It's Time to Kick Erdogan's Turkey Out of NATO
It has always been a matter of historical curiosity that one of the American diplomats who was deeply involved in the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was named Achilles. As the head of the State Department's Office of Western European Affairs after World War II and the eventual U.S. Vice Deputy of the North Atlantic Council, Theodore Achilles played a lead role in drafting the treaty that was designed to deter an expansionist Soviet Union from engaging in an armed attack on Western Europe.
It's a reflection of how difficult it was to imagine that any member of the organization would betray the rest of the alliance that to this day, NATO has no formal mechanism to remove a member in bad standing or to even define what would constitute "bad standing."
After 67 years, that day has arrived: Turkey, which for half a century was a stalwart ally in the Middle East while proving that a Muslim-majority nation could be both secular and democratic, has moved so far away from its NATO allies that it is widely acknowledged to be defiantly supporting the Islamic State in Syria in its war against the West. Since Islamist strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan came to power in 2003, Turkey has taken a harshly authoritarian turn, embracing Islamic terrorists of every stripe while picking fights it can't finish across the region - including an escalating war with 25 million ISIS-battling Kurds and a cold war turning hot with Russia,
An exasperated Erdogan railed about the loyalties of the West, accused the U.S. of creating a "sea of blood" in the region by supporting the Kurds, and issued an ultimatum: he demanded that the time had come for America to choose between Turkey and the Kurds.
I couldn't agree more: the time has come for the U.S. to choose the Kurds over Erdogan's Turkey.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stanley-weiss/its-time-to-kick-erdogans_b_9300670.html?
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