All politics is local, the saying goes. But quite often the instruments are found abroad. The Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has shown how well he understands this. Last week he used Israel’s cretinous overreaction to the humanitarian flotilla to Gaza to curry favour in the Arab world and burnish his bona fides at home.
However, Mr Erdogan’s ability to play on Arab outrage represents a larger phenomenon, what we might call the “peripheralisation” of the Middle East.
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