Why did Turkey suddenly okay Sweden and Finland joining NATO? It was a case of the necessary prevailing over the ideal

 The American Enterprise Institute's Elizabeth Braw, writing at Defense One, explains that it was a matter of waiting out some internal dynamics in the Scandanavian countries:

What happened? In their trilateral June 28 memorandum—which NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg and the Biden administration had no small part in bringing about—the three countries agree that “as prospective NATO Allies, Finland and Sweden extend their full support to Turkiye against threats to its national security. To that effect, Finland and Sweden will not provide support to YPG/PYD [Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units and the associated Democratic Union Party], and the organisation described as FETO in Turkiye.” It went on: “Finland and Sweden unambiguously condemn all terrorist organisations perpetrating attacks against Turkiye, and express their deepest solidarity with Turkiye and the families of the victims.”

There was one particular Swedish legislator who was driving a lot of the support for the Kurdish groups:

This was a victory for Turkey. Last November, Sweden’s governing Social Democrats had promised to deepen their cooperation with PYD, a left-wing Syrian Kurdish party that is also an affiliate of Turkey’s PKK. Why would the Social Democrats promise to deepen their cooperation with this unlikely partner? Because they were trying to find a parliamentary majority for their minority government, and to reach the already-precarious position of a one-vote parliamentary majority, they had to assuage Amineh Kakabaveh, a member of parliament who had been sacked from the Left Party and was sitting as an independent. And Kakabaveh, a former Peshmerga fighter, made maximum use of the leverage by demanding support for Kurdish causes. In fact, she seemed to take delight in her sudden power.

But time was not on Kakabaveh's  side:

But in late June, the Swedish parliament completed its term; it will resume after the country’s parliamentary elections in September. Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson no longer owed anything to Kakabaveh, who can’t be reelected, and could sign the memorandum with Turkey. So, of course, could Finland, which was never really a concern of Turkey’s in the first place.

The bargain finally struck certainly has a lot of benefits for Turkey:

Although the devil of every intergovernmental agreement is in the implementation, the Swedish-Finnish-Turkish memorandum was a certainly a victory for Turkey. In addition to denouncing support for the PYD, Sweden and Finland promised to lift their suspension of arms exports to Turkey and to “address Turkey's pending deportation or extradition requests of terror suspects expeditiously and thoroughly, taking into account information, evidence and intelligence provided by Turkey.” 

What that means was explained by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkish media: Sweden will have to extradite 73 suspected terrorists to Turkey, he announced. Washington, meanwhile, signaled that it’s willing to sell Ankara new F-16 fighter jets and modernization kits for its existing F-16s.

Mutual security comes with costs:

. . . as a senior official in a NATO member state told me, “Sweden and Finland have learned their first lesson in collective defense”: some members of the collective may be difficult, obnoxious even, but for the benefit of enhanced security for all you have to work with them. 

History provides many examples of nation-states having to hold their noses to pursue bigger-picture objectives. This is one of them. At a time of gruesome behavior and alarming rhetoric on the part of Russia, the West needs to provide the most united front it can muster. 

 

 

 

Turkey finally gets on board with Finland and Sweden joining NATO

 This ought to give Putin pause:

Office of the President of the Republic of Finland
Press release 41/2022
28 June 2022

Today in Madrid, before the beginning of the NATO Summit, we had a thorough meeting with President of Türkiye Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Prime Minister of Sweden Magdalena Andersson, facilitated by Secretary General of NATO Jens Stoltenberg.

As a result of that meeting, our foreign ministers signed a trilateral memorandum which confirms that Türkiye will at the Madrid Summit this week support the invitation of Finland and Sweden to become members of NATO. The concrete steps of our accession to NATO will be agreed by the NATO Allies during the next two days, but that decision is now imminent.

Our joint memorandum underscores the commitment of Finland, Sweden and Türkiye to extend their full support against threats to each other’s security. Us becoming NATO Allies will further strengthen this commitment.

I realize that this afternoon's avalanche of big news (Maxwell's 20-year sentence, Cassidy Hutchinson's J6 testimony, the Rasmussen poll showing that half of likely voters approve of SCOTUS ruling in Dobbs) presents us with a dizzying number of claims on our cognitive faculties, but this must not get lost in the shuffle. It shows that a unified front against Russia's barbarism in Ukraine still exists.

 

Which is it?

 Talk about mixed signals. 

This is an eye-opening move, is it not?

RUSSIA has started deploying nuclear missiles toward its border with Finland in wake of the nation's bold NATO bid.

Menacing mobile Iskander missiles were spotted being transported towards the dividing line as desperate Putin throws a troubling tantrum.

The video documentation is accompanied by some taunting narration:

Chilling dashcam footage appears to show a fleet of the deadly Iskander missiles en route to Vyborg - just 24 miles from the Finnish border - on Monday.

The commentary in the clip suggested a "new military unit is about to be formed" - in the immediate aftermath of the Nordic nation's NATO application. 

The person behind the lens explained: "As soon as the president of Finland said they were joining NATO, a whole division of Iskanders, seven of them…  is moving towards Vyborg.

“Looks like a new military unit is about to be formed in Vyborg or the region.

 “All the equipment is new, Ural trucks are driving it. So get ready Finns, to join NATO.

“New Urals, seven Iskanders, looks like a new military unit is being formed - well done.”

But then there's this:

[T]hree months into a Ukraine invasion that’s not going according to plan, and after two other countries close to Russia announced that they are joining NATO, Putin appears to be softening his tone, and resigning himself to the fact that NATO’s eastward expansion is happening anyway.

On Sunday, Finland—which shares an 800-mile border with Russia and was part of the Russian Empire for over a century—said it had applied to join NATO to ensure that its own national security would not be threatened by Russia in the future. On Monday, Sweden followed suit after a meeting amongst ruling party officials over the weekend, who voted to end the country’s 200-year neutrality policy.

“The issue at hand is whether military nonalignment will keep serving us well?” Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson said on Sunday. “We’re facing a fundamentally changed security environment in Europe.”

For months, Russian officials have warned against the two countries taking this decisive step, but now that it has actually happened, Putin appears to be doing his best to diminish the significance of the act.

"As for the expansion of NATO, including through new members of the alliance which are Finland, Sweden — Russia has no problems with these states,” Putin said Monday at a summit of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a military alliance composed of several post-Soviet states.

This juxtaposition of developments bears watching. 

 

 

 

 

Leave it to Erdogan to throw a wrench in the works

 The push for NATO expansion and strengthened Western resolve has hit a road bump:

Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has come out against allowing Sweden and Finland to join Nato, putting the two Nordic countries’ hopes of joining the western military alliance in jeopardy.

 

In a move that could undermine Turkey’s efforts to strengthen ties with the US and Europe in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Erdoğan — whose country has been a Nato member since 1952 — on Friday said he could not take a “positive view” of the two nations’ potential bids for membership.

 

The obstacle was their support for the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), which has waged a decades-long armed insurgency against the Turkish state, he said. It is classified as a terrorist organisation by Ankara, the US and the EU. Turkey’s president also named a far-left extremist group.

 

“Scandinavian countries are like some kind of guest house for terrorist organisations,” Erdoğan told reporters, referring to the Nordic countries. “They are even in parliament.”

 

He added: “At this point, it’s not possible for us to look positively at this.”

 

Some Swedish officials and MPs have been worried that Turkey could pose the most dangerous opposition to a potential Nato bid, which appears to be backed by most of the alliance’s other 29 members but requires unanimous support.

 

“There are a lot of Kurds in Sweden, there are a lot of MPs with Kurdish background, Sweden has been active on the Kurdish issue — I’m afraid there could be a backlash,” one senior Swedish official said earlier this month.

 

Finnish and Swedish diplomats have been crossing Europe and the Atlantic to curry favour with Nato members, whose ratification is necessary for them to become members.

The Turkish president has a different set of criteria for weighing factors on a situation like this. 

But then, he's harbored prejudice against Kurds all his political life and has a track record of acting on it: 

In troubled times, people worship self-assured leaders, and Erdogan sees himself as the anointed vessel of Ottoman resurrection. He allowed Islamic State to murder Kurds and unleashed his army on them. He must and can be stopped.

 

Kurds, formerly referred to as Mountain Turks, constitute more than 20% of the country's citizens. Many want independence, but in 1999, the inspirational, formerly separatist Marxist leader of the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), Abdullah Ocalan, urged peace after being captured and jailed. Most obeyed, but many still dream of uniting with Kurdish enclaves in Syria, Iraq and Iran to re-establish historic Kurdistan.

In 2013, Erdogan promised to recognize Kurdish identity and language, and increase Kurdish liberties. A truce followed, but hostilities resumed in 2015. Erdogan said he was responding to PKK terrorism. The PKK claimed Erdogan destroyed the ceasefire by building dams and security stations in Kurdish regions. In either case, a war was on. Erdogan attacked with helicopter gunships, artillery and armored divisions, murdering thousands and displacing 335,000 mainly Kurdish citizens. A UN report described destroyed villages as moonscapes. 

 Erdogan perceives Kurdish nationalism as an existential threat. 

Recalling the Armenian Genocide, Turkish Nobel Prize winning novelist Orhan Pamuk lamented Erdogan's mass killings of Kurds. Pamuk er was prosecuted for insulting "Turkishness," and public Pamuk book-burnings followed. International outcry spared Pamuk imprisonment, but he sees his once democratic moderate Muslim country heading towards "a regime of terror."

So where do things stand regarding Erdogan vis-a-vis the Kurds at present and in the near-term future?

The economic and foreign struggles of Turkey combined with the fact that the Turkish government historically has pushed its failures onto minority groups means that the ultra-nationalist alliance in Turkey will further scapegoat, persecute, and brutalize minorities, especially the Kurds, because much of their ongoing foreign policy is centered around the Kurds and the alleged existential threat they present. 

There's been a feeling in a lot of quarters for some time that Turkey was arguably the iffiest member of NATO. We now have a rather high-stakes example of this that is going to be thorny to deal with.