The ’Splainer (as in, “You’ve got some ’splaining to do”) is an occasional feature in which RNS gives you everything you need to know about current events to help you hold your own at a cocktail party. (RNS) Turkey’s crackdown of those suspected in the failed July 15 military coup widens, with the firing of 492 people at its top Islamic authority. And Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is zeroing in on a Muslim cleric living in rural Pennsylvania, whom he accuses of masterminding the coup. Reclusive Turkish imam Fethullah Gulen, who lives in a gated compound in the Poconos, denies involvement and disavows violence. Erdogan is pressuring the U.S. to extradite Gulen, but Secretary of State John Kerry, rejecting insinuations that the U.S. was involved in the coup, said it awaits a formal extradition request and proof of Gulen’s involvement.

Had Turkey’s military succeeded in toppling President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last Friday, by seizing and consolidating power, and the public acquiesced, how would the U.S. have reacted? Counterfactuals are, of course, impossible to game out. But that thought experiment shows the difficulty the U.S. might have faced trying to reconcile its interest in a stable Turkey with its commitment to a democratic one. The problem of reconciling U.S. values and interests isn’t limited to Turkey, though those issues might be at the fore this week; this pertains to several partners in the Middle East.

Turkish authorities have announced a shake-up of the security forces a week after a section of the army attempted to overthrow the government in a failed coup. In the most significant institutional changes since the coup attempt, Interior Minister Efkan Ala said on Friday that the gendarmerie would in future fall under the interior ministry and not the army. The gendarmerie, which is responsible for public order in rural areas that fall outside the jurisdiction of police forces, as well as assuring internal security and general border control, had always been part of the military and its removal is a blow to the armed forces' clout.

Turkey's bloody coup attempt plotted by the Fetullah Terrorist Organization is not seen as a threat to democracy, according to an article written by American writer Steven Cook. The article published on Thursday in U.S.-based magazine The Atlantic, which is headlined "How Erdogan Made Turkey Authoritarian Again", overlooks the people's struggle to protect the country's democracy, rushing to the streets to stop the illegal coup attempt, but rather says it "would not have brought an end to Turkey’s democracy". The article claimed that only Turkey's ruling party's progress would have been lost, ignoring the fact that coup plotters bombed the Turkish parliament, a clear intention to harm the democratic functioning of the country.