As of: February 3, 2024, 12:37 p.m
From: Foreign Policy
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Nowhere else can Turkey put pressure on Western states like it does in NATO.
Warning about the end of NATO: Even the exclusion of Türkiye was an issue
Location between Europe and Asia is useful: Turkey became a NATO member together with Greece
Pressure on the West: Türkiye to fight within NATO
This article is available for the first time in German - it was first published by
Foreign Policy
magazine on January 14, 2024 .
In mid-January, the Turkish parliament approved Sweden's application for NATO membership, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan immediately ratified the measure.
Sweden's accession to NATO has been delayed for more than a year.
While all other NATO members except Hungary supported Stockholm's entry, the Turkish leadership accused the Scandinavian country of harboring Kurdish terrorists.
They demanded that Sweden tighten its anti-terrorism laws, extradite people accused of terrorist activities in Turkey and resume arms sales to Turkey.
The United States appears to have linked approval of Sweden's NATO membership to future US sales of F-16 fighter jets to Turkey.
Even Turkey's exclusion from NATO was an issue
As Sweden's accession process stalled, analysts warned of the alliance's demise and offered a series of proposals to rein in Ankara with carrots and sticks.
Some even went so far as to suggest expelling Turkey from NATO, even though such a move is nearly impossible under the alliance's charter.
These fears and threats come at a time when it has become common among U.S. experts to describe Turkey's foreign policy as "transactional," meaning that Turkey's national interests take precedence over NATO's shared values.
Once a reliable, Western-oriented ally of the United States, Turkey is now pursuing its own interests, which often run counter to the interests of the United States and European countries.
It is worth taking a look at history to understand Turkey's position.
The country waited almost four years before it was finally allowed to join NATO in 1952.
This experience has convinced Turkish decision-makers that relations with the United States, NATO and Western countries always require a certain level of negotiating skills.
Relations between Turkey and NATO over the next seven decades have often confirmed this view, sometimes to Turkey's advantage, sometimes to its detriment.
Türkiye turned to Britain and the USA
Turkey's efforts to join NATO and other US-dominated post-war institutions took place under conditions of great uncertainty for the country.
The Turkish leadership kept their country neutral during World War II, accepted aid from Great Britain and France without committing themselves as participants in the war, and sold war materials to Germany.
At the end of the conflict, Turkey found few friends among the Allied victors.
It was also surrounded on several sides by communist-controlled regimes: Bulgaria in the west and the Georgian, Armenian and Azerbaijani Soviet republics in the northeast.
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In neighboring Iran, the Soviet Union and Great Britain occupied the north and south of the country, respectively.
The Soviets supported the autonomy of the Azerbaijani and Kurdish ethnic groups in the region;
the Turkish leadership long rejected the latter separatist movement.
Soviet officials also pressured the Turkish leadership to renegotiate treaties regulating transit through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits and to cede control of several northeastern border provinces.
For Ankara, the Soviet threat appeared to be existential.
Instead of complying with Soviet demands, Turkey turned to Britain and the United States.
With London unable to maintain its expansive role in the Eastern Mediterranean, Washington increased its commitments to Turkey and Greece and provided aid to both countries under the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan.
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However, US and Western European leaders were reluctant to admit Turkey into NATO.
Ankara first inquired about membership in 1948, when the alliance was just taking shape, but was rebuffed.
Turkey tried again in 1950 but only received “associated status”.
Western leaders' objections to full membership for Turkey were not based on the ideals of “democracy, individual freedom and the rule of law” enshrined in the NATO Charter;
the military alliance included the Portuguese dictatorship.
Rather, their arguments were strategic - they did not want to extend NATO's political and military commitments so far east.
Turkey became a NATO member together with Greece: location between Europe and Asia useful
Turkey did not receive firm U.S. support for its NATO membership until after 1950 and 1951, when Ankara sent thousands of Turkish soldiers to fight alongside the United States in some of the most brutal months of the Korean War.
Washington proposed Turkey's accession in May 1951, and support from the entire NATO Council followed.
Turkey was admitted along with Greece in 1952.
Turkey's relations with NATO have been transactional from the start.
By willing to put Turkish citizens in harm's way to curb communist expansion in Korea, the Turkish leadership convinced its Western partners that Ankara had strategic value.
Turkey's geographical location between Europe and Asia - and on key waterways - appeared to be of use to the Western alliance in the event of war with the Soviet Union.
This also applied to Ankara's large army.
Although Turkey has often been able to take advantage of NATO, the country has not always been on equal footing with Western partners.
The Turkish leadership felt that its national interests were subordinate to the interests of the United States and other allies.
Washington's willingness to negotiate with the Soviet Union over US nuclear missiles stationed in Turkey during the Cuban Missile Crisis was an example of this dynamic.
But the main source of frustration was Cyprus.
Cyprus gained independence from Britain in 1960 through a power-sharing agreement between the Greek majority and the Turkish minority.
When the agreement collapsed in 1963, Turkey began preparing to invade the island to protect the Turkish population.
However, then US President Lyndon B. Johnson informed the Turkish government that it could not count on NATO's support if an invasion led to Soviet intervention in Cyprus.
Johnson's letter to Ankara stoked anti-US sentiment in Turkey and put the Turkish leadership, which supported the alliance and its various financial and security benefits, in a difficult position.
Dispute over arms embargo against Turkey
When Turkey intervened in Cyprus a decade later, it benefited from NATO membership.
In 1974, the Greek military regime, which had come to power in 1967, supported a coup in Cyprus.
Turkey then responded by taking control of a third of the island, which remains divided to this day.
Then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger considered Turkey to be “more important” than Greece and feared that pressure on Ankara could lead to a left-wing regime taking power.
The Democrats in the US Congress were not convinced and voted to stop arms sales to Turkey.
The Ford government responded to the embargo, which would not be fully lifted until 1978, by persuading West Germany and other NATO allies to increase arms exports to Ankara.
The government in Ankara responded to the embargo by allowing several additional Soviet aircraft carriers to sail from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean and ending unilateral U.S. access to bases in Turkey.
On the eve of the annual NATO summit in May 1978, Turkish Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit refused to sign a joint statement, telling reporters that he saw “no threat” to Turkey from the USSR.
He added that a continued US embargo would likely reduce Turkey's contribution to NATO.
Two months later, the US Senate voted to lift the arms embargo on Turkey.
By negotiating with NATO, Turkey's leadership satisfied short-term public anger with the United States without completely undermining their country's long-term strategic relationships.
The transactional diplomacy had paid off.
After the Turkish coup of 1980, NATO membership became useful for the country again.
The military leaders stressed their determination to uphold NATO commitments.
They also took conciliatory steps, offering possible territorial concessions in Cyprus (which they never implemented) and supporting the reincorporation of rival Greece into the NATO command structure after it withdrew during the 1974 crisis.
NATO faced irrelevance
These gestures came at a time when the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War once again placed Turkey at the center of U.S. strategy - and gave the Turkish military more room to maneuver.
The United States increased its aid to Ankara even amid reports of torture investigated by Amnesty International, prompting countries such as Denmark and Norway to freeze their financial support.
Until 1991, only Israel and Egypt received more US military aid than Turkey.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR between 1989 and 1991 threatened to make NATO irrelevant - and diminish Turkey's importance to its Western allies.
Then-Turkish President Turgut Özal supported the US-led campaign against Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait in 1990, in part to restore Turkey's centrality to Western interests.
He also liberalized the Turkish economy to encourage foreign investment.
In return, Ozal hoped to obtain concessions from the United States and other allies in Europe, such as:
B. better access for Turkish textiles to the US market.
Turkish MPs from the Social Freedom Party and the Socialist Solidarity Platform hold up placards reading "No occupation, no war for NATO" during the debate on Sweden's application to join NATO in the Turkish parliament.
© Ali Unal/dpa
NATO began to expand its ambitions in ways that suited Turkish interests.
During the Gulf War, the alliance provided Turkey with additional aircraft to repel Iraqi attacks.
It decided to intervene in Bosnia and Kosovo, where Turkey was concerned about Serb attacks on Muslims.
There was even talk of a “strengthened partnership” between Ankara and Washington.
The United States and other NATO allies played a crucial role in the capture of a key Kurdish separatist leader in 1999.
In the same year, the European Union officially recognized Turkey's candidacy for membership.
Political chaos plagued Turkey in the 1990s
Despite these developments, Turkey was rocked by economic crises, violence and political instability in the 1990s.
The chaos of those years helped discredit the established parties and bring Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) to power in 2003.
Initially, the AKP increased Turkey's efforts to cooperate with Western allies.
But there were several setbacks.
Talks over Turkey's membership of the European Union stalled after Cyprus was admitted to the bloc and the election of European politicians such as Angela Merkel of Germany and Nicolas Sarkozy of France, both of whom opposed Ankara's EU membership .
As the AKP lost the support of Western-oriented groups in its coalition - including the liberals and the Gulen religious movement - Erdogan became dependent on political groups that advocated a "Eurasian" foreign policy that was less Western and more connected to Russia and Central Asia was.
Of all the conflicts between Turkey and its NATO allies in the post-Cold War period, relations with Kurdish nationalist groups have been the most important.
Washington has repeatedly sought Kurdish groups as local partners in military operations - first against Saddam Hussein in Iraq and later against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
Pressure on the West: Türkiye to fight within NATO
Meanwhile, anti-Kurdish actions by governments in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran have helped create a sizeable, politically active Kurdish diaspora in Europe.
Sweden is one of the most notable examples.
There, a narrowly divided parliament in 2021 allowed a lawmaker who fought with Iranian Kurdish guerrillas in her youth to cast the deciding vote to secure additional support for Kurdish groups in Syria.
But the behavior of a single MP was not the reason for Turkey's unwillingness to grant Sweden quick accession to NATO.
In fact, Sweden itself is not the problem.
Sweden was the first country after Turkey to designate the PKK - the Kurdistan Workers' Party - as a terrorist organization in 1984, and other NATO member states such as Germany also have an influential Kurdish diaspora.
Rather, the Turkish leadership has decided to fight within NATO because the alliance represents one of the few opportunities to put pressure on Western states.
Through NATO, Ankara can draw attention to its security problems - and win important concessions along the way.
To the author
Reuben Silverman
is a research fellow at the Institute for Turkish Studies at Stockholm University.
Twitter (X): @silvermanreuben
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English in the magazine “ForeignPolicy.com” on January 28, 2024 - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.