Is Erdogan the sick man of Europe?

For decades, beginning in the 19th century, Europeans referred to the Ottoman Empire as "the sick man of Europe." First sultans and then so-called reformers acting in their names sought autocratic power. The Porte covered for a crumbling economy with grandiose projects and compensated for lack of popularity with disastrous foreign adventures. In its final decades, Turkish authorities played ethnic and sectarian communities off each other in order to consolidate power and ethnically cleanse Anatolia. Ultimately, the question diplomats asked during and after World War I was not if the Ottoman Empire would fall but when. 

Turks like to embrace the glories of the Ottoman Empire at its peak, but shirk responsibility for its twilight years by arguing that Turkey was merely a successor state that emerged from a fractured empire, no different from Greece, Hungary or Syria. It is a...