I expect I will have more to say about this in another venue, but I will just note that Soner Cagaptay is once again on his mission to stir up distrust of Turkey with another op-ed. No doubt one can find illiberal AKP measures, and I am far from being a defender of the AKP, but under the old, supposedly more “liberal” regimes in Turkey’s past free speech was as curtailed as it is now, Islamist governments were banned, the Kurds were kept down and at the margins and the current Prime Minister was imprisoned while mayor of Istanbul for reciting a poem. It was a militant poem full of Islamist rhetoric and authored by the chief ideologue of of the Young Turks, but it was nonetheless just a poem. To the best of my knowledge, no politician of similar stature has been imprisoned for such an “offense” under Erdogan’s tenure. Turkey and the AKP have their flaws, which I will be happy to spell out, but this mythology that the AKP is turning away from some prior liberal order is utter nonsense, and it is very much like the people who lament Russia’s “turn” from the West and democracy after the ’90s. What these critics seem not to grasp is that these states are going to act in their own interests, which may sometimes be at odds with ours, and the products of their elections are not necessarily going to be in alignment with Western designs when policies undertaken by Western governments prove to be deeply unpopular with the population in these countries. Indeed, the “problem” with Turkey, as with Russia, is that its government does rather too good of a job of representing its people’s sentiments and fails to ignore public discontent as effectively as Washington does.