Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday he would oppose cooperation between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Israel unless a “comprehensive, sustainable peace is established in Palestine.”
There is no such nation as “Palestine.” Erdogan was referring to the Gaza Strip, where Israel’s military operation against the terrorists of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) is ongoing.
“It is not possible for the Israeli administration, which has trampled on the fundamental values of our alliance, to continue its partnership relationship with NATO,” Erdogan declared at a press conference in Washington, DC, where he was attending a NATO summit.
Erdogan railed against the supposed “expansionist and reckless policies” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the “atrocities” Israel is allegedly committing against the Palestinians in Gaza. He urged other nations to file complaints against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
“I hereby call on all our allies to increase their pressure on the Netanyahu administration to ensure a cease-fire and the uninterrupted delivery of humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza, who have been starving for nine months,” he said.
Erdogan called for sanctions against Israel during the NATO summit and accused the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden, who was hosting the event, of complicity in Israel’s “brutal murder” of civilians.
Erdogan’s stridently anti-Israel stance was at odds with most other NATO members, as was his diplomatic embrace of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. Erdogan said he instructed his foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, to arrange meetings with Assad and restart Turkey’s diplomatic relationship with Syria.
Relations between Ankara and Damascus became strained when Turkey supported rebel groups during the long and bloody Syrian civil war, which Assad eventually won with help from the outlaw regimes of Russia and Iran.
Erdogan put even more strain on that relationship by launching several military incursions into Syria to fight Kurdish militias, all of which he accuses of being aligned with the violent PKK separatist group in Turkey — even the Kurdish militias that worked closely with NATO powers to defeat the Islamic State.
“It is not possible for us to accept the crooked relationship that some of our allies have established especially with the PYD/YPG, the extension of the terrorist organization PKK in Syria,” Erdogan said in Washington. The YPG militia was a crucial Western ally against ISIS.
In an interview on Thursday, Erdogan defended Turkey’s comfortable relationship with Russia and China, and Turkey’s push to join the China-dominated BRICS coalition, even as the rest of NATO seeks to marginalize the two tyrannical superpowers and contain their territorial aggression.
“We are an unwavering NATO ally. However, we do not believe that this impedes our ability to establish positive relationships with nations such as China and Russia,” he said.
Despite his harsh language against Biden, Erdogan said he expected the U.S. president to swiftly clear up any lingering roadblocks to Turkey’s planned $23 billion purchase of F-16 fighters.
“I talked to Mr. Biden. ‘I will solve this problem in three to four weeks’ he said,’” Erdogan told reporters.
Turkey scaled back its long-delayed F-15 purchase on Thursday, announcing it would purchase fewer upgrades and munitions to save money amid a budget crunch back home. Turkey is also keen to develop its own defense manufacturing capability to become less reliant on the U.S. and Russia for weapons.
Turkey was booted out of the F-35 fighter program for buying Russian missiles, but Erdogan pushed the U.S. into selling him F-16s instead by holding up Sweden’s application for NATO membership. Erdogan has not condemned the horrifying Hamas atrocities of October 7 and has never paused Turkey’s financial and logistical support for the terrorist gang. One of the major terrorist attacks thwarted by Israeli intelligence during the Gaza war was orchestrated by Hamas operatives living in Turkey.
If Erdogan’s boast of Biden smoothing out the F-16 deal proves true, after Erdogan called Biden an accessory to crimes against humanity, Turkey will have won a long contest of wills against NATO for buying both American warplanes and the Russian missiles designed to shoot them down.
Michael Rubin at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) warned in June that NATO is still “in denial” about how thoroughly Turkey has “humiliated” it. Too many NATO members entertain the “fantasy” that Turkey will improve as soon as Erdogan’s 21-year “dictatorship” ends, but unfortunately Erdogan’s long rule has made too many of his bad attitudes a permanent part of Turkish diplomacy.
Rubin noted that NATO does not really have any way to expel a “liability” like Turkey, so Erdogan gets to “be a Trojan horse and block consensus on every decision until NATO members meet his price” — precisely as Erdogan did with respect to Israel on Friday. Rubin suggested NATO should find ways to make Erdogan angry and/or miserable enough to quit on his own, such as by cutting Turkey out of the NATO intelligence loop.
“Turkey no longer provides NATO the foundation or value it once did. Denial about Erdoğan’s ideology or his impact on the Turkish military can be deadly. Rather than embrace wishful thinking and recognizing the impossibility of giving Turkey the boot, it is time to quarantine NATO’s Trojan horse,” Rubin advised.
The problem, as ever, is that NATO sees too much value in having a Middle Eastern member with regional influence, a reasonably solid economy, and a huge military, even if the authoritarian ruler of that member is working on the alliance’s last nerve.
Erdogan has been somewhat helpful to NATO’s great project of the decade, opposing the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He has supported Ukraine’s desire to join NATO and offered to leverage his good relationship with Russia as a peacemaker, although Moscow shrugged off his overtures.
Erdogan has also scoffed at China and Russia’s plan to build the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) into an “alternative” to NATO, a slap he was uniquely positioned to deliver as a member of both organizations. Erdogan certainly has his uses, but other NATO leaders must be frequently tempted to wonder if he’s worth the price he demands.
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