Cold Turkey: why is Erdogan resisting Nato’s expansion?

Driving a hard bargain is the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s chief survival skill – one that has kept him in power for nearly as long as his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. And the basic principles of bargaining are twofold: never give something away for nothing, and make your threats to walk away convincing.

No surprise, then, that Erdogan’s buzz-killing announcement last week that Turkey would oppose Swedish and Finnish membership of Nato was made in characteristically blunt terms. Speaking of a planned visit of Nordic diplomats to Ankara, Erdogan asked: ‘Are they coming to convince us? Excuse me, but they should not tire themselves.’ He directly contradicted his own diplomats, who a day before in Brussels had broadly signalled that Turkey’s approval of Nato’s latest expansion was a done deal. That good cop, bad cop routine is another classic from the Erdogan playbook of diplomacy.

Will Turkey actually block Finnish and Swedish accession to Nato – which requires unanimous approval by all members? A senior EU source with direct knowledge of the negotiations predicts that the deal will be done ‘soon… once [Erdogan] has extracted as much as he can’ in exchange for his blessing. ‘It is unlikely that Erdogan had one specific policy goal in mind,’ says Asli Aydıntaşbaş, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. ‘But he will no doubt be expecting to be cajoled, persuaded and eventually rewarded for his cooperation, as in the past.’

Ostensibly, Turkey’s sticking point is that both Sweden and Finland have offered asylum to Kurdish and religious opponents of Erdogan. But Turkey has a long list of other grievances against various Nato partners. Several Nato members – as well as Finland and Sweden – imposed sanctions on Turkey after its attacks on Kurds in 2019. The Swedes have long championed a human rights-based approach in relations with Turkey within the EU which has angered Ankara for years.