Review of old international posts

One thing reading back through my old posts makes clear is that U.S. foreign policy never recovered from its scrambled start during the Obama administration. Egypt did not turn out to be a success story. Ultimately, the U.S. had to support an overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood government that was elected after the revolt against the Mubarak government.

Ostensible NATO ally Turkey has become an outsider within NATO for its strong anti-Israeli positions, which have caused continuing rifts between it and the US. Despite Kemal Ataturk's attempts to make certain that Turkey would remain a secular country in the future (the real origin of the term "Deep State", a term which is often falsely applied to the American federal bureaucracy), current Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is trying to remake Turkey into a new Ottoman Empire, which includes some collusion with Russia against NATO -- a situation which Erdoğan has used to portray himself as a Muslim hero against the European infidels.
See, e.g., NATO went "crazy" over Russia deal, says Erdogan

I've made the non-novel argument before in other platforms that "all politics is local", but there are certain leaders (perhaps we should call them "little Napoleons"?) who try to design policies to appeal beyond their own country. Usually such leaders have dictatorial control within their country, so they don't really need to worry about domestic insurrections -- or even domestic opposition.

Two people in that situation are Erdoğan and Russian "president" Vladimir Putin, and they both see themselves as regional leaders at the very least. But the point of this post is to note that the opportunities for regional leadership that these tyrants want to exploit opened up because the U.S. abdicated such leadership roles under Obama. Most of Obama's supporters thought that was a correct decision. The rest of us should feel fortunate that Obama's clique no longer has operating control of the U.S., even if we aren't thrilled about who does.