Authoritarian Turkey should be kicked out of NATO

While nobody serious is advocating the dissolution of NATO, plenty of legitimate concern continues to mount around the future of the transatlantic alliance.

Critics in line with president Trump want Europe’s member states to pony up considerably more spending, and want to reorient the organization around effective counterterrorism, not the vanished threat of Soviet tank divisions. Other critics, however, complain that Trump’s approach is badly weakening NATO, sowing divisions that Russia and others are only too happy to exacerbate and exploit.

These are important facets of the deepening crisis around the alliance. But the reality is that the most serious problem faced by NATO is hardly in Europe at all. The autocratic regime that poses the worst challenge to NATO’s health and efficacy belongs to a member state itself — Turkey.

Under the iron rule of Recep Erdogan, Turkey has slipped into dictatorship and rank anti-Americanism. Erdogan now describes his country’s crumbling finances as the consequence of an “economic coup” engineered by the U.S. — and warns that he is beginning to look elsewhere for allies.

Even though many liberal observers fret over the rise of more populist and Russiafriendly regimes in central Europe, a staunch nationalism is powering those movements. For them, NATO remains an indispensable guarantee of their sovereignty and independence. Turkey’s continued presence in NATO, unfortunately, undermines its core security guarantee.

Fortunately, both the Trump administration and our European allies — who once seriously contemplated bringing Turkey into the EU

— rightly view Turkey as an increasing threat to Western values and interests. “Should the West,” Bernard HenriLevy asked in a column advocating Turkey’s removal from the alliance, “continue to share military secrets on which our collective security depends with a capital that is forming strategic partnerships with the powers most hostile to us?”

To ask that question is to answer it, in the negative. But unfortunately the West is badly unprepared to cut Turkey loose from NATO — and even less prepared to deal with the swift and inevitable geopolitical fallout.

That is why the U.S. should, quietly, plan out both Turkey’s exclusion from NATO and the destabilizing consequences to follow. Enacting the plan is so fateful a move that it must be done with as much care and forethought as possible. It should also, if and when it happens, be a turnkey operation. The hard truth is that Turkey should be kicked out of NATO — but not yet.

— Los Angeles Daily News, Digital First Media