The State Department has denied Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and his approximately 80-member delegation visas to attend the United Nations General Assembly later this month. Abbas, serving as president of the Palestinian National Authority for the 20th year after being elected for four, hoped to make a triumphant appearance in New York as the beneficiary of Hamas terrorism, with countries ranging from Australia to Canada to France recognizing Palestinian statehood.

The Trump administration is now considering calls to ban the Iranian delegation from shopping in big-box stores such as Costco and other visa restrictions on the leaders of civil war-torn Sudan and Zimbabwe. A leaked list of Somalia’s 32-person delegation, which includes the wives and children of even minor politicians and politicians who have no pending business at the U.N., deserves limits. The annual assembly in New York is not an entitlement for dictators and terrorism sponsors to have a junket — only those with real business, perhaps foreign heads of state and their closest nonfamily aides, should receive U.S. visas.

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Whether Secretary of State Marco Rubio will correct another injustice, however, remains to be seen. For the last two years at least, his predecessor, Antony Blinken, allowed Ersin Tatar, president of the unrecognized state Turkish military forces established in northern Cyprus, to travel to New York to hold sidebar meetings with U.N. officials and other world leaders.

Like Abbas and Iranian President Masoud Peseshkian, Tatar and his delegation pose a risk to U.S. security. Under Tatar, northern Cypriot casinos have become a money laundering hub for both Russian billionaires and Iranian and Turkish terrorism interests. More than half the school children in the region’s secondary schools speak only Arabic or Persian, northern Cypriot teachers report. Hezbollah uses Tatar’s zone as a safe haven to plot terrorism. Blinken, like Rubio, knows this — diplomats discuss it openly, as do many journalists.

Adding insult to injury, Blinken issued Tatar a visa on a Turkish passport rather than on a Cypriot passport. Had the State Department demanded Tatar use the passport of Cyprus, they would have forced him to decide: Either stay home as befitting the illegitimate leader of an illegitimate state, or acknowledge Cypriot sovereignty over the entirety of the island and its people, regardless of northern politicians’ pretensions. Blinken’s weakness, however, was no surprise. After all, he could not even bring himself to describe Cyprus as occupied, never mind that Turkish forces seized one-third of the island a half-century ago and never left.

Rubio should correct the error. Cyprus has been a steadfast ally and an exceptional partner for the past decade and across administrations. It is an amplifier for U.S. national security interests in the eastern Mediterranean. When both Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump initiated the metaphorical 3 a.m. phone call, Cypriot leaders were the first to respond. Accordingly, when Tatar comes begging the U.S. Embassy in Turkey for a visa, he should be told instead to report to the U.S. Embassy in Nicosia with his Cypriot passport in hand — if he does not have one, he can apply at the Cypriot foreign ministry, which regularly issues Cypriot passports, even for those under Turkish occupation in the north.

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It took 25 years across both Republican and Democratic administrations to reset and build U.S.-India relations as a partnership of democracies upon which 21st-century security could rest — it took Trump less than 250 days to destroy their work and send U.S.-India relations into the biggest crisis in more than 60 years.

Rubio should ensure that the United States does not make the same mistake twice by gratuitously insulting a country with whom both Republicans and Democrats have labored to build solid, symbiotic relations. It is time to shut the door on northern Cyprus in New York and at the U.N.

Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is the director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.