NATO Unity: Some Members Haggle for LuLu’s
By Elisabeth Braw, Skytop Contributor / May 25th, 2022
Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where she focuses on defense against emerging national security challenges, such as hybrid and grayzone threats. Concurrently, she is a columnist with Foreign Policy, where she writes on national security and the globalized economy, and a member of the National Preparedness Commission (UK).
Before joining AEI, Ms. Braw was a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies in London, where she founded its modern deterrence project. She has also been an associate fellow at the European Leadership Network, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, and a senior consultant at Control Risks, a global risk consultancy.
Ms. Braw started her career as a journalist working for Swedish newspapers and has reported on Europe for The Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek, among others. She is often published in a wide range of publications, including The Economist, Foreign Affairs, The Times (of London), and The Wall Street Journal. She is also the author of “God’s Spies: The Stasi’s Cold War Espionage Campaign Inside the Church” (Eerdmans, 2019).
A frequent speaker at European and NATO conferences, Ms. Braw often appears on BBC Radio 4 and other international media.
Ms. Braw attended the University of Hagen in Germany, graduating with an MA in political science and German literature. She has a BA from Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany.
Turkey and NATO Unity
Last week, Finland’s president and Sweden’s prime minister visited Washington and met with President Biden. The Nordic leaders were following their defense ministers, who had met with their U.S. counterparts earlier in the week. Unsurprisingly, the Americans all promised to fully support their NATO application bids. Indeed, virtually every NATO member state has promised to do the same. Commonly accepted, Finland and Sweden would be an enormous asset to NATO,
Enter stage right is Turkey’s Erdogan, who is now blocking the Nordic siblings’ accession, demonstrating that the alliance, thought to be solid, can suddenly become vulnerable even in a moment of perceived strength.
Wheels in Motion
At a press conference, with White House symbolically in the background, President Biden declared that “Finland and Sweden make NATO stronger.” as he, President Sauli Niinistö of Finland, and Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson of Sweden, exchanged comments affirming their commitment to moving forward.
He’s right. Finland brings enormous reserves with expertise in territorial defense, a skill neglected over the past couple of decades by most Western countries as they focused on expeditionary warfare.
Finland also brings an excellent air force, as does Sweden, which also brings a large navy with outstanding submarine capabilities. Both countries are, of course, vibrant liberal democracies with an excellent good governance record. Along with Biden’s support, shoo-ins affirming U.S. support are Mitch McConnell and other Republican senators who had already visited Helsinki and Stockholm, making their position clear.
As Niinistö and Andersson were in Washington, Estonia approved the Finnish and Swedish applications and Poland extended security guarantees.
Spanner in the Works
But by that time, NATO member state Turkey threw a spanner in the works. Its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogen, announced that he would not support the Finnish and Swedish NATO bids, explaining that “neither of these countries have a clear, open attitude towards terrorist organizations. How can we trust them?” Sweden a “hatchery” for terrorist organizations, he added, vowing that Turkey would block their applications.
For Turkey to lift its block, Erdogan wants Finland and especially Sweden to extradite a number of Kurdish activists who have received political asylum in the two countries over the years.
Parliamentary Parcheesi
“I’m the one he wants to silence,” responded Amineh Kakabaveh, a Kurdish activist born in Iran who arrived in Sweden as a teenager. Kakabaveh also happens to be a member of the Swedish parliament—and she gives Andersson’s minority Social Democrat government a one-vote majority support in parliament. So desperate were the Social Democrats to get the support of Kakabaveh, who represented the Left Party until it expelled her, that they signed a pledge to strengthen their links with PYD, a Syrian Kurdish party that Erdogan’s considers an affiliate of the PKK. Now Kakabaveh has withdrawn her support for the government, which she accuses of yielding to Turkey.
The result: Andersson’s government has lost its razor-thin parliamentary support majority just as it’s shepherding Sweden into NATO.
Yes, on any NATO matters it can rely on the opposition, as most opposition parties support NATO membership. But, Sweden is in the midst of its core political campaign season, with general elections approaching in September.
Talking Turkey for Finland and Sweden
Three decades ago, NATO looked moribund, an alliance without a purpose. Today, it looks stronger once again, so strong in fact that two strong believers in military non-alignment are seeking admission and another prospective applicant has been invaded over its desire to join.
However, a values-based alliance with no mechanism for expelling unruly members relies on the cooperation of its members. That is, of course, why the alliance so carefully assesses prospective joiners. Turkey was never a clear-cut case, but its strategic location eventually persuaded NATO member states to accept its application. Today plenty of officials in various member states fervently wish NATO had never done so. In fact, as Eric Edelman, a former US ambassador to Finland and Turkey and later undersecretary of defense, noted in a recent op-ed, “Erdogan needs to proceed with caution, because there is broad support for Finland and Sweden in Congress, and many members would like nothing better than to trade Turkey as a member for the two Nordic states”.
Be that as it may, NATO is stuck with Turkey, and Erdogan doesn’t care that other countries see him exceptionally difficult or a salesman who exploits every opportunity to haggle.
Adding further chaos, other leaders may conclude that they too can extract concessions from NATO allies as a quid pro quo for supporting Finland and Sweden’s bids. The Kremlin, it’s safe to assume, is actively looking, hoping that precisely this will happen. In its moment of greatest strength, NATO is suddenly looking vulnerable.
What’s Next
Both anti-NATO conspiracy theorists and NATO fans alike consider the alliance as seemingly extraordinarily powerful, yet the tale of Erdoğan, Kakabaveh, and a wafer-thin Swedish parliamentary majority demonstrate that it can be easily weakened.
If I were an advisor to Putin tasked with weakening NATO, I’d go about finding such vulnerabilities. Likewise, if I were a leader of a NATO member state, I would identify and fortify those vulnerabilities before they are targeted.