Turkey is a country of nearly 85 million people with the second largest military force in NATO after America’s own. Little wonder then that deepening ties with a strategic country that straddles two continents should be so enticing for a wily and ruthless leader like Vladimir Putin. 

On Tuesday a Turkish official confirmed that Turkey seeks to join BRICS, the geopolitical bloc that includes Russia, as well as Brazil, India, Communist China, Iran, and other countries considered by some to be developing economies.

For Mr. Putin, this is clearly Turkey time. The energy deals the Russian president seeks to ink with Mongolia and China to a certain extent he already has with Turkey, to the tune of several billion dollars. 

Turkey actually applied to join BRICS months ago. A spokesman for President Erdogan’s ruling party, Omer Celik, said Mr. Erdogan has stated “several times” that Turkey aspires to become a member.

“Our request on this issue is clear. This process is ongoing. But there is no concrete development regarding this,” Mr. Celik told reporters. “Our president has clearly stated that Turkey wants to take part in all important platforms, including BRICS.”

Earlier this year the Turkish foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, said Turkey was “exploring new opportunities for cooperation with several partners in different platforms, such as BRICS.”

The first BRICS summit took place at Yekaterinburg in 2009, and the onboarding of new members will likely be high on the agenda at another summit in Russia in October. Whether Turkey will formally join the bloc then is not yet clear, but on Monday the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, reaffirmed Ankara’s interest in joining BRICS. 

There is little doubt that while Turkey remains a committed partner of NATO, which it joined in 1952, its pivot to the east is now in full swing. President Erdogan said as much last week then he stated that Turkey should “simultaneously” develop relations with both the East and the West.

In the long run, this drift toward Moscow and the Global South is more troubling than assaulting Marines or protesting American warships, but those incidents are part and parcel of it. 

On the one hand, Mr. Erdogan feels perennially snubbed by Europe. Turkey first sought to join the EU in 2005. Prospects looked bleak from the start, in part because that was only a year after the divided island of Cyprus joined the bloc as a full member. 

Economic interests are one thing, but it is that tangled Cypriot knot that is pushing Turkey inexorably away from the West. On Wednesday, the Greek daily Kathimerini averred that “Turkey is indeed an important force to be reckoned with; however, it constantly shows, with its words and actions, that it diverges from the Western ‘camp’ in crucial matters.”

If the open embrace of the pro-Russian BRICS is part of that divergence, it would be inaccurate to lay the blame completely at Mr. Erdogan’s doorstep. 

It is true that Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974 and still illegally occupies approximately a third of the strategic island — but it did so as one of the then-young country’s guarantor powers (the other two being with Great Britain and Greece), in response to a half-baked attempt by the junta that ruled Athens at the time to unify Cyprus with Greece. 

In theory, the Cyprus problem should be relatively easy to fix. The place is not that large. A United Nations peacekeeping force, UNFICYP, has for decades monitored a long buffer zone between the Greek Cypriot south and Turkish-occupied north, but whether that keeps the two sides from clobbering each other or simply cements the island’s de facto division is debatable. 

What is not in question is that all United Nations attempts to negotiate a settlement on Cyprus have ended in abject failure. The efforts seldom come off as anything other than pro forma, and the excuses are usually polite.

 If the UN has not helped to solve the problem, it is, if only quietly for now,  making it worse.  The failures feed Turkish intransigence on the issue, effectively short-circuiting any progress Ankara could realistically hope to make on ever joining the EU. 

The fruitless rounds of intermittent talks in New York and elsewhere ricochet to the Brussels, where Turkey is certainly no pariah but also is never  made to feel particularly welcome. In that space a certain vacuum has been created, and Mr. Erogan knows how to fill it. What should alarm Washington more is that Presidents Xi and Putin do too.