I don’t know how upset to be about this. Erdogan is more pro-Islamist than Obama.
The extremists have taken over Turkey. I would no longer consider THEM an ally, and that would be true if Sarah Palin was President!
It doesn't matter. The duty of the government is to maintain contacts - and ways of control - with all countries. Especially with bad ones. Now, with contacts and controls broken, the troubled country is going their own way - and the US's political foe hasn't missed an opportunity.
Obama picked the wrong side in the internecine struggle among the many factions of Islamic jihadist militants out there. The two main branches, the Sunni and the Shi’ite, are centered roughly in Saudi Arabia and Iran, respectively, and each thinks the other to be an apostasy.
It is a little hard to figure Turkey in this interchange, as they are absolutely anti-Israeli, but the only faction actually engaged in combat with Israel at the moment is Hamas, supposedly a protectorate of the Muslim Brotherhood, and therefore part of the Sunni faction, but their resupply and logistics are being carried out by contacts working with Iran, the Shi’ite supporter. Turkey has been the intermediary charged with transporting the arms to Hamas, which sort of explains their bristling hostility, both for their justification and their continued recalcitrance in the face of various pressures to “cease and desist”.
Maybe Erdogan is taking his cues from the rest of the world and just disrespecting Obama on general principles.
When a relatively insignificant player such as Turkey’s Prime Minister begins disrespecting the “leader” of the (formerly) Free World, it ought to give one pause, to consider how far and how fast the territory once known as “the United States of America” has fallen.