Today’s guest roster at the Turkish parliament offered an intriguing glimpse of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s “New Turkey.” While Western ambassadors in Ankara showed solidarity with the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) over the detentions of its leaders, in a nearby chamber the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) was hosting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s special adviser Alexander Dugin.

Posing for photographers with Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, the militantly anti-American Russian academic told reporters that Putin was “proposing a strategic alliance to Turkey and extending the hand of friendship.” Asked whether such an alliance would not conflict with Turkey’s NATO membership, the man also known as “Putin’s Rasputin” responded, “That is your decision. You will decide who stands by you, who is your friend, who is your foe.” Dugin added, “You know who stood behind the people who bombed the Turkish parliament. Definitely not Russia.”

Dugin has become the new darling of the AKP for echoing its claims that the Pennsylvania-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen and the United States were behind the botched coup attempt on July 15. He was invited to testify before a parliamentary committee that is investigating the incident.

But the seeds of the love affair with Dugin were planted before July. In a June interview with his own site Katehon, Dugin had already claimed that the Americans and the Gulenists were responsible for Turkey’s downing of a Russian fighter jet over the Syrian border, all part of a plot, he insisted, to send Turkish-Russian relations into a tailspin.