The Real Reason Turkey Is Mad at Joe Biden
The Democratic candidate’s longstanding sympathy for the Kurds is likely what’s causing Ankara anxiety.
He makes Erdogan nervous.
Photographer: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post
It’s easy to dismiss the recent Turkish uproar over a Joe Biden video as political theater. The video, from a conversation between the Democratic presidential candidate and the New York Times editorial board, is eight months old. In it, Biden describes Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan as an “autocrat” and suggests the U.S. should “embolden” his opponents to defeat him in elections.
Yet it was only over the weekend that the old video somehow floated to the top of Turkish headlines, prompting Ibrahim Kalin, the president’s communications director, to denounce Biden’s comments on Twitter as “based on pure ignorance, arrogance and hypocrisy.”