It’s Time to Boot Turkey from NATO

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, May 22, 2022

 

We ought to do Turkish caudillo Recep Tayyip Erdogan the courtesy of being frank with him: A NATO that includes Sweden and Finland but excludes Turkey is preferable to one that includes Turkey but excludes Sweden and Finland.

 

It is time for Turkey to go.

 

As Russian war criminals murder and rape their way through Ukraine, Russia’s long-suffering neighbor, Finland, has finally decided that it is time to formally join NATO. Sweden, though a larger and more powerful country (twice as big by population and by GDP), is following Finland’s lead and is ready to sign the North Atlantic Treaty, as well.

 

Turkey, the odd man out in NATO, plans to veto any move to bring Finland and Sweden into the alliance. At least, that is the official position. Erdogan’s real agenda is something simpler: blackmail.

 

Notionally, this is about the presence of a handful of Kurdish militants in Nordic exile. In reality, this is about the fact that Turkey under Erdogan has come to much more closely resemble Vladimir Putin’s Russia in its fundamental political character than it does any of its fellow NATO members. Turkey has developed close economic and political relations with Russia, and Erdogan has worked hard not to irritate Putin during the Ukraine war. Every political axis needs a third member, and Ankara today fits more easily between Moscow and Beijing than it does between Paris and Berlin.

 

NATO is not only a military alliance. It is also a community of liberal-democratic values — values which Turkey rejects with increasing vigor and openness. The West once hoped — naively, as it turns out — that Erdogan would carry the banners of secularism, democracy, and liberty for the Turkish people, but he has led Turkey in the opposite direction: toward Islamist politics, authoritarianism, and tyranny.

 

It is time to expel Turkey from NATO.

 

This is a possibility that has been considered before. Erdogan’s brutal suppression of dissent beginning in 2016 and his cooperation with Moscow in acquiring Russian air-defense technology both led to calls for NATO to sever ties with Turkey. Booting Turkey out of NATO will be tricky on both the legal and political fronts, not least because the North Atlantic Treaty does not contain an explicit mechanism for expelling a member. The lawyers will no doubt dice it pretty fine if NATO members argue that Turkey is in material breach of its treaty obligations, but as a matter of fact Turkey is undermining NATO in the service of Erdogan’s domestic political needs. Turkey is advancing the interests of Moscow and Beijing and making it more difficult for NATO members to engage in collective self-defense, which is the point of NATO.

 

And morally, Turkey does not deserve to be in NATO. NATO’s job is to defend its members against police states, not to provide a snug harbor in which authoritarianism may be cultivated.

 

NATO’s neighboring bureaucracy in Brussels should also do Erdogan the courtesy of being frank and formally ending all consideration of Turkey as a candidate for membership in the European Union. Turkey was not a very good fit for the European Union at its best, and it is far from at its best today. Beyond its backsliding into soft dictatorship, Turkey is an economic basket case with 70 percent inflation and increasingly irresponsible economic policies. The European Union had a hard enough time with Greece’s financial shenanigans, and Greece is Denmark compared to Turkey.

 

Geopolitics is not a matter of friendship. As Lord Palmerstone put it (and here the full quotation is more illuminating than the apocryphal proverb attributed to Charles de Gaulle), “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” There was a time when it seemed that Turkey was fitted to NATO’s permanent interests. Turkey joined NATO in 1952, when the organization was not yet a decade old and Joseph Stalin was still extant, if only barely that. NATO’s optimism was perhaps excessive, but, at the time, Turkey identified itself very strongly with the West and looked westward toward its future. Today’s Turkey looks eastward, and that fact should be acknowledged.

 

Things did not have to go this way, but Turkey has made its choices — not only the autocratic junta of Recep Tayyip Erdogan but the Turkish people, too. Perhaps that looks like a tragedy when seen from Brussels and like something else when seen from Ankara.

 

But however we feel about them, the facts on the ground are what they are, and it is time for NATO to recognize this and act accordingly.