Don’t mess with the US Congress

On the eve of the latest legislation in the United States House of Representatives putting pressure on Turkey over its S-400 missile system purchase, Nicholas Danforth - a veteran Turkey analyst at the German Marshall Fund - posted a warning on Twitter that perfectly captured the dilemma in US-Turkey relations:

"An under-discussed part of the problem in US-Turkish relations is that from Washington's point of view, none of the policies that infuriate Ankara are actually about Turkey at all... For Washington support for the YPG [mainly-Kurdish militia in Syria] is about ISIS. Not extraditing [Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah] Gulen is a legal issue. The Halkbank investigation was about Iran and even [the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act], to a lesser extent, is about Russia.

"At best, this has led many observers in Turkey to conclude that US...