1. Hot Take: US-Turkey ties begin era of new normal, unburdened by nostalgia

"No unsolvable issues." Following his meeting with US President Joe Biden on the sidelines of the NATO summit this week in Brussels, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, "There are no unsolvable issues in the Turkey-US relations, with the areas of cooperation, quite the contrary, outnumbering the contentious topics."

Erdogan’s new tone belies the two stickiest issues — US sanctions on Turkey for its purchase of the S-400 Russian missile defense system and a seeming unbridgeable disagreement about the Syrian Kurds — which appear no closer to being solved, as Amberin Zaman reports.

Moving the missiles. US sanctions on its NATO ally for Ankara’s purchase of the Russian S-400 missile defense system are the "deepest sore" in US-Turkey ties, Zaman writes. There had been some buzz that a face-saving way out might be to move the missiles to the US air base in Incirlik, Turkey, as Diego Cupolo reports. That, so far, remains talk, but there’s no doubt both sides are desperate to move beyond this crisis.

"Warped mentality." In his post-summit remarks, Erdogan complained about the "warped mentality" among states that he said label terrorists as good or bad. Here he means the Syrian Kurdish groups — the People's Protection Units (YPG) and Democratic Union Party (PYD) — which comprise the core of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). To Erdogan, the YPG/PYD are on the same level as the Islamic State and linked directly to the Turkish Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which Turkey and the United States have designated a terrorist group. The United States considers the SDF a valued partner, not a “good” terrorist group, and has no plans to bail on it in the fight against the Islamic State. This one for now is in the "no solve" category.