Turkey’s role in NATO comes under scrutiny

Turkey’s request to join two international organizations headed by Russia and China has added to questions about its role in NATO with which it has clashed in recent years.

Ankara asked this week to join the BRICS economic bloc named after Brazil, Russia, India and China and South Africa. It is seen as a rival to the G7 of the world’s most developed economies and aspirations to join it form the latest pivot by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan away from the West.

Erdoğan has said he also wants Ankara to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). It has raised concerns over the compatibility of Turkey’s membership of NATO, whose security focus is the invasion of Ukraine, with being in blocs spearheaded by Moscow carrying out the aggression.

Joining the SCO “is a non-starter for a NATO country,” said Sinan Ciddi, non-resident senior fellow on Turkey at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, D.C. think tank. “They are mutually opposing organizations.”

Ankara’s move to both BRICS and the SCO “is more than just a hedge against NATO,” he said, “you’re basically looking at Turkey inside of NATO which is a non-performer on many levels.”

Ankara has tweaked the nose of NATO several times in recent years. In 2020, the U.S. sanctioned Turkey for deploying a Russian-made S-400 surface-to-air missile system which Washington says is incompatible with alliance technology.

Ankara also slowed the NATO membership bids of Sweden until an unofficial bargain saw Washington agree in February to sell it F-16 fighter jets in what Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul called a “quid pro quo.”

Erdogan’s Position on Israel

Erdogan was again at odds with the alliance after his labeling of Hamas as a “liberation group” following its October 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel that preceded the Gaza war.

Without specifying how, the Turkish president, a critic of the offensive in Gaza, told a meeting of his ruling AK Party in July that Turkey may enter Israel to help Palestinians in the war as it has done in the past in Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh.

Since the start of the Gaza war, Ankara has blocked co-operation with Israel, a major non-member ally of NATO.

Siddi said that while predominantly Muslim countries—Turkey is officially secular—oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza, Ankara “is literally, not figuratively, offering material support to a terrorist entity considered by NATO and the European Union.”

“I don’t know how much how much more outside of the value system one can be. It’s almost as like our European and NATO leaders don’t want to come to terms with this,” he said. “I don’t know how a leader could be more sort of instructive in their intent in saying where they’re moving towards and how they’re positioning their country.”

Newsweek has contacted NATO and the Turkish foreign ministry for comment.

There are heightened tensions due to the war in Gaza and the resultant increased U.S. military presence in the region. On Monday, an anti-American youth group in Turkey attacked U.S. military service members in the port city of Izmir after which the Turkey Youth Union (TGB) involved posted a social media message that U.S. hands “are stained with the blood of our brave soldiers and thousands of Palestinians.”

In comments for Newsweek last month, Erdogan said that Western powers were taking wrong and potentially dangerous approaches to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza which threatened to spiral into far larger confrontations.

On Russia’s invasion, Erdogan said that “the solution is not more bloodshed and suffering, but rather a lasting peace achieved through dialogue,” and more broadly that Ankara wants to “approach issues with sincerity and rational road maps rather than with codes from hidden agendas and emotional reflexes.”

Former Turkish diplomat Sinan Ülgen, head of the Istanbul-based think tank EDAM, said that Ankara’s request to join an economic group like BRICS was partly borne out of frustration at the decades-long push to join another club—the European Union, as well as stalled negotiations for modernizing an EU customs union deal.

“What we’ve seen really over the past decade is a desire in Ankara to really chart a path of strategic autonomy for Turkey,” Ülgen said. “There is a realization that the current global order opens up space for middle powers like Turkey to diversify its set of correlations away from its traditional partners in the West.”

Ülgen said the absence of any other NATO nations in BRICS for instance means that Turkey’s move to join will be interpreted as a move away from the West “even though Turkish authorities will state that this is essentially a rebalancing.”

Erdogan and Putin

Since the start of Putin’s invasion, Turkey has played a key role in putting in place a deal to ensure grain could be shipped safely from Ukraine’s Black Sea port, which later ended, and it has also supplied Kyiv with weapons such as Bayraktar TB2 attack drones.

But most observers focus on the cordiality of Erdogan’s relations with Putin and the Turkish leader said on the sidelines of the SCO that Ankara could be an intermediary in the Ukraine war, although the Kremlin rejected the offer.

However, Erdogan’s pivot away from the West appears to be by dissatisfaction of its ties with the EU and Washington, according to Yörük Işık, a geopolitical analyst and head of the Bosphorus Observer consultancy based in Istanbul.

“There is a huge lack of engagement from Brussels,” he told Newsweek. “They have settled into this totally unhealthy relation of transactional relations with Turkey.

“Washington is not paying attention to Turkey—from Ankara’s point of view—neither to Turkey’s demands nor to its concerns.”

Işık believes that Ankara sees a multi-polar world in which the old actors are not necessarily fulfilling any of Turkey’s demands. “Some of it is legitimate but the more reasonable thing is for Turkey to make its own in the existing institutions where it’s appreciated more and it can relate concerns much better,” he said.

However, since Putin’s full-scale invasion, he believes there is a greater appreciation for NATO which has again become “Europe’s most important institution.”

“Turkey is a 72-year-old member of this institution, so it can relay its concerns more in the frame of NATO and work towards its goals there,” Işık said. “This is so much better than endless attempts to carve itself new political arenas.”