With a Wink at Putin, Turkey Drops Opposition to Expanded NATO

A small but important detail should be noted regarding Turkey dropping its opposition to Sweden and Finland joining NATO: The Turkish president’s signature is not on the document certifying the agreement. While it was President Erdogan who headed the Turkish delegation that conferred with the Swedish and Finnish leadership, the tripartite memorandum hammered out during the NATO summit at Madrid yesterday bears the signature of his foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu. With the Kremlin opposing any NATO expansion, this move allows Mr. Erdogan to deflect direct responsibility for poking the Russian bear at a time when its claws are out. Turkey has steadfastly refused to sanction Russia since its invasion of Ukraine, despite virtually every other member of NATO having done so. Now, should the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, ask Mr. Erdogan why he signed on to the enlargement of the military bloc that casts Russia as an imminent threat, the Turkish leader can say it was someone else’s pen that did the signing. Ahead of the Madrid summit, reports said Mr. Erdogan was conspicuously absent from a lavish dinner hosted by Spain’s King Felipe VI to welcome more than 40 heads of state, including President Biden. Turkey’s ultimate acquiescence to the Nordic nations joining the alliance was never really in question, and without too much wrangling Ankara secured Finland and Sweden’s pledge not to support Kurdish groups it brands as terrorist. The Greek newspaper Protothema reported the approval “was accompanied by underground promises by Washington to meet some of its demands.” In any case, it remains in Ankara’s interest to keep a low profile about any alignment with the West with respect to the Kremlin, because it would risk cutting in on the quiet tango between Ankara and Moscow. Because there are no sanctions, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has been able to travel Turkey more than once since February to discuss a possible ceasefire in Ukraine. The Russian-Israeli oligarch Roman Abramovich, who is under sanctions in Britain, has also been a welcome presence in Turkey. Then there is the matter of Ukrainian grain supplies, which Kyiv accuses Russia of stealing and selling at discounted prices to third-party countries including Turkey. Last week, the Turkish foreign minister said Ankara was investigating the Ukrainian claims but, according to Reuters, has “not found any stolen shipments so far.”That should surprise no one. While an end to the war in Ukraine is a global imperative, the evidence of connivance between Turkey and Russia, separated only by the now heavily militarized Black Sea, has not diminished in the least since the Ukraine war started. Yet this is not the only reason that Ankara is seen as “a burr in the other NATO members’ backsides,” as Foreign Policy succinctly put it, to the extent that “throwing Turkey out has become a refrain for so many of Ankara’s opponents and critics.” One of those critics is neighboring Greece, a fellow NATO member whose islands in the Aegean Sea have been subject to dozens of overflights by Turkish military aircraft in recent months. Mr. Erdogan also has lashed out at Greece, erroneously, for hosting “nine American bases” and has repeatedly called on Athens to “demilitarize” some of its islands near Turkey’s Mediterranean littoral, taking an aggressively revisionist stance on a treaty signed in the aftermath of World War I. Turkey has done so despite maintaining a military command structure along its Aegean Sea coast that is outside NATO’s operational purview and even as it stations several thousand troops in the northern section of Cyprus, which it seized by force in 1974.The Greek foreign minister, Nikos Dendias, speaking at B’nai B’rith World Center’s Israeli-Hellenic Forum at Athens this week, took a subtle swipe at Turkey for adhering to just such “revisionist narratives” that “can only arouse extremism and provoke tensions.” In a neighborhood as turbulent as the eastern Mediterranean, the commercial and geopolitical intersect but not always calmly. “Turkey, together with the Sarraj Administration in Libya, agreed on Exclusive Economic Zones bypassing Crete,” Mr. Dendias said. “As if Greece and Spain tomorrow were to decide to draft an EEZ map pretending that Italy in the middle does not exist, and pretend this is common sense.”It would be common sense for the Turkish and Greek leaders to have a face-to-face meeting at Madrid, given that both Mr. Erdogan and the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, are members of the same team — at least, officially. In a volatile atmosphere much can change and without much notice, but as of Wednesday morning in Europe, the Turkish president was adamantly refusing to meet with his Greek counterpart. He will be meeting with President Biden at the summit. It would be a quiet triumph for American diplomacy should Mr. Biden get the Turkish and Greek leaders to, if not tango, at least have a conversation: A little dialogue might go a long way toward defusing some of the tensions now roiling the Continent. Mr. Dendias, for his part, did speak briefly with Mr. Erdogan on Wednesday morning.The NATO summit wraps up June 30.

With a Wink at Putin, Turkey Drops Opposition to Expanded NATO

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