The row is symptomatic of Turkish anxiety that the country's rising "soft power", based on a booming economy and relative democratic stability ushered in by Erdogan after a long era of military coups, could be threatened by a nascent "Shi'ite axis" embodied by Iran and Maliki's Tehran-backed Baghdad government.

The most-populous nation has been throwing tens of billions of dollars at its prestige deficit for a decade, all part of an effort to enhance China’s soft power, something of which the U.S., for all its crises, has a surplus.