Best Buddies: Obama and Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

President Obama’s critics picture him as a screw-up in venues as far removed as Putin’s Greater Russia (including increasing chunks of Ukraine), Assad’s always-open Syrian charnel house, imploding Iraq, Iran’s nuclear ninjadom, civic meltdown in Libya and continuing civil war in Sudan and Christian kidnappings in Nigeria, the late Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela-wide prison swamp, or Beijing’s newly-drawn map absorbing all the South China Sea.

According to the Pew poll, the only democratic country where Obama’s prestige remains intact is not the U.S. but—you guessed it—Israel where Israelis’ high regard for their sole ally, America, rubs off favorably on the American president.

Yet many global criticisms of Obama are overdrawn; after all, he can’t be everywhere at once, and he’s sometimes just a hapless spectator—not a moving force behind international crises. With Obama, the line between leading from behind in a disaster, or hiding behind it, is typically blurred. However, one rarely-mentioned criticism almost perfectly fits: President Obama has made himself the willing dupe of Turkey’s Erdoğan.

Erdoğan has just called Israel’s defensive campaign in Gaza “worse than Hitler.” This despite the fact that Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 while this year is the fortieth anniversary of Turkey’s non-withdrawal from Cyprus. Erdoğan’s Gaza stance is significant because the Turkey-Qatar lobbying for their own pet, pro-Hamas ceasefire may make it harder—not easier—to end hostilities. Can you imagine the nightmare of stationing Turkey’s no-longer professionally-reliable troops as part of an international force to “demilitarize” Gaza the same way they catastrophically did Southern Lebanon some years ago?

Erdoğan’s rabble-rousing has incited anti-Israel riots in Ankara that forced Israeli diplomats to send home their families and Israeli tourists to stay home. Erdoğan may or may not be helping to inflame anti-Israel sentiment among Turkish immigrants in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. He may or may not have been behind the 2010 blowup when lightly-armed Israeli commandos used deadly force against hundreds of so-called “peace activists” armed with hatchets aboard the “Mavi Marmara,” the flag ship of the “Gaza Freedom Flotilla” launched with the complicity of the Turkish Islamists in and outside the government to break Israel’s naval blockade of arms shipments to Gaza. He still refuses to accept Israel’s official apology for an episode for which it really had nothing for which to apologize.

Also in 2010, an episode of the Turkish television soap opera, “Valley of the Wolves,” depicted the Mossad spying inside Turkey and kidnapping Turkish babies as well as mounting a “false flag” attack on the Turkish embassy in Tel Aviv. This followed a rising crescendo of incendiary anti-Israel programming in the Turkish media that caused Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman to criticize the Turkish government which responded by threatening to withdraw its Ambassador to Israel.

Currently, Erdoğan is waging a vendetta with Egypt’s General al-Sissi because Erdoğan believes that Turkey led by himself—the self-proclaimed “greatest non-Arab since Saladin”— not Egypt should be the center of gravity of the Arab as well as Muslim World.

A few year ago, Obama put flowers on the grave of Turkey’s Ataturk—a gesture impossible to square with his admiration for Erdoğan, the man who has subverted Ataturk’s legacy. What accounts for this unseemly bromance of Obama with a Turkish despot who aspires to rule a new Mideast Caliphate with a leadership style reminiscent of Emperor Caligula Unbound? Erdoğan’s “Islamist democracy”—a contradiction in terms—is on the march in Turkey where slow-motion Islamization has metastatsized Ataturk’s secular, democratic republic into a semi-authoritarian Sunni theocracy over the course of a decade. Professional military officers cashiered, judges fired, journalists jailed, political opponents tried on trumped-up charges: the list goes on and on. Turkish Jews are also becoming virtual hostages in their own country.

Obama previously wagered disastrously on Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood as his strong Mideast horse. Perhaps Erdoğan—whose authoritarian style has certain traits in common with Chicago machine politics—is his second-place bet to win the Mideast Derby. Unless he’s also making a side-bet on Iran.

Does Erdoğan still hope—with Obama’s help—to be admitted to the EU to complement Turkey’s long-standing membership in NATO: a military Trojan Horse if there ever was one? Erdoğan’s megalomania probably does not extend that far, and even daft Europeans are not crazy enough to allow him to wreck their economy.

Erdoğan has seen his support for Syria’s anti-Assad rebels blow up in his face, also offending Iran in the process. He cannot feel comfortable with the rival ISIS Caliphate emerging on his Iraqi border. Or with Kurdistan’s impending independence. With friends like Erdoğan, one doesn’t need enemies. So much for the Obama-Ottoman Axis.