Jake Wallis Simons: Trump has been fooled by the Turkish cuckoo in the Nato nest

What has happened to Turkey under Erdogan is a tragedy. A pro-Western country has fallen to Islamism

Jake Wallis Simons

Published 05 July 2026 9:00am BST

If a Soviet tyrant wants his Black Sea Fleet to easily reach the Mediterranean, he must sail it into the narrow Bosphorus Strait, through the Sea of Marmara and along the Dardanelles Strait. In other words, he must direct his warships through Turkey’s backyard.

Thus, as the Second World War gave way to the Cold War, Joseph Stalin tried to strong-arm Ankara into accepting a series of demands, including joint maritime control, the recovery of Turkish territory controlled by the Russian Empire before 1918, and greater Soviet military influence.

This proved a grave misjudgment. Stalin’s plan backfired, driving Ankara to abandon its traditional neutrality in favour of the West. Shortly afterwards, in 1952, Harry Truman pulled off a strategic masterstroke by championing Turkey’s admission into Nato. Not only did this prevent Soviet maritime domination but, as the country borders Syria, Iraq and Iran, the deal helped secure Middle Eastern oil supplies, the Eastern Mediterranean seaboard and the Suez route.

More than seven decades later, and in the era of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, the reach of Truman’s genius has expired. In its Islamist incarnation, Turkey has evolved to become a cuckoo in the Nato nest. Last week, just days before a Nato summit in Ankara, Hakan Fidan, Turkey’s foreign minister,, delivered an Israelophobic rant on CNN Türk that officials in Jerusalem described as “incitement to genocide”.

The Middle East’s only true democracy was “not only Turkey’s problem”, he said, sounding for all the world like a character from the Third Reich. “These people have become a burden that humanity can no longer bear. The human conscience cannot bear it.”

Given that Turkey has become one of Hamas’s most important overseas financial hubs – Western intelligence agencies have repeatedly exposed it for hosting parts of the terror group’s shadowy business, fundraising and money-laundering networks – Fidan’s claims were rather rich. Surely, the Hamas regime in Gaza should more heavily burden the human conscience than the vibrant freedom of Tel Aviv. (And only one of them has attempted genocide.)

The affection between Turkey and the jihadists of Gaza is not incidental, however. Erdogan has long been a powerful backer of the Muslim Brotherhood, whether Mohamed Morsi’s government in Egypt or aligned movements across the Arab world. It all appears to be part of a strategy. Show me jihadism and I’ll show you loathing of the West.

Yet on Tuesday and Wednesday, in the shadow of the unresolved war in Iran, Nato leaders will pose for photographs in the cuckoo’s home territory, Ankara.

Was this really the wisest choice of venue? After all, Erdogan reportedly played a key role in the strategic failure of Washington’s campaign against Tehran, by quietly persuading Donald Trump to abandon a plan to use Kurdish ground forces to topple the regime.

‘A gift bag of F-35s’

Erdogan, pictured in the Oval Office last year, has won the admiration of Donald Trump Credit: AP

Yet Trump, who seems bizarrely infatuated with the Turkish demagogue, doesn’t appear to have noticed that he’s being played. If the summit wasn’t being held in Turkey, he told reporters last month: “I don’t think I would have gone ... I’m going out of respect to President Erdogan.”

In his first term, Trump seemed more alive to the threat posed by Turkey. In 2019, he expelled the country from a multinational F-35 procurement programme, after Ankara invested in Russian S-400 air defences. This, the US argued, posed an intelligence risk, giving Moscow the opportunity to gain sensitive information about the F-35’s capabilities.

Overnight, Turkey was deprived of the right to buy the aircraft. Turkish pilots training in the US were sent home, their technical staff were removed, and six F-35s built for Turkey were never delivered.

For Donald 2.0, however, the Turkish tyrant seems to be second only to Vladimir Putin in his affections. Speaking alongside Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary-general, at the White House last month, Trump gushed: “Erdogan is a strong man ... everything I’ve ever asked him to do, he’s done.”

Was Trump going to bring a “gift bag” full of F-35s with him to Turkey, a reporter asked? “I think so,” Trump replied. “Yeah, I’m going to probably do something that’s going to make [Erdogan] very happy.”

Atatürk’s legacy undone

Erdogan waves to supporters in front of a giant portrait of himself and one of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk Credit: AFP

What has happened to Turkey is a tragedy. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey, replaced Islamic law with Swiss-inspired civil law, adopted the Latin alphabet, banned the fez and promoted Western dress, and granted extensive legal rights to women, including suffrage. Conservative Islam was limited to rural areas and Islamist networks were pushed underground.

Even when political Islam began its inexorable comeback in the 1970s and 1980s, secular culture remained dominant. Its most eye-catching symbol was Ankara’s friendship with Israel. In 2017, when I was a foreign reporter, I was sent to Istanbul on a freezing New Year’s Day to cover the massacre of 39 people in a nightclub by an Islamic State gunman.

One of the victims was a 19-year-old Arab-Israeli woman called Leann Zaher Nasser, who had been there on holiday. Such was the closeness between the two nations that Mossad officers later confided to me that they were hugely frustrated at having failed to prevent the atrocity.

Such relations would never have been found in any of Turkey’s Muslim neighbours. Later that year, however, Erdogan made constitutional changes that concentrated power in the presidency, followed by an intensification of restrictions on journalists, pressure on political opponents and limits on freedom of expression and assembly. The rot was setting in.

Amid this growing Islamist authoritarianism, Ankara’s relationship with Israel now lies at an all-time low. Benjamin Netanyahu surpassed Hitler long ago in the crime of genocide, Erdogan announced last year, calling the Israeli leader a “bloodthirsty vampire” and “psychopath” in charge of a country he has previously described as a “terror state”.

This Israelophobia is not a local problem. Rather, it is the banner that flutters above a hardline, neo-Ottoman, expansionist regime that is filling the regional power void left by battered Tehran, bolstered by its close alliances with Qatar – another Brotherhood enthusiast – and Pakistan.

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Syria is now ruled by the former Al-Qaeda warlord Ahmed al-Sharaa, who swept to power with Turkish backing. Azerbaijan’s 2020 victory in Nagorno-Karabakh, enabled in part by Turkish drones, paved the way for its final 2023 takeover. Westward, Turkey holds quiet influence over Europe’s gas and migrant flows, while across the Muslim world, its popular soft-power exports of television dramas and films have long been winning millions of hearts and minds.

History denied

Meanwhile, Erdogan’s propaganda is becoming increasingly unhinged. This week, in another public war of words with Jerusalem, he made the bizarre claim that “in our history there is no genocide, no massacre, no oppression, and no colonialism”. How, then, would he describe the butchery of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottomans in 1915, an atrocity widely viewed as the 20th century’s first genocide?

How, for that matter, would he explain the Ottoman Empire itself, which at its height stretched from the walls of Vienna across the Balkans, Anatolia, the Levant and Mesopotamia to the Gulf, and from the steppes of Crimea to the deserts of Yemen and the shores of North Africa? If that’s not colonialism, I’m not sure what is.

This is a problem that is not going away. Without a clear mechanism for expelling a Nato member – those drawing up the North Atlantic Treaty did not have the foresight to design one – there is no obvious way to defuse this combustible mess. What the alliance badly needs is an American president with the deftness to bend Erdoğan towards a Western agenda. Under the free world’s current vain, inept and capricious leadership, however, Truman’s legacy is dying in our hands.