With the avalanche of news from both America and the Middle East, there are some stories that are easy to miss. One of these is a speech given by the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday, in which he declared that his country must protect Palestinians from Israel, and then added, “Just as we entered Karabakh [in Azerbaijan], just as we entered Libya, we might do the same” to Israel. It’s hard to read this as anything but a threat by a NATO member to send troops to fight against the Jewish state.

I can’t offer a good explanation of Erdogan’s rationale, but perhaps there is some connection to other developments in Ankara’s foreign policy, which Sinan Ciddi explains here:

Recep Tayyip Erdogan spent the better part of the last decade attempting to overthrow Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. This came after Erdogan cultivated a personal relationship with Assad between 2007 and 2010, an integral part of Ankara’s aspirational policy of “zero problems” with its neighbors. At one point in 2007–08, Erdogan even worked to mediate peace talks between Syria and Israel.

All this ended abruptly when Syria’s civil war began in 2011 and Assad refused to heed Erdogan’s calls to relinquish power. Thirteen years later, Erdogan now, suddenly, wants to make friends again.

Ciddi believes Erdogan’s latest change of course is the result of pressure from the Kremlin. In other words, Turkey could be moving closer to the Russia-Iran-Syria-Hizballah axis, which of course supports Hamas. Examining the possible outcomes of Turkish-Syrian reconciliation, Ciddi observes that the “greatest winners are likely to be Moscow and Tehran.”

With the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program damaged, and its regional influence diminished, the U.S. must now prevent it from recovering, and, if possible, weaken it further. Benjamin Baird argues that it can do both through economic means—if Congress does its part:

Legislation that codifies President Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” policies into law, places sanctions on Iran’s energy sales, and designates the regime’s proxy armies as foreign terrorist organizations will go a long way toward containing Iran’s regime and encouraging its downfall. . . . Congress has already introduced much of the legislation needed to bring the ayatollah to his knees, and committee chairmen need only hold markup hearings to advance these bills and send them to the House and Senate floors.

They should start with the HR 2614—the Maximum Support Act. What the Iranian people truly need to overcome the regime is protection from the state security apparatus.

Next, Congress must get to work dismantling Iran’s proxy army in Iraq. By sanctioning and designating a list of 29 Iran-backed Iraqi militias through the Florida representative Greg Steube’s Iranian Terror Prevention Act, the U.S. can shut down . . . groups like the Badr Organization and Kataib Hizballah, which are part of the Iranian-sponsored armed groups responsible for killing hundreds of American service members.

Those same militias are almost certainly responsible for a series of drone attacks on oilfields in Iraq over the past few days