In less than one year, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro have become two chummy leaders who embrace and watch out for each other in tough times. In reality their political mindsets, worldviews and lifestyles are totally contradictory. Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, who lifted Maduro from the bottom to the zenith, had become friends with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad while challenging US hegemony.

What makes Erdogan and Maduro close buddies is their joint perception of being targeted by the US government. When Maduro was coming to Ankara to congratulate Erdogan for winning the June 24 elections, he saluted Erdogan as “the global leader of the new multipolar world.”

Maduro has other reasons to feel close to Erdogan, primarily their joint economic hardships.

Venezuela, the fifth-biggest oil producer of the world and once the engine of leftist Latin America, became a bankrupt country where many of its people go hungry. The IMF says Venezuela’s inflation is 1.37 million percent. His opponents attribute to this disastrous situation to a populist administration that doesn’t produce solutions. According to Maduro, however, the real culprit is the US-origin embargo, blackmail, coup conspiracies, black marketers and speculators who have joined the economic war.