For the last couple of years, there have been growing rumbles of concern about Turkey's internal and external tilt toward Islamist rule, abroad and at home. The changes have not been individually revolutionary, but they have been slow and steady. Taken as a whole, they've been dramatic enough for Michael Rubin to title a major Commentary Magazine essay chronicling this slide "Turkey, from Ally to Enemy." This year the Heritage Foundation published a detailed, multi-leveled analysis called "Countering Turkey's Strategic Drift."
But of course, these kinds of guys are right wing crazies. Or just casual travelers. Don't listen to their arguments. Pay attention to the State Department boffins and "adults in the room" who keep saying everything is fine, and dismissing concerns as alarmism.
Except for the inconvenient truth revealed by Wikileaks documents, which shows us a series of unofficial statements from official sources the that are a lot closer to the analyses put out by guys like Rubin and the Heritage Foundation.
The moral of the story is left as an exercise for the reader.
It's a strange sort of democracy that depends on a single individual leader. It seems to be the only kind of democracy that some "Democrats" still believe in.
And why is it our goal - dreamily described as "vision" - to pack another country into that broken-down chicken coop they call the European Union?
Although their government has been trying to claw their way in for years, a 2010 poll showed that only 38% of Turks want to be in the EU. 60% of people in EU countries want Turkey kept out. Apparently "democracy" requires that all of these little people do what they're told to do.
It's funny that our deepest, darkest diplomatic secrets are less embarrassing than our public policy.