Turkey continues its foreign policy blunders

Turkish authorities denied its citizens access to Wikipedia, and on the same day, US troops began to deploy along the Turkey-Syria border to prevent Turkey's military from attacking the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), the main US ally in Syria against the Islamic State (IS). There is no correlation between the two developments, but the irony is there: Turkey is keeping the West out, just as the West is keeping Turkey in.

The Turkish air force on April 25 bombed the YPG general command, its Denge Rojava Radio premises and some other targets in northeastern Syria. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan asserted that Americans and a number of allies and partners of Turkey were given advance notice. It came out later that the United States was notified just 52 minutes before the bombing.

Some pundits offered an analysis that Turkey was testing American resolve before a May 16 meeting between Erdogan and US President Donald Trump. Those observers said Ankara, by escalating its fight against the YPG, was putting pressure on the United States to choose between Turkey — its formal NATO ally — and those Kurdish partners on the Syrian battlefield who Turkish leaders see as terrorists as a security threat.

That analysis might have seemed reasonable at first glance, but developments belied its validity. After the attacks, US troops visited the bombed areas where American and wanted-by-Turkey YPG commanders gathered for a photo-op — to the dismay of Turkey’s leaders. But what made Erdogan, in his own words, “seriously saddened” was the US troop deployment along the border.