President Trump and the rest of NATO’s leaders, received a lavish red-carpet welcome in Ankara from President Erdoğan ahead of the NATO summit, complete with a full guard of honour. While protocol dictates courtesy, Turkey’s spectacle bordered on farcical adulation, treating a transactional U.S. leader like a conquering imperial hero.

This theatrical excess is painfully tone-deaf for a nation whose modern identity is built on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire—a history indelibly stained by the Greek and the Armenian Genocide and other brutal suppressions of minority populations. To drape oneself in such grandiose, imperial-style ceremony is not just a severe lack of taste; it is a historical insult to the victims of that very legacy. Erdoğan’s desperate pageantry, full of velvet and sabres, seems a pathetic attempt to project faded glory while ignoring the deep moral stains of the past.

Such ceremonies don’t elevate Turkey; they underscore a profound historical amnesia and a cringeworthy need for validation from a foreign leader, making the entire display a ridiculously out-of-place pantomime of imperial grandeur.