Turkey is arresting a significant amount of the secular military and civilians. This has damaged the ability of the military to restrain the Islamic trend in Turkey. Turkey’s judges are sliding to Islamic law that was outlawed by Attaturk.

However Erdogan is very smart and plays all the players well. Also the amount of corruption was getting to be a problem and he is cleaning that up so his party is very popular.

Turkey sits astride the Islamic world and the Christian world. Around Istanbul they are very secular, further west they are not. Turkey has been a flash point for decades and was the cork in the bottle for the Black Sea. They have every reason not to want American Navy to upset the situation and raises risks, they are directly affected.

Turkey has been cool to US the last two Turkish elections. They are not our enemy but may have an understandable desire to see the US taken down a peg. Most of the world is extremely envious and resent the US because we are the world colossus and not just militarily. Our economic strength is enormous. When we sneeze the world economies get the flu. Our recent economic slowdown and sub prime mess did not really put us in a recession our growth just slowed a lot to about 1.5%. Other economies are called raging when they get to 1.5%.