Who is Turkey's Erdoğan? How NATO's most unpredictable leader keeps reinventing himself

Erdoğan buys Russian air defense systems, jails journalists by the dozen, and picks fights with half of NATO, and somehow he's still standing in the room when the family photo gets taken. That's not ideology. That's an extremely gifted political operator who has figured out that in Turkey, and increasingly in the alliance that houses it, survival beats consistency every time.

Trump calling him "a friend" isn't naive. It's honest. Erdoğan is useful precisely because he's unpredictable, and Washington has learned that dealing with him as a transactional actor gets more done than lecturing him about democratic backsliding ever did. He controls the Bosphorus, he's got the second-largest army in NATO, and he'll sell F-16s one week and buy S-400s the next. You don't manage a guy like that with press releases about values.

The people who keep waiting for Erdoğan to reveal his "true" ideology are missing the point entirely. There isn't one, beyond staying in power. That should worry Ankara's own voters more than it worries us. For America, the job is simpler: know what he wants, know what he'll trade, and stop pretending Turkey is going to behave like a tidy liberal democracy just because it wears the NATO patch.