Since Donald Trump’s arrival on the international stage, Nato summits have descended into pantomime.
Serious actors say and do absurd things to fit the genre. Everyone suspends disbelief during the performance. Then we emerge blinking from the air-conditioned theatre into the hot and busy real world and try to get on with our jobs.
The Ankara pantomime, which I attended last week, as usual featured the cartoonish American president as the villain. But it included some other elements too.
We all pretended politely that the host country is called Türkiye, though the locals still happily refer to all other countries by their sometimes mystifying Turkish endonyms (İsveç is Sweden; who knew?).
We also pretended that we were visiting a normal democracy rather than an elective autocracy. The authorities rolled up even the mildest critics into preventive detention, just as they rolled out the red carpet for visiting dignitaries. Selective mutism was in the Ankara air: nobody talked about this.
