Rift Between Turkey and Israel Genuine, Serious

To be clear, there's no question that there's been a serious deterioration in defense ties between Turkey and Israel over the last several months. Last week's Defense News article details the drift, and includes explicit argument by Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan to the fact that popular pressure is limiting the extent to which Turkey can cooperate with Israel. The issue, rather, is whether the rupture represents a dispositional shift in Turkish foreign policy (Turkey abandoning the West for the camp of radical Islam), or whether it's simply the result of Turkish dissatisfaction with Israeli military and security policy. I lean rather heavily towards the latter interpretation; whatever the sins of the AKP, Turkey internally operates much more like a Western liberal democracy than any state associated with "radical Islam," and indeed Turkey's internal politics are more in line with liberal democracy (including especially reform of the role delegated to the military in a liberal democratic state) than they ever have before. The error made by Glick and others, in my view, is in the effort to derive domestic regime type from foreign policy; it is possible for Turkey (or France, or Germany) to be simultaneously democratic and queasy about the Gaza operation. Indeed, in Turkey's case I think that achieving any other outcome would be difficult.

Now, in the short run this means that military dominated regimes may be easier for the United States (and certainly Israel) to deal with. In the long run, however, I don't see that this policy has much of a future. You don't need to be a neoconservative to be deeply skeptical about a policy of maintaining authoritarian allies of convenience; such a policy is far more likely, in my view, to lead to events like the Iranian Revolution than is tolerance of parties like the AKP.