Nato objection is classic Erdogan
IT’S been dubbed a case of “cold Turkey”. Cold, that is, in terms of president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s response to the proposal that Sweden and Finland join Nato.
At the core of Erdogan’s objection, of course, lies Ankara’s anger with Sweden over the latter’s diplomatic dealings with Kurdish groups operating in Turkey and Syria, and granting of asylum to members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which Turkey, along with some other countries, views as a terrorist organisation.
As a Nato member, Turkey has the power to veto any new countries seeking to join. Nato enlargement requires unanimous agreement from all current members.
But what we are witnessing here is classic Erdogan. Never one to miss a political opportunity, he sees the crisis over Ukraine as the perfect moment to use his leverage to extract further concession from the West.
Or, as the Turkish leader himself expressed it last week, “The expansion of Nato is meaningful for us, in proportion to the respect that is shown to our sensitivities.”
Erdogan is a past master at driving hard diplomatic bargains, a political instinct that has kept him in power for decades. But as some analysts like Asli Aydıntasbas, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations points out, it’s unlikely that the Turkish leader had one specific policy goal in mind.
“He will no doubt be expecting to be cajoled, persuaded and eventually rewarded for his co-operation, as in the past,” Aydıntasbas told The Spectator magazine last week, echoing the views of other experts that Erdogan is simply trying to extract all he can from the crisis.
For its part, Sweden has pushed back against Erdogan’s claims that it is soft on terrorism. In an unusually blunt tweet on Friday, Swedish foreign minister Ann Linde rejected the notion.
“Due to the vastly spread disinformation about Sweden and PKK, we would like to recall that the Sweden government of Olof Palme was first after Turkey to list PKK as a terrorist organisation, already in 1984,” Linde wrote, noting that the EU “followed suit” in 2002.
The whole wrangle has ended up a bit of a diplomatic mess, but few doubt that Erdogan will ultimately agree to Nato membership for Finland and Sweden. It’s just that he will, as always, extract his pound of political flesh first.