Turkey has a newly confrontational foreign policy

“TURKEY WILL strive for peace and durable stability in the region alongside the US, her strategic partner and ally for more than half a century,” a Turkish leader once wrote in an American newspaper. “We are determined to maintain our close co-operation with the US.” Those words seem from another era. They are, though not such a distant one. The year was 2003, Turkey’s parliament had rejected an American request to use the country as a launchpad for its invasion of Iraq, and the writer, keen to reassure his NATO ally, was the new prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.