The country is facing economic depression, terrorist attacks, a failure of its Syrian policy and a rebuff from Washington after demanding that the US back its campaign against the Syrian Kurdish YPG, one of the most effective fighting forces against Daesh, wrote author Liz Sly.
In addition, Erdogan has sought unsuccessfully to revive pressure on the United States to agree to long-standing Turkish proposals for the creation of a safe zone in northern Syria.
"Erdogan has mismanaged foreign policy because of hubris," Henri Barkey, a Turkey expert at the Wilson Center in Washington, told WP.
"He was overconfident in 2010 that Turkey was the darling of the world, and that went to his head. There are setbacks that are not of his doing, but how he managed those setbacks are his doing."
Threats by the Turkish president to send troops in Syria "would risk a confrontation with Russia that Turkey would almost certainly lose," wrote the author.
However, Erdogan has put himself in a difficult position, Gokhan Bacik, professor of international relations at Ankara’s Ipek University, said.
"I’m not saying that Turkey has lost its mind and is poised for war, but the posture in Ankara is very strange and could lead to surprises," he said, and warned that "Turkey is facing a multifaceted catastrophe."
"This is a country that has often had problems in the past, but the scale of what is happening now is beyond Turkey’s capacity for digestion."
