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FILE PHOTO: The President of the Republic of Turkey, Mr. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz speak at a press conference in Berlin on November 17th, 2023.
Still no Swedish meatballs at the NATO cantina
Just days after the Swedish foreign minister said he was confident his country would join NATO “within weeks,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has thrown up another roadblock.
If you’re counting, the process has now dragged on for more than 18 months, as Turkey and Hungary are the two NATO member holdouts blocking Sweden’s formal accession to the alliance.
Erdoğan says that while he’s “done his duty” by asking lawmakers to greenlight Sweden’s entry, he now expects Washington to reward him by approving his long-coveted purchase of US-made F-16 fighter jets. The Turkish president’s idea is that both processes should occur “simultaneously.”
But the US Congress doesn’t share that idea. Lawmakers in Washington won’t sign off on the F-16 sale “until Sweden is let into NATO,” according to Eurasia Group US Director Clayton Allen. And Erdoğan’s recent statements in support of Hamas and sanctions-busting trade with Russia will “make that even thornier,” he says.
Still, Erdoğan’s game isn’t to block Sweden indefinitely, but rather to engage in “diplomatic grandstanding and bazaar bargaining”, says Emre Peker, Europe analyst at Eurasia Group.
The inflection point, says Peker, will be Turkish local elections scheduled for next March. If Erdoğan detects political advantage in chastising the US and wagging his finger at NATO allies still, he can have his lawmakers withhold approval for Sweden until after that vote, if he likes.
Either way, that timeline would – in theory – make it possible to see Swedish meatballs on the menu at the NATO summit in Washington in July, commemorating the 75th anniversary of the alliance.
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan speaks with Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom ahead of the NATO Foreign Ministers meeting at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, November 28, 2023.
Sweden is confident it will finally become a NATO member
Sweden’s top diplomat is optimistic that the nearly year-long delay in his country’s NATO accession caused by Turkey and Hungary will soon be over. Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom says that Turkey could approve Sweden’s NATO membership “within weeks,” and he expects Budapest to follow Ankara’s lead.
Billstrom met this week with his Turkish counterpart and spoke with Hungary’s foreign minister. “We expect white smoke from Budapest the moment there’s white smoke from Ankara,” he said, using the metaphor for conclaves signaling they’ve selected a pope.
Sweden and Finland broke long-standing policies of neutrality and moved to join NATO last year after Russia invaded Ukraine. Finland is now a member of the alliance, but Turkey and Hungary have obstructed Sweden’s bid. Expanding NATO requires the approval of all current members.
Turkey initially objected to Sweden’s application over allegations that Stockholm supported Kurdish groups that Ankara considers to be terrorists. Ankara also took issue with an arms embargo that Sweden imposed on Turkey, though that has since been lifted. At the NATO summit in July, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reversed course and said he’d support Sweden’s bid after getting assurances that Stockholm would work to address Ankara’s security concerns.
Meanwhile, Hungary's governing Fidesz Party has accused Sweden of spreading “blatant lies” about the state of democracy in the Central European country and has stood in the way of a parliamentary vote on the matter. A senior Fidesz lawmaker recently said there’s “little chance” parliament will vote on Sweden’s NATO bid this year.
Similarly, Hungarian PM Viktor Orban in September said that his country is in “no rush” to ratify Swedish accession. Despite Sweden’s apparent confidence this issue will soon be resolved, it seems the Scandinavian country may have to wait until 2024. But we’ll be watching to see whether Billstrom is right – that Sweden could be added to the alliance in the more immediate future.
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan in Sochi, Russia, September 4, 2023.
Turkish exports of military-tied goods to Russia skyrocket
Turkish exports of military-tied goods to Russia have spiked this year, sprinkling even more awkwardness atop the already tense state of relations between Ankara and NATO.
Amid the war in Ukraine, the US and its allies have imposed export controls to prevent dual-use items – goods that can be used in civilian and military applications – from reaching Russia. The goal is to throw a wrench in Russia’s war machine by limiting access to items that might aid its military, such as microchips, telescopic sights, and communications equipment.
Turkey, a NATO ally, exported $158 million worth of 45 categories of goods the US deems “high priority” to Russia and five other former Soviet countries between January and September 2023, according to a Financial Times report. That’s three times the level exported during the same period last year.
The number of sensitive goods exported from Turkey to the five ex-Soviet countries reportedly did not line up with their reported imports, raising the question of whether the goods actually went straight to Russia.
Washington’s response: The US has already sanctioned Turkish companies in relation to the war in Ukraine, and it’s conceivable that more private entities could be slapped with economic penalties over the exportation of military-linked goods to Russia. The Turkish government has not embraced Western sanctions against Russia, but its foreign ministry told FT that “strict monitoring and prevention of efforts to skirt sanctions through Turkey is an integral part of our … policy.”
James O’Brien, US assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, on Monday told reporters that Turkey has taken steps to make it more difficult for certain items to transit its territory, but also conceded that “obviously there’s always more to do.”
Brian Nelson, US Treasury under-secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, meanwhile, is set to visit Ankara and Istanbul this week. During the trip, Nelson will “discuss efforts to prevent, disrupt, and investigate trade and financial activity that benefit the Russian effort in its war against Ukraine,” Treasury said in a statement.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams
NYC mayor in hot water over Turkey
The mayor of America’s largest city is now ensnared in a scandal involving one of America’s ficklest allies.
Federal agents are currently investigating whether New York Mayor Eric Adams’ campaign violated financing rules during his 2021 run for office – the feds are reportedly focusing on alleged contributions from a Turkish-owned construction company.
The plot thickens: Did Adams, before taking office, pressure local Fire Department officials to rush approvals for a new consulate building in Manhattan that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was eager to unveil during United Nations General Assembly week in 2021? Thus far, Adams hasn’t been accused of any wrongdoing.
Adams, a centrist Democrat, is an eccentric former police officer who styles himself, variously, as a homeopath, crimefighter, bon vivant, and rat killer. Elected as the city’s second-ever Black mayor in 2021, he has faced criticism over the city’s sluggish post-pandemic recovery and has clashed with Washington over responsibility for absorbing the more than 100,000 asylum-seekers who have arrived in the city since 2022.
Turkey, of course, is one of Washington’s great frenemies. A NATO member, yes, but one that maintains especially warm ties with Moscow, has attacked US-backed Kurdish fighters in Syria, and has sought to complicate NATO accession for Sweden.
Residents of Constantinople (today: Istanbul, Turkey) celebrate the entry into World War I of the Ottoman Empire in front of the Ministry of War
How the Ottoman collapse led to decades of bloodshed in the Holy Land
Quick, when did the last Roman emperor abdicate power?
Did you say 476 CE? Maybe 1453 for the fans of Byzantium?
You’d be wrong, of course. The last emperor of Rome – or Kayser-i-Rûm, as he would have put it – stepped down exactly 101 years ago today, when Sultan Mehmet VI dissolved the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans had claimed to be successors to the Eastern Roman Empire, which they conquered in the 15th century.
The Ottomans’ end was a long time coming: Mehmet’s ancestors struggled to reverse a long decline in Ottoman fortunes through the 18th and 19th centuries, and the nascent 20th had been no kinder. Revolts in the Balkans, driven by new ideas of ethno-nationalism, carved half a dozen new countries out of Ottoman lands in the years before World War I.
But it was Istanbul’s decision to side with Germany and Austria in that conflict that proved the coup de grâce, as Istanbul’s Entente adversaries successfully exploited ethnic and nationalist resentment against Turkish domination to weaken the empire’s periphery.
As the empire perished, the political, cultural, and economic structure that the Ottomans had imposed on the Middle East for nearly half a millennium unraveled with it, despite European attempts to reshape the region, leaving us to deal with the consequences even today.
In recognition of this understudied anniversary, GZERO is taking a deep dive into how the fall of the Ottoman Empire set up the dynamics that have dominated headlines for the last month: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
After the Ottomans joined the war, Britain and France attempted to storm the gates of Istanbul by seizing the Dardanelles Strait and sailing warships into Istanbul’s harbor.
It proved a macabre error. Against the Entente’s expectations, the Turks fought like lions to defend their capital, throwing back crack units from the foremost military powers of the age in eight months of dogged resistance on the Gallipoli peninsula.
If you’ve seen “Lawrence of Arabia,” you know what comes next. The Entente powers shifted tactics, focusing instead on the ethnically non-Turkish regions in the empire to undermine Istanbul. France and Britain began arming and advising the Arab Revolt, taking advantage of their mobility and local knowledge to outmaneuver largely ethnic Turkish forces fighting far from their homes in Anatolia. In exchange for their help, the Europeans promised a post-war Arab state stretching from Aleppo to Aden, in tune with the ethno-nationalist zeitgeist.
But behind the backs of their Arab allies, British and French diplomats had conspired to slice off the Arab-majority regions of the Ottoman empire in a secret treaty known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. The British helped themselves to what is now southern Iraq, Jordan and Israel, while the French carved out Syria, Lebanon, and much of the Kurdish highlands in modern Iraq and Turkey.
Britain secured a mandate from the newly formed League of Nations to occupy and govern the southern Levant by 1922, officially called Palestine for the first time. About five years earlier, the British government had issued the Balfour Declaration, expressing support for a “national home for the Jewish people'' in the Holy Land, which the League’s mandate now obliged London to establish. Jewish communities, particularly from Eastern Europe, began migrating by the tens of thousands, while the Arabic-speaking Muslim and Christian communities in the region chafed at being sidelined by the British in favor of the newcomers.
Low-level violence became a regular thing, and a full-on Arab revolt against the British broke out in 1936. By late 1937, hard-pressed British forces called on Jewish militia to aid them, and violence continued up to the eve of World War II.
Faced with an incipient German invasion of Poland in 1939, the British issued a White Paper that heavily favored Arab interests, restricting Jewish immigration and rejecting a partition of the mandate into Jewish and Arab sections. Jewish authorities begrudgingly accepted the terms and supported Britain in hopes of securing better conditions later.
Then came the holocaust. Even as Nazi Germany killed Jews by the millions in Europe, the British refused to allow all those who escaped to settle in Mandatory Palestine. Many Jews who did manage to find their way to the Holy Land were thrown into detention camps or deported to far-flung imperial possessions like Mauritius. In response, radical Jewish militants began a guerilla campaign against British authorities in 1944, carrying out high-profile assassinations and terrorist bombings.
After the war in Europe ended, the British looked for a way out of Palestine. In 1947, they announced their intention to end the mandate, and pushed the problem onto the newly formed United Nations. The UN Special Committee on Palestine issued a plan to partition the territory into Arab and Jewish states with Jerusalem run by the UN. Arab leaders rejected the plan, saying it privileged Jewish interests. The British then announced they’d pull out all their troops by August 1948, even as Jewish and Arab violence ramped up.
They didn’t even make it to the summer. On 14 May 1948, the State of Israel formally declared its independence before the last British troops had pulled out of the port city of Haifa.By the next day, Israel was at war with Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq.
Turkish lira banknotes are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on June 1, 2022
Hard Numbers: Turkey hikes rates, US strikes Syria, France sentences jailbreak legend, Qatar to execute Indians, China cracks cat caper
35: Turkey’s central bank ordered another monster rate hike on Thursday, upping the key lending benchmark by 5 percentage points to 35%. The move comes after a similar increase last month as the Central Bank struggles to tame an annual inflation rate above 60%. Since President Erdogan was reelected in May, he’s allowed the bank to drop his “actually high interest rates cause inflation” approach in favor of a more orthodox hawkish policy.
14: France’s most notorious career criminal and jailbreak artist, Rédoine Faïd, was sentenced to 14 years for his cinematic 2018 escape from Reau prison, a getaway involving two of his brothers, a handful of smoke bombs, and a hijacked helicopter. Faid was later caught dressed in a burqa in his hometown north of Paris. “I have an addiction which consumes me,” Faïd said at the trial. “I am addicted to freedom.”
2: US forces on Friday carried out airstrikes on two targets in eastern Syria that are linked to Iran-backed militias. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the strikes had nothing to do with the current conflict in Gaza, and that they were "narrowly tailored in self-defense" following a recent wave of rocket and drone attacks on US forces in the region. As Israel readies its expected ground invasion of Gaza, the US has been bolstering its defenses in the region to deter possible escalation by Iran or its proxies.
8: A Qatari court has ordered the death penalty for eight Indian citizens who were arrested in the Gulf kingdom last year. The charges against them have never been made public, but local media have suggested they were believed to be spies. The Indian government has said it will “take up” the issue with Doha directly.
1,000: Acting on a tip from local animal rights activists, police in the eastern Chinese city of Zhangjiagang stopped a truck filled with 1,000 cats en route to be slaughtered and passed off as pork or lamb skewers. We’re happy the cats were rescued, but we have one pressing question: Who on earth managed to herd a thousand cats into a truck? Have you ever tried to herd as many as one cat into anything? Whoever this person is, we could use their skills in the US Congress.
Will Israel's ban on UN staff impact peace efforts?
Ian Bremmer shares his insights on global politics this week on World In :60.
Is Israel's UN ban a blow to peace efforts?
If it was permanent, I'd say yes as it is. I think we won't be talking about it in a few days. Look, obviously, on the back of these horrific terrorist attacks, everyone in Israel is on edge and more willing to lash out when they hear anything that sounds not 100% aligned with the message they want to hear. I'm empathetic to that, and I expect they're going to back away, especially because the Secretary-General has been consistent in talking about how he has condemned Hamas terrorist attacks. You know, anyone can pick a sentence and cherry-pick it for their purposes. That's what's happened here. I think it's unfortunate. The Global South will certainly align more with the Secretary-General, as they always do. But Antonio then doubled down and clarified his statement on Hamas all the way through. I think this will not be a big deal.
Will Qatar's diplomacy efforts secure the release of Gaza hostages?
Meaning more Gaza hostages. We've got four out so far. I certainly think a lot more can be released if there is further delay for Israel on the ground assault. And, you know, frankly, I think that there's very good reason for the Israelis to continue to hold off. I mean, the fact of the matter is, you will get more citizens, not military people that have been captured, and there are a bunch of those, too. But I think, you know, women, children, infirm, the aged, the willingness of Hamas to let them go, buy themselves time, get more international support as they do it, less condemnation and work with the Qataris is probably pretty high. So I do think that that's going to happen. But I'd be very surprised if the Israelis are willing to wait for like a month before the invasion. It does feel to me increasingly soon.
How will Erdoğan's stance on Hamas impact Turkey's standing with the Western world?
Well, I mean, it's not new that Erdoğan has had warm relations with Hamas, supported Hamas, and certainly has not considered them a terrorist organization as the United States does. He also has recently, after the terrorist attacks, refused to condemn them. That is a harder-line policy than we see even from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia right now. And keep in mind, Turkey is a NATO ally. On the other hand, they're now letting the Sweden vote go through the parliament. So, I mean, the fact is that Turkey has always been a NATO's ally with challenges and they're never 100% aligned with the United States and most of Europe on most things. And this continues to be the case. But let's be clear that unlike the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where the entire West was aligned, on the Israeli response to the Hamas terrorist attacks, the West is not fully aligned. And certainly most of the world opposes Israel's military bombings. The extent of the bombings as well as the likely ground invasion. So in that regard, I think there's less to be seen here with Turkey's position.
That's it for me, and I'll talk to you all real soon.
President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan is holding a press conference during NATO Summit
Turkey finally greenlights Sweden’s entry into NATO
Stockholm is finally within sight of joining NATO after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday submitted a bill to parliament approving Sweden’s membership. There is no set timeline for its passage, but a similar bill for Finland passed in 13 days.
The process had been held up over Ankara’s insistence that Sweden do more to clamp down on the Kurdistan Workers Party, whose armed wing has waged a decades-long insurgency in the eastern highlands. Stockholm promised to involve its intelligence agencies in asylum applications from Turkish Kurds, among other steps, but Ankara remained unsatisfied, dragging the process out.
It’s not clear that Sweden did anything in recent days to precipitate Erdogan’s acquiescence, but he has been facing increased exasperation from NATO allies. After all, he said he would pass on Sweden’s accession to parliament at the NATO summit in July. Getting even that far took the Biden administration dropping its objections to Turkey buying F-16 jets and Sweden promising to help with Ankara’s moribund European Union membership bid.
Since then, the world has changed considerably. With the war in Israel and Ukraine’s counteroffensive making torturously slow progress, Erdogan may sense a better deal is not in the cards. And, with his F-16s held up by the US Senate, he may also sense the time is right to give a little in order to gain a little rhetorical leverage.