In July, a deal to release an American minister jailed in Turkey came apart because, a White House official told the Washington Post, Turkey was changing the agreement and “upping the ante.” A few weeks later, President Trump tweeted that he had doubled tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Turkey, punctuating his thought with: “Our relations with Turkey are not good at this time!”

American officials have often insisted on seeing Turkey, a NATO ally since 1952, as a close partner, which is why the recent dramatic fallout seems so shocking. Don’t these two countries share interests and values?

Not really. When you strip away all the happy talk, it’s clear the two nations aren’t really, and have never been, that close. This is a relationship doomed to antipathy.

Alliances are never perfect, of course, and there have been moments over the past seven decades that justify Turkey’s image as a close partner of the United States: President Turgut Ozal’s decision to shut down oil pipelines carrying Iraqi oil through Turkey during the run-up to the Gulf War, at great cost to the Turkish economy, for instance.

A decade later, the Turkish government was among the first to condemn the 9/11 terrorist attacks and quickly committed to the deployment of troops to Afghanistan. Turkey became an important and valued component of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in that country.

By that time, American officials had become accustomed to seeing Turkey as a partner, like their closest allies in Europe and East Asia. The country’s failure to live up to this role reveals more about our own desperation for Turkey to be something it isn’t, and about Cold War strategies, than about Turkish shortcomings.

In the decades since the Cold War ended, problems between the US and Turkey have piled up, but Washington and Ankara no longer share a threat that mitigates these differences. After the Persian Gulf War, which Turkey supported, it grew exasperated at sanctions on Iraq that, it believed, hindered its own economy. So it began turning a blind eye to Iraqi oil exports crossing its border.

When Turkey pledged to aid the mission in Afghanistan, its troops didn’t engage in combat. Turks opposed the later Iraq War on principle, which was their right, but also repeatedly threatened to undermine the stability of northern Iraq, the one region of the country that welcomed the American occupation, because it housed a Kurdish separatist movement that advocated for Turkey’s oppressed Kurds.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, Turkey became a champion of Hamas, supporting the organization diplomatically in its periodic conflicts with Israel, and has welcomed its operatives in Istanbul. In Syria, Ankara enabled extremists who used Turkish territory as a rear area in the fight against the Assad regime. And the Turkish government has stirred up trouble at Jerusalem’s holy sites.

When it comes to Iran, the Turkish government (along with Brazil) negotiated a separate nuclear agreement with Tehran that ran at cross purposes to Washington’s; purposefully blew the cover on an Israeli intelligence operation in Istanbul gathering information on Iran’s nuclear program and opposed the Obama administration’s effort to impose new UN sanctions on Tehran, then helped the Iranians evade those sanctions.

Turkey’s incursions into northern Syria have complicated the fight against the Islamic State, for a time drawing Washington’s Syrian Kurdish allies away from the front line to face the Turks and their allies.

In 2016, Turkish President Recept Tayyip Erdogan threatened to allow tens of thousands of refugees to enter Europe, apparently because of suspended talks on Turkey’s European Union membership.

To be fair, from the Turkish perspective, the United States is not much of an ally either. A staggering number of Turks believe that Washington was complicit in the attempted coup d’etat in July 2016.

Meanwhile, Washington’s Syrian Kurdish allies are directly linked to a Turkish Kurdish terrorist organization, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, that has been in a violent campaign against Turkey since the mid-1980s.

With the current tensions, expect the debate over who “lost Turkey,” and calls to protect the alliance, to grow louder. But it is hard to lose an ally when it was not much of one to begin with.

Steven Cook is the Eni Enrico Mattei Fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Special to the Washington Post.