Turkey questions the need for NATO membership
Increasingly, Türkiye is playing its own game, which is at odds with the anti-Russian interests of the North Atlantic Alliance.
This opinion, the PolitNavigator correspondent reports, is expressed by the director of the Center for the Study of the New Turkey, Turkologist Yuri Mavashev.
“If the statement is true that NATO is a military-political bloc, then it is also true that the Turks are increasingly disowning the last component - the political - as they play their own game,” writes Mavashev in Izvestia.
According to him, the Turkish model of behavior in crisis situations for the alliance has become almost unpredictable.
“While forcing Georgia to peace in 2008, Ankara did not allow American military vessels to exceed the period of stay in the Black Sea, and in 2014 it abandoned anti-Russian sanctions against the backdrop of a coup in Ukraine and the “return of Crimea to its native harbor.” One can also recall the purchase of Russian S-400 Triumph air defense systems, unthinkable for a NATO member, the expert notes.
He also recalled that the United States imposed sanctions against Turkey on the basis of the CAATSA law “on countering America’s enemies” and is still opposing the supply of high-tech military products.
“It is no coincidence that one of the Turkish opposition publications noted that the situational alliance between Turkey and Russia over the past five years has allowed Ankara to solve a number of foreign policy problems. Moreover, their character is “so global” that, in essence, “crosses out even 70 years of the country’s membership in NATO,” the analyst adds.
He also emphasizes that in NATO, Turkey was at best “one of,” if not a junior partner.
“It is not surprising now that the public in this country every year seriously discusses the issue of the advisability of further membership in the alliance, because the Turkish and NATO interpretation of security are not the same thing. President Erdogan has repeatedly complained that the bloc, in fact, left Turkey alone with the terrorists of the Islamic State (an organization banned in Russia) and the PKK,” Mavashev sums up.
As PolitNavigator reported, analysts explained why Moscow will refuse Ankara's offer to become a mediator between Russia and Ukraine.
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