Two-faced Turkey demands a terrible price for NATO expansion – Haaretz.com

Mr Erdogan will now expect Sweden and Finland to adhere to the spirit, and not just the (notably vague) letter, of the agreement. This means he will demand they back a future Turkish operation in Syria to combat the YPG, who happen to be the West’s main allies against Islamic State, support Ankara’s plans to expel and forcibly resettle over one million Syrian refugees in northern Syria, take concrete steps to extradite alleged members of the PKK and Gulen movement to face trial, unlikely to be fair, in Turkey, and keep schtum about Turkey’s poor human rights records and abuses of fundamental democratic freedoms.


Turkey will seize on any hemming and hawing on these issues as evidence of bad faith, if not betrayal, and a just cause to reignite a crisis in Turkey’s relations with the West. Turkey under Erdogan is a fundamentally untrustworthy ally. The NATO deal has triggered a countdown to the next noisy but inevitable conflagration.

Two-faced Turkey demands a terrible price for NATO expansion – Haaretz.com Read More »

Erdogan says no meeting until Greek PM “pulls himself together” | Reuters

Historic rivals, Turkey and Greece have been at odds over issues ranging from overflights and the status of Aegean islands, maritime boundaries and hydrocarbon resources in the Mediterranean, and ethnically-split Cyprus.

Tensions flared again recently over air space and the status of demilitarised islands in the Aegean. Erdogan has said Mitsotakis “no longer exists for him” after the Greek premier lobbied for the United States not to sell Turkey F-16 fighter jets during a speech at the U.S. Congress.

Erdogan says no meeting until Greek PM “pulls himself together” | Reuters Read More »

As Turkey gets Biden backing for F-16s, Greece steals Erdogan thunder by moving for F-35s – bne IntelliNews

Turkey’s hopes that developments at this week’s Nato Madrid summit moved it closer to obtaining F-16 warplanes from the US were on June 20 tempered by an announcement that regional arch-rival Greece has sent an official request to Washington for the acquisition of 20 of the world’s most advanced fighter plane, the Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth jet.

Ankara remains unable to get its hands on the scores of F-35s it has ordered. It remains locked out of the F-35 development programme, with US and Nato officials saying they are concerned that S-400 advanced missile defence systems bought from the Kremlin by Turkey could pose a security threat to F-35 perfo

As Turkey gets Biden backing for F-16s, Greece steals Erdogan thunder by moving for F-35s – bne IntelliNews Read More »

The US did not offer Turkey anything to get Erdogan to drop his objections to allowing Sweden and Finland into the alliance, a trio of senior administration officials claim – The Pavlovic Today

A trio of senior administration officials detail the first day of NATO Summit in Madrid. Here’s what they told The Pavlovic Today. The new NATO strategic concept will be released shortly and focuses heavily on Russia. But it also, for the first time, mentions China. The document will note that China’s stated ambitions and challenge

The US did not offer Turkey anything to get Erdogan to drop his objections to allowing Sweden and Finland into the alliance, a trio of senior administration officials claim – The Pavlovic Today Read More »

EXPLAINER: How was Turkey’s veto of Nordic NATO bid avoided? – San Francisco Chronicle

Before the text was released, Turkish officials circulated to media outlets a note titled “Turkey got what it wanted.” Finland’s leading newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, wrote in an editorial that “Turkey got what it wanted – and so did Finland and Sweden.”

“The memorandum was the price that had to be paid for the weird style of dealings with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that at the same time represents typical behavior to Turkey,” the Finnish newspaper said.

While arguing against making Sweden and Finland NATO members, Erdogan showed videos and photographs of PKK demonstrations in Sweden as evidence of his claim of Swedish indifference to terrorism.

EXPLAINER: How was Turkey’s veto of Nordic NATO bid avoided? – San Francisco Chronicle Read More »

P. Molyviatis in “K”: Open letter to the Secretary General of NATO | Η ΚΑΘΗΜΕΡΙΝΗ

When you, Mister Secretary-General, call on Greece to engage in dialogue with Turkey to resolve their differences, you are essentially asking Greece to place its territorial integrity as a subject of negotiations with Turkey. And you are asking for it while representing an Alliance that was set up and still exists for this very reason, namely the protection of the territorial integrity of its members.

This is not an equal distance stance. It is encouraging the attacker against his victim.

And this, in the end, does not lead to strengthening the cohesion of the Alliance, but rather to its dissolution.

If, Mister Secretary-General, you do not have the authority to intervene to remedy this unprecedented and unacceptable situation within the Alliance, I think the best thing to do is to remain silent until your term

P. Molyviatis in “K”: Open letter to the Secretary General of NATO | Η ΚΑΘΗΜΕΡΙΝΗ Read More »

Is Turkey more trouble to NATO than it is worth? | The Economist

Aside from a few words of condemnation at the start of the war in Ukraine, Turkey has remained on good terms with Russia throughout. When Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, visited Ankara this month his Turkish counterpart kindly suggested that the West should ease sanctions against Russia if Russia relaxed its blockade of Ukrainian ports. When Mr Lavrov repeated his claim that Russia had invaded Ukraine to liberate it from neo-Nazis, his host said nothing.

Mr Erdogan’s move to block Sweden’s and Finland’s accession to nato has further damaged Turkey’s standing in the alliance. The strongman has signalled that he wants the Nordic countries to extradite several members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (pkk), an outlawed armed group, and to drop a partial arms embargo against his country. He may also be shopping for concessions from America in exchange for withdrawing his veto, or from Russia for doing the opposite. Mr Erdogan occasionally sounds hostile to nato enlargement as a matter of principle. In a recent guest column for The Economist, he went as far as to blame Finland and Sweden for adding an “unnecessary item” to nato’s agenda by asking to join the alliance.

Is Turkey more trouble to NATO than it is worth? | The Economist Read More »