https://ecfr.eu/article/turkey-nato-and-...d-finland/
Just when NATO members were about to pop the champagne in celebration of Finland’s and Sweden’s applications to join the alliance, the buzz-kill dropped: Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, declared on Friday that he looks unfavourably on the duo becoming members.
“We are following developments. We currently do not have a positive [favourable] position on the issue of Sweden and Finland [joining NATO],” Erdogan told reporters after Friday prayers in Istanbul. “Scandinavian countries are like terrorist groups’ guesthouses,” he continued, referring to the presence in Sweden of exiled Gulenists and sympathisers of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) – which Ankara views as a terrorist organisation that has tentacles in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq.
This was an obstacle in an otherwise well-choreographed Nordic march into NATO. Was Erdogan trying to put pressure on the US Congress for those F-16s that Ankara wants to purchase? Was this really about more money for Syrian refugees in Turkey? Or did he really want Gulenists or PKK sympathisers extradited to Turkey?
By Monday, Turkish officials had started floating the idea that they wanted Sweden and Finland to show that they had stopped “supporting terrorists” and lift export bans on Turkey.
It is unlikely that Erdogan had one specific policy goal in mind, but he will no doubt be expecting to be cajoled, persuaded, and eventually rewarded for his cooperation, as in the past. Over the weekend, his spokesperson, Ibrahim Kalin, walked back the idea of a Turkish veto by saying that Ankara was not “closing the door” on Nordic entry, but that it wanted a crackdown on terrorists’ activities in Sweden.
Indeed, Erdogan’s statement was expressed more as a complaint than as a firm veto threat. And it may not be all about Sweden and Finland. The president almost certainly sees this as an opportune moment to air his grievances about existing NATO members, especially with the Biden administration, which has kept the Turkish leader at arm’s length. In the long list of problems between Ankara and Washington, a key item might be Erdogan’s disappointment at being unable to establish the type of presidential telephone line with Joe Biden as he had with Donald Trump. “We had good relations with Obama and Trump and had no problem talking. Have we achieved the same with Mr. Biden? No, we haven’t. That wasn’t what we wanted,” he recently lamented. With dwindling domestic support at a time when Turkey is entering a critical electoral cycle, Erdogan is looking for a higher international profile to demonstrate his global importance to Turkish voters.
Turkey’s leader is a man who wears his emotions on his sleeve – and he almost certainly would have been upset at the recent news that Washington has lifted sanctions on Syria’s Kurdish-controlled (as well as Turkish-controlled) regions, allowing the autonomous Kurdish administration to trade with the outside world. Turkey views the US-allied Kurdish administration in northern Syria, dominated by the Syrian Democratic Forces, as an offshoot of the PKK and a threat on its southern border. It is angry at Western support for Syrian Kurds.
For the past few years, Ankara has criticised NATO for failing to be a reciprocal love-match, a relationship that overlooks Turkey’s security concerns despites the country’s decades of loyalty to the alliance. And there are occasional bouts of friction with NATO partners, most notably with Greece and France over issues such as eastern Mediterranean maritime borders and overflights in the Aegean. The Turkish air force has recently pulled out of a military exercise in Greece and tensions between the two countries are quietly brewing regarding the Aegean.
![](https://i.imgur.com/CLvY2jA.png")
![[+]](https://sgtalk.net/images/bootbb/collapse_collapsed.png)
