On eve of summit, NATO secures big win

On the eve of a closely watched NATO summit this week one question loomed large: how to solve the alliance’s Turkey problem.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for months had been a holdout in efforts to admit Sweden to NATO. He charged that Sweden isn’t doing enough to punish terrorists who include, in his view, those who burn Qurans and openly agitate for Kurdish independence. 

Since NATO’s founding treaty demands unanimity when it comes to new members, a veto was within his power. 

But on Monday the ground shifted. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced that Mr. Erdoğan will forward to the Turkish parliament Sweden’s bid to join the military alliance.

“I’m glad to announce ... that President Erdoğan has agreed to forward the accession protocol for Sweden to the Grand National Assembly as soon as possible, and work closely with the assembly to ensure ratification,” Mr. Stoltenberg told a news conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, where the summit is taking place.

For NATO, hoping that the upcoming summit would be a show of unity, the shift appears to be a major victory. In many ways, the bloc was already treating Sweden as a member, including sharing intelligence. 

Yet even with Mr. Erdoğan’s change of heart, the maneuvering points to a continuing challenge. Turkey is both essential to NATO and often out of line with it. Members will hope the breakthrough signals progress in efforts to bridge the gap.

The mounting tensions had reached the point that there were questions over “whether Turkey, in fact, belongs in the alliance,” said Max Bergmann, who directs the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, in a briefing last week.

Mr. Erdoğan, however, is well aware of NATO’s importance to his country. “For all the differences Turkey has with the alliance, it also has an interest in resolving them,” says Ian Lesser, who is based in Brussels as vice president of the German Marshall Fund.

The alliance had been reasonably accommodating to Mr. Erdoğan’s demands, analysts say. Sweden passed tougher anti-terrorism laws, which required amending its constitution. Sweden’s Supreme Court has also cleared the way for the extradition of a legal Turkish migrant suspected of posting manipulated photos of Mr. Erdoğan online, which is punishable under Turkish law.

Sweden was also one of the first nations rushing in assistance after the devastating Turkish earthquakes in February. It even lifted a 2019 arms embargo against Turkey. 

Sweden, Turkey, and Russia: a long history

Sweden’s connection to both Turkey and Russia goes back centuries. 

Despite a roughly 200-year history of neutrality, Sweden has had its share of run-ins with Russia. In 1708, after a victorious march on Moscow in which he routed Russian forces, Swedish King Charles XII was ultimately defeated and fled.

He took refuge in the Ottoman Empire, and Swedish-Turkish political relations date back to this point, the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs notes on its website.

It was in 1952 that Turkey joined NATO, which released a promotional film at the time extolling the strategic advantages of its new member state. Among other things, Turkey offers control of the Bosporus and Dardanelles, straits linking the Black Sea to the Mediterranean – a considerable check on the Soviet navy. 

Turkey would become, the film promised, the “strong right anchor” of the alliance.  

Today, at some 355,000 troops, Turkey has the largest standing army in NATO after the United States – another source of leverage within the alliance, notes Rajan Menon, director of the Grand Strategy program at the Defense Priorities think tank in Washington. France and Germany have forces of roughly 200,000 each.

Most recently, Ankara has contributed to NATO military missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has endeared its troops to their Western counterparts. 

“They’re heavy-duty players because they understand the Middle East, they understand Asia,” says a senior NATO military official, who asked to be anonymous due to the issue’s sensitivity, prior to Monday’s announcement. “They’re passionate, very devoted to the team – and they get things done.” 

Yet Mr. Erdoğan’s embrace of autocracy and deals with Moscow over the years have driven a wedge between Turkey and NATO allies. Many point in particular to Ankara’s 2019 acquisition of a Russian missile system rather than a NATO-made equivalent.

For Ankara, this soured relations with the alliance and got it sanctioned by the U.S., and it was ejected from the F-35 fighter jet program – all excellent developments from Moscow’s geopolitical perspective.

There have been Turkish run-ins with Russia, too, including the 2015 shoot-down of a Russian military aircraft on the Syrian border after it violated Turkish airspace.

And though Turkey refused to take part in sanctions against Moscow in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine, it has closed off key waterway access to Russian warships. 

Lessening leverage

As recently as early on Monday, Mr. Erdoğan vaguely suggested that he would only admit Sweden if the European Union were to “clear Turkey’s way” to membership.

But analysts saw an advantage to downplaying the importance of Sweden’s actual accession. The more Sweden’s entry seemed a fait accompli, the less leverage Mr. Erdoğan had for extracting concessions. 

Even prior to the summit, NATO headquarters was already operating as if Sweden was in the alliance, including sharing intelligence. “Put it this way, I’m in briefings where the slide will say ‘classified’ at whatever level, ‘releasable to Sweden,’” says the senior NATO military official. 

Sweden is at the table in the Military Committee, which guides policy and strategy for the alliance, as well as the North Atlantic Council, which is NATO’s main decision-making body, Adm. Rob Bauer, chair of NATO’s Military Committee, noted at a pre-Vilnius briefing for reporters last week. “They know basically everything.”