Turkey’s announcement that it wants to join the genocide prosecution of the Jewish state is a moment to weigh the merits of Ankara’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty. At what point does an alliance with Turkey lose its logic? Turkey increasingly distances itself from the values for which America stands. The alliance harks back to the Cold War, when Turkey was seen as a bulwark against Soviet aggression. Is it still a friend of the West? 

In a post-Cold War world facing new moral divides between freedom and tyranny — and peace against terrorism — Turkey is setting itself squarely against Western values. President Erdogan is accusing America’s ally, Israel, the only real democracy in the Middle East, of genocide. The Commerce Secretary, meanwhile, is warning that Turkey is exporting American technology to aid Russia’s war in Ukraine. These are hardly the actions of an ally.

JFK used Turkey to resolve the Cuban missile crisis. Its location made it seem indispensable to America’s interests. Turkey was even cited as a paragon of democracy. President Obama lauded it as proof that Islam and modernity can coexist. Under Mr. Erdogan, this Turkey no longer exists. The would-be pasha rebrands it Türkiye. Beware of leaders who change the names of their countries. Like Zaire, Kampuchea, and Myanmar, to name a few. 

Early in Mr. Erdogan’s rule, his slogan was “zero problems with the neighbors.” He soon confronted several Mideast and European countries, and Turks parodized the slogan into “constant troubles with every neighbor.” As our Benny Avni notes, after threatening NATO member Greece that “one night” Turkey might invade an Aegean island, Mr. Erdogan is ratcheting up attacks on Jerusalem and blocking NATO cooperation with Israel, an alliance partner. 

Now Ankara is joining the case at the UN’s International Court of Justice, where Israel is accused of genocide. The anti-Israel lawfare includes the International Criminal Court’s threats to arrest Israel’s prime minister and defense minister, alongside leaders of Hamas — “like indicting Churchill,” a top French lawyer, Noelle Lenoir, has said, “along with Goering, Keitel, and Ribbentrop.” Yet, Turkey likely would spurn an arrest warrant against Hamas’s Yehya Sinwar. 

Which brings us back to the question of Turkey’s role as an American ally. Turkey hosts, at Incirlik, America’s largest air base in a troublesome region. Yet, the Pentagon is reportedly developing plans to move that base to a neighboring country and out of the increasingly iffy ally. That would hurt Mr. Erdogan more than America. It’s all a far cry from the optimism that prevailed in the American press when Turkey joined NATO in 1952.         

Turkey, the Washington Post crooned in an editorial in 1951, is “a bastion of strength in the Middle East” and “her people are solidly oriented toward the West.” In 1952, a New York Herald Tribune editorial said that Turkey joining NATO signaled that the “Turkish peoples have cast their lot with Western civilization.” A New York Times editorial that year called Turkey’s accession to NATO a sign of “that country’s adhesion to the West and Western democracy.” 

The Wall Street Journal took a more skeptical view in an editorial in 1951 titled “Commitments Unlimited.” With the addition of Turkey, the Journal editorialized, the Atlantic Treaty “is being expanded far beyond the shores lapped by the Atlantic’s waves.” Such new commitments, it added, “imply more than going to the defense of a country which is attacked,” but “building up their military forces” and “subsidizing their economies.” 

Meanwhile, NATO “has already cost this country billions and its demands have but begun,” the Journal’s editorial observed. Americans, the Journal said, deserve “to know the cost” of these obligations “in manpower, money and freedom of action.” The Journal editors might well have added the moral costs of association with a nation like Turkey that has proven itself, contrary to the hopes of some 70 years ago, to be no friend of the West.