Last week, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, threw the international community into a tizzy when he announced that Sweden should “not expect” Turkey’s support to join NATO after a far-right politician burned a Koran at a protest in front of the Turkish Embassy, ironically, in protest of Turkey’s duplicity concerning Sweden’s bid to join NATO. For months, the addition of Sweden to NATO was treated as a fait accompli by the West, perhaps just requiring a little more cajoling of Ankara, even though Turkey had not technically taken final steps to admit Sweden.
While there is ambiguity in Erdogan’s words, they threw NATO enlargement into doubt at a time when almost all member nations are pushing for more unity in support of Ukraine’s war against Russian aggression. Erdogan’s actions are jeopardizing major geopolitical events and hampering the interests of his fellow NATO members, potentially even jeopardizing the long-term health of the alliance itself.
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