During his tenure as Turkey’s president, and before that as prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been a source of frustration for the U.S.—supporting Hamas, intervening in Libya, and dismantling democracy at home. But, Michael Doran argues, two consecutive American presidents have failed to counter Erdogan effectively due to “a pervasive misdiagnosis of the problem.”

Regardless of what one thinks of Erdogan, his policies that have most enraged Washington—such as launching a military offensive last fall to drive American forces away from the Turkish border or buying the S-400 anti-aircraft system from Russia—have enjoyed very broad domestic support, precisely because the Turkish public reviles the policies of the United States. In short, America does not have an Erdogan problem; it has a Turkey problem. And that is a problem largely of its own making.

The source of America’s Turkey problem is U.S. support of the Syrian wing of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), a terrorist separatist group formerly supported by the Soviet Union:

The disintegration of the Syrian state offered the PKK a new opportunity. Throughout 2013 and 2014, the PKK’s Syrian arm, “the Peoples Protection Units,” or YPG, established control of the Kurdish cantons all along the Turkish border. . . . The PKK openly presents Rojava, [as it calls this slice of Syria], as the southern part of a much larger polity that will encompass all of eastern Turkey. As Kurdish autonomous regions sprang up in Syria, a number of Kurdish towns in Turkey also proclaimed their autonomy.

Historically, the United States has respected the Turkish assessment of the threat. But as then-President Obama negotiated his way through the labyrinth of the Syrian civil war, he broke with precedent and allied the United States with the PKK by selecting the YPG as its main partner for combating Islamic State.

[A]rriving at [a strategic] accommodation with Turkey should be seen . . . as a top priority of American foreign policy—the key to managing the central contradiction in American policy vis-à-vis the Middle East. On the one hand, talk of withdrawing from the Middle East is rife on both sides of the political aisle, and the American public has no tolerance for significant military commitments. On the other hand, if the United States leaves the region, Russia, China, and Iran will fill the ensuing vacuum. America is thus betwixt and between.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.