NEW: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is no Turkish delight. “Erdogan is a pain in the neck and he likes it that way,” a high-level NATO official, who is not authorized to speak on the record, told The Daily Beast.
Recep Tayyip ErdoganYou would be, too, if your international claims-to-fame included jailing some 13,000 people for “insulting” your style of leadership, then saying Sweden isn’t fit for NATO membership because the country and its parliament is a “hatchery” for terrorist groups. The president has gone so far as to threaten to vetoas a further counterweight to Russian belligerence in the region.
Police secure the street outside the Turkish embassy during a visit by Erdogan on May 16, 2017, in Washington, D.C. Earlier, the Turkish leader’s security detail had clashed with pro-Kurdish protesters, leaving at least eight people wounded, one of them critically.Erdogan is also a bummer at NATO cocktail parties, and not because the 68-year-old strongman is a tea-toddler.
There’s likely no better Erdogan decoder than the Turkish-American historian and author Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish research program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Cagaptay’s last three books are respectively and poignantly titledHe describes Erdogan as “Janus-faced,” a reference to the Roman god depicted with one expression looking toward the past and another toward the future, much in the same fashion as Batman’s nemesis Two-Face.
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