The West has a big Turkey problem

Blame the Mideast's tangled and contingent alliances

Turkish soldiers patrol the Turkey-Syria border.
(Image credit: Gokhan Sahin/Getty Images)

There's a newly active coalition partner taking the fight to ISIS: Turkey. That might seem like good news. But really, it ought to be a dark reminder of how messed up the Middle East really is.

In the waning decades of its centuries-long run, the Ottoman Empire was derisively known as the Sick Man of Europe. And its death at the hands of the Allied powers in World War I gave birth to a nightmare. The old imperium, held together by Islam, gave way to a new patchwork of nation-states — first Turkey, and then, after decolonization, the Arab countries — where monopolies on political violence, not on religious authority, often determined who ruled. Building nation-states out of Ottoman and European imperial rubble led directly to despots and dictators. Many of these strongmen, particularly in places like Iraq and Syria, leveraged loyalty through ethnicity and tribe that didn't fit neatly with the arbitrarily drawn borders of nation-states. And time and again, regime trouble has touched off a chaotic scramble among a shifting array of warring groups — from Lebanon in the '80s to Iraq in the '00s to Syria today.

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James Poulos

James Poulos is a contributing editor at National Affairs and the author of The Art of Being Free, out January 17 from St. Martin's Press. He has written on freedom and the politics of the future for publications ranging from The Federalist to Foreign Policy and from Good to Vice. He fronts the band Night Years in Los Angeles, where he lives with his son.