The recent expansion spat between Turkey and NATO has laid bare a long-time problem of the alliance – that it must contend with the authoritarian leader that is the Turkish president, who is willing to use his leverage to gain political points at home by blocking consensus, the New York Times said on Monday. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey has a history of troubling moves in the alliance, it said, including its 2009 blocking of a new NATO chief from Denmark and preventing the alliance from working with Israel for six years. While Turkey, a member of NATO since 1952, provides the alliance with a crucial strategic position at the intersection of Europe and Asia, it has increasingly become a problem to be navigated, NY Times said. Turkey earlier this month rejected a unanimous NATO decision to admit Sweden and Finland into alliance over their alleged support for separatist Kurdish groups. The move has placed Turkey in the international spotlight with a fresh aggressive foreign policy move, while throwing a diplomatic wrench into plans of the alliance to admit the Nordic countries into NATO amid the ongoing Ukraine-Russia war. “These countries have almost become guesthouses for terrorist organizations,” the NY Times cited Erdoğan as saying this month. “It is not possible for us to be in favour.” Erdogan’s objections to Sweden and Finland’s membership have even renewed questions about whether the alliance might be better off without Turkey, according to the NY Times. The publication cited a recent essay Joe Lieberman, a former independent U.S. senator from Connecticut, which opined that Erdogan’s Turkey would effectively fail the alliance’s standards for democratic governance in prospective new member states. Ankara’s policies, including its close ties with Vladimir Putin, have undermined NATO’s interests and that the alliance should examine ways of removing Turkey, Lieberman said in The Wall Street Journal. According to Emre Peker, a London-based director for Europe at the Eurasia Group, Turkey will be able to work out an agreement with Sweden and Finland with the mediation of the NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg. Peker maintains that Erdoğan’s main priorities are getting his country’s security concerns about Kurdish separatists heard and the lifting of the arms embargoes from the Nordic countries. The United States has remained relatively hands-off in the latest spat, sparking questions about Ankara -Washington relations. U.S. President Joe Biden will have to make a nod toward Erdogan in the upcoming NATO summit in Madrid, it said. At a talk hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations last week, Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., chair of the House Armed Services Committee, suggested that the stakes of Swedish and Finnish membership were great enough to warrant direct US involvement. “We need to sit down and we need to cut a deal,” NY Times cited the chair of the House Armed Services Committee, Adam Smith, D-Wash, as saying. “And we need to get aggressive about it, like now.”
Ahval