deal, the administration is supposedly responsible for Turkey’s pursuit of its own foreign policy goals, and all because it did not treat a Turkish ally as insultingly as Obama’s critics falsely claim he has treated many other allies. On one of the few occasions when the U.S. actually has tried to humiliate a long-standing ally by dismissing the deal Turkey helped broker, the administration critics who cannot stop talking about his alleged “snubs” of U.S. allies are finally pleased and wished he had treated Turkey as dismissively in the past.

Yes, of course, their previous outrage about the mistreatment of allies was mostly feigned and opportunistic, but that is not the main problem. More important than that, these critics are perfectly happy to demand that our government give our allies whatever it is their governments want and go along with their policies, no matter how unwise, provocative or counter-productive they are. Then, when one of our allies does something constructive and useful that could possibly facilitate an end to the impasse with Iran, these critics are among the first to complain about the ally’s treachery. Turkey’s improved relations with Syria and Iran provide the U.S. with an opportunity, not an obstacle. If Washington insists that states have to choose between good relations with their immediate neighbors or good relations with us, there may come a time when they do not choose to be on good terms with us.

Turkey’s “zero problems” approach to its neighbors is a perfectly normal one, and one that the administration should welcome. It is the sort of thing one would think Washington would want to encourage, but of course we know that when it comes to the Near East, the former Soviet Union or East Asia it seems as if it has been standing policy to support governments that are happy to perpetuate or create problems with their neighbors and to denounce governments that attempt to minimize or resolve them. American hawks have had the same negative reaction to the election of Ma in Taiwan, Hatoyama in Japan, Roh in South Korea, and Yanukovych in Ukraine, and will undoubtedly see whoever succeeds Saakashvili in Georgia in the same “quisling” terms. Wiser observers understand that Ma’s rapprochement with Beijing is a good development, not least because it reduces the likelihood of a conflict over Taiwan, and that the warming of relations between Kiev and Moscow removes an unnecessary irritant from U.S.-Russian relations.

What Rosett finds objectionable about Turkey’s behavior is not that it has become a quisling state, which is a deeply insulting and unjustified thing to say, but that it does not play the part of an obedient lackey and puppet. Our allies are not lackeys to be ordered about and told to keep quiet, and their loyalty is not something to be taken for granted and exploited without any recpicrocity. Turkey will be an increasingly independent and assertive actor in the Near East and elsewhere, and it is going to pursue its perceived national interests. The more that Americans define Turkey’s pursuit of its interests as inimical to our own, the worse relations with Turkey will get until at some point Turkey may go from being an independent-minded ally to a state aligned entirely with other powers.