Because the West is bowing to Erdogan

By Costas Raptis

In the face of Turkey’s veto on Sweden and Finland joining NATO, the Western leadership was forced to choose between two contingencies, both humiliating. Either let the Atlantic Summit end without NATO enlargement, which is meant as a message of decisive solidarity with Russia, or give in to Tayyip Erdogan’s demands.

The latter was preferred so that humiliation would be experienced more discreetly than in Sweden and Finland, rather than being perceived worldwide.

There was no third possibility, because there was simply no way to circumvent the Turkish veto or force Turkey to lift it without consideration.

It is what they never realized e.g. Finnish citizens, who despite their country’s 79% support for NATO membership, the highest in history, also wanted 70% no concessions to Turkey, according to a poll by the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper.

Self-cancellation

This completes a process of self-annulment of Sweden and Finland on three levels: the abandonment of neutrality that was the foundation of their post-war prosperity, the weakening of their democratic principles (provided that their top geopolitical choice is rushed referendum, such as the accession to the European Union) and now the removal of the high guarantees offered by their rule of law, as their internal arrangements for freedom of speech and assembly are adjusted to Turkish requirements.

There are already reports of 33 planned deportations of Kurds or Gulenists to Turkey and another 12 from Finland in seal of yesterday’s tripartite memorandum. Sometimes privileged collaborators of the West prove to be tragically expendable.

Needless to say, the “export” of Turkish criteria to northern Europe does not foreshadow the possibility of credible international intervention on issues such as the pro-Kurdish HDP ban, the sentencing of Osman Kavala, the existence of 12,000 political prisoners in Turkish prisons and so on. As for the terrorist threat cited by Turkey, little will the Western allies have much to say from now on about Turkey’s immunity from jihadist action.

The “values” of the Atlantic area are harmonized with the Turkish low denominator and not with the hitherto high northern European standards. Otherwise, the new Cold War will continue to be ideologically invested in the narrative of the conflict between Western democracies and “Eurasian authoritarianism”.

Already in the throes of a backlash against Saudi Arabia’s successor, Mohammed bin Salman, US President Joe Biden, who acted as a catalyst in his phone call to Tayyip Erdogan the day before yesterday, is preparing to give the Turkish president a chance to the leader who, just as symbolically, had been “quarantined” the previous year and a half.

Probably the negotiation with Erdogan was facilitated by agreements other than those recorded in the tripartite Turkish-Swedish-Finnish memorandum, relevant e.g. with the unblocking of the supply of F-16 fighter jets from Turkey or with the court adventures of the Turkish bank Halkbank in America.

Specific weight

In any case, the armies of analysts who raise the issue of Turkey’s expulsion from NATO every time Ankara becomes consul of friction, must come to terms with the idea that the country with the Alliance’s second largest army has a specific weight greater than that. many other Member States.

But also the method to promote, if necessary through friction, its national interests as it perceives them over time and cross-party. If this is considered contradictory and acrobatic, it is because contradictory reveals a reality where Turkey’s basic geopolitical choice, ie NATO membership, complicates and intensifies its Kurdish “existential threat”.