If we are to believe Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the culprits for the mass protests that have rocked his country for over two weeks are "the interest-rate lobby," "foreign hands," and their domestic "collaborators." Some of his supporters have even better ones: the intelligence agents of Britain, France, Iran, Israel, Russia, Syria and the United States.

How spies from such a diverse group of countries agreed to, and succeeded in, destabilizing Turkey so easily and so quickly, we do not know.

But Prime Minister Erdogan’s turn to conspiracy theories reveals a strange paradox: Since he came to power more than 10 years ago, his top priority has been to improve relations with both global investors and foreign nations. The successes of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the last decade — boosting the economy, elevating Turkey’s global prestige and taking the military out of politics — have all been achieved partly because of international support.

To be sure, this is not to dismiss Erdogan’s domestic constituents. Indeed, without the prime minister’s appeal to broad segments of Turkish society, the AKP could not have withstood the storms of the past 10 years. At any rate, it was not foreigners but the citizens of Turkey who voted the AKP into power and kept it there.