Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is scheduled to host NATO leaders in Ankara next week. Unbelievably, American and European leaders are revving up their engines to coddle, cradle, and embrace this radical, antisemitic, viciously anti-Western and anti-Israeli dictator.
Washington just announced that it will ship 80 engines to Ankara, worth more than $700 million for Turkey’s homegrown fighter jet, and it is positively considering letting Turkey back into the F-35 jet program (from which it was expelled in 2019 over its purchases of Russian S-400 air defense systems).
The EU is begging Turkey for a series of major economic and energy contracts, including central Turkish roles in overland energy networks that will bypass the Arabian Gulf, Russia, and Israel.
This is astonishingly unwise and infuriating because Turkey under Erdogan openly seeks to undermine the values and long-term interests of the West, and to obliterate Israel.
Erdogan seems to have no problem regularly branding the US a declining hegemon and an “imperialist sponsor of terrorism,” siding with Russia against the West in defense of Iran and in support of the Iranian economy and Iranian war effort, and hosting Hamas military headquarters – all while lobbying his friend US President Donald Trump and gullible Europeans for goodies.
A series of well-documented reports this month from the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum show how Erdogan is seeking strategic autonomy and regional primacy in a post-American Middle East.
His fiery language and aggressive actions (including expansion into Syria, Iraq, and across the eastern Mediterranean) drive toward a Turkish-led regional order with clearly expressed Ottoman and Islamist-jihadist aspirations.
“Turkey is an adversary that occasionally cooperates, and the US is now preparing to subsidize the machine built to replace it,” wrote MEF director Gregg Roman.
This makes no sense. Washington is financing its own containment and calling the down-payment an alliance, he warned.
“American hardware is the rented ladder Turkey needs to climb out of its current vulnerability. The new Turkey is using the hegemon’s tools to build the machine that will one day render the hegemon irrelevant,” he added.
Turkey also is building a Sunni alliance with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, and Qatar that has a malodorous anti-American scent. My Misgav Institute colleague Noa Lazimi has been tracking this, and she warned that Ankara has drafted a model constitution for an Islamic confederation meant to replace NATO.
NATO cannot currently afford a complete rupture with a country that controls the Turkish Straits and hosts US nuclear weapons. But at the very least, a “reciprocity standard” should be applied to Turkey. Contracts with that country must be tied to its conduct.
It is time to confront Erdogan about his much-too-close alignment with Russia, China, and Iran; his military occupation of northern Cyprus and northern Syria; and the actual war he wages against Israel.
Old-school antisemitism
When it comes to Jews, Erdogan is a true-blue believing old-school antisemite, who considers classic antisemitic myths like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (where Jews control the global banking and media conglomerates) as truth.
He honestly hates Jews and Israelis, and his preference is to lead a pan-Islamic coalition to crush Israel.
For a moment, back in 2022 when he hosted President Isaac Herzog in Turkey, Erdogan seemed to welcome an improvement of ties with Israel. He managed to mutter something about opportunities for regional and bilateral cooperation.
Indeed, an Ankara-Jerusalem détente would enhance regional stability. But since October 2023, Erdogan has reverted to his default annihilationist slant on Israel.
In 2025, he publicly prayed that “Allah make Zionist Israel destroyed and devastated.”
Just this week, he repeated the wild claim that the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey was organized by “the genocidal, occupying, and expansionist ideology called Zionism.”
Erdogan said, “When we fight Zionism, we are not conducting a personal struggle for ourselves. We are conducting this struggle for our own survival and for the collective survival of our nation. Zionism threatens not only me, not only our party, and not only our alliance, but everyone.”
Then he hit back at Israel for formally recognizing the Armenian genocide by escalating his oft-repeated false accusations of Israeli genocide: Israel being “a country that has the blood of 73,000 innocent Gazans, most of them children and women, on its hands.”
He didn’t explicitly refer to Israeli leaders as “Hitlerites” or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the “Fuhrer of our day” this week, as he did in 2023 and 2024.
Nor did he libel Israel with torture of Palestinian children “like the concentration camps during World War II, with methods that would put Nazis to shame,” as he did at a summit in Istanbul of the Organization for Islamic Cooperation.
But speaking in his playacting parliament, the Turkish tyrant said Israel’s military actions in Syria and Lebanon have escalated to a level that could endanger Turkey, warning that Israeli “aggression” poses a threat to the entire world and must be stopped.
And apparently, according to President Trump, Erdogan’s military was prepped to join Iran’s war against Israel this year until Trump “asked Erdogan not to do so.” But that has not stopped him from threatening Israel repeatedly with war over gas fields in the Mediterranean.
Turkey as a terrorist hub
Last week, the IDF revealed yet another Hamas terrorist network directed from Turkish soil, which recruited operatives to carry out terror attacks and which transferred weapons and funds into Judea and Samaria.
Turkey has hosted a Hamas headquarters since 2012, and has given full backing to the Palestinian terror group since its 2023 assault into Israel and subsequent massacres and kidnappings.
Furthermore, Erdogan has led a Turkish invasion of Jerusalem. He is investing tens of millions of dollars per year in Islamic missionary (dawa) activities, renovation of Muslim institutions, holiday handouts, and social networking in eastern Jerusalem – glorifying terrorists and explicitly calling for violent resistance to Israel.
Turkish-backed clerics and other radical Islamist actors have led troublemaking on the Temple Mount and other subversive activities.
The Turkish consulate in Jerusalem and two Turkish quasi-governmental agencies are directly implicated in this activity; by their own admission, to the tune of over $40 million a year. As a result, Turkish flags today fly everywhere in eastern Jerusalem and prominently on the Temple Mount too.
The Turkish purpose is not at all innocuous. It is to weaken Israel’s hold in the holy city, and to bolster Erdogan’s claim to leadership of the Muslim world on a path to a global Islamic sultanate.
And at home, Erdogan has jailed more journalists, judges, generals, and academics than any other country in the world, including China. He is building 40,000 new jail cells to handle the overload and creating an authoritarian system to suit his imperial purposes.
Erdogan needs to be cut down to size, and his madly ambitious and ferocious foreign and defense policies need to be put in a box.
How can it be that American and European leaders don’t see this?
How can they knowingly ignore Erdogan’s smearing of the West and concrete undermining of Western interests, as well as his demonizing talk and dangerous moves against Israel?
How can they waltz into Ankara next week to hug, kiss, and reward Erdogan without demanding that he back off his belligerence?
The writer is managing senior fellow at the Jerusalem-based Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy. The views expressed here are his own. His diplomatic, defense, political, and Jewish world columns over the past 30 years are at davidmweinberg.com.