At various times in the history of its membership, dating back to 1952, Turkey, though effectively rescued from threats from Stalin by the Truman administration in 1947 and 1948, was a double agent between the Soviet Union and the United States, taking substantial aid from both. For decades, on the strength of that NATO membership, Turkey knocked noisily on the door of Europe but was generally rebuffed as a nation of Muslims unassimilable to the pretensions of the surging Euro-federal ideal.

This remained true in the brief shining but somewhat infamous moment when most of the West European leaders thought that, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States could be eased out of Europe, and the Germans, French, British, Italians, Spanish, and others could stand on one another’s shoulders and Europe would become the centre of the world again, after the aberrant century that started with World War I in 1914.

In these circumstances, NATO eroded, first into the enfeebled “coalition of the willing,” which isn’t an alliance at all, just an assertion that if one country in the group wishes to do something, another, if it is in its interest too, might join in. And in these temporarily relaxed times, when European officialdom was aflame with the anticipatory joy of being the world’s greatest power again, it was an affordable luxury to brush off the heirs to the “Abominable Porte,” the “sick man of Europe”; and to do otherwise, as Gladstone said of Disraeli, would be “backing the wrong horse.”

Turkey was one of the world’s greatest powers from the rise of the nation-state in the 16th century, when Europe’s greatest leaders were the Holy Roman (including the Spanish) Empire’s Charles V, Britain’s Henry VIII, France’s Francis I, and Turkey’s Suleiman the Magnificent. The Habsburgs and Romanovs beat the Turks back in the Balkans, Ukraine, and Caucasus through the 18th century, though the Turks besieged Vienna in 1529 and 1683 and almost gained control of the Mediterranean at Lepanto in 1571.

The Ottoman Empire still put up a tremendous fight in World War I, which it made a serious mistake entering, but it sent the British Empire and the French packing in Gallipoli in 1915, inflicting 250,000 casualties and almost ending the career of Winston Churchill. The subsequent regime of Kemal Ataturk and his heirs westernized the alphabet, attire, and customs of the Turks and secularized their government. The army became the custodian of secular democracy, which necessitated overthrowing the democratically elected government from time to time, when it was deemed either insufficiently democratic, too corrupt, or a threat to the continuity of the army’s role as supreme arbiter of the state.

Under Ataturk’s successors, Turkey behaved quite responsibly in the world but did not match its enthusiasm to join the West with very visible economic or social progress. The war with the Kurdish nationalists in Anatolia was prosecuted rather brutally, and Turkey has never come close to West European standards of individual liberties or what became known as transparent government.