NATO and Turkey: a marriage of convenience in danger

What's Turkey's game? This is one of the questions that many analysts in the field of international relations have been asking for months. The answer to this question is far from simple. Ankara's foreign policy has evolved into a complex network of alliances and enmities - and sometimes alliances and enmities at the same time - in many of the most relevant geopolitical theatres in the eastern Mediterranean region, its zone of influence.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's militaristic drift in Syria and Libya, to cite the two hottest scenarios, has often been interpreted as a flight forward; a kind of smokescreen deployed by an Executive whose economy is immersed in a crisis that threatens to become chronic and which, on an international level, is increasingly criticised for its treatment of opponents, journalists, lawyers and so on.

Indeed, outside its borders, the situation does not look at all rosy for Turkey's interests. Although Erdogan has managed to forge strategic links of some importance around him, his constant ups and downs have meant that the major powers do not see his country as an over-reliable partner. Perhaps the clearest example is Ankara's complicated relationship with NATO.

Like almost everything to do with the Atlantic Alliance, Turkey's incorporation is related to one of the many episodes of the Cold War. Like so many other scenarios, the country of Anatolia was one of the places where the United States and the Soviet Union tried to expand their influence in the years immediately following World War II. 

Not surprisingly, thanks to its control over the Bosphorus and Dardanelles Straits, Turkey enjoys enviable power as an arbiter in the eastern Mediterranean. In 1946, the USSR tried to get in on the act and asked the Turkish government for rights of way so that it could connect the Black Sea to Mediterranean waters. In the face of the initial refusal by Turkey, Moscow increased its naval presence near the Turkish coast, carrying out military manoeuvres on a continuous basis, in an attempt to intimidate Ankara. 

In view of the danger that this circumstance represented, both in terms of what the Soviet presence in the Mediterranean would mean and an eventual establishment of communism in Turkey, the United States, with President Harry S. Truman at its head, showed its firm support for Ankara, drawing it into its orbit. After years of unresolved tensions, in 1952, already with Dwight Eisenhower in the White House, Turkey joined NATO. It was the first enlargement of the Atlantic Alliance, which added Greece to its cause as well.
 

Since then, Turkey has played a role as a checkpoint that served Washington's interests very well. It should be remembered that, during the second half of the 20th century, Moscow was not the only communist regime in the area: Bulgaria and Albania were also in the sphere of the USSR (although the regime in Tirana was always somewhat more independent). Moreover, Tito's Yugoslavia was also governed by a communist system, even though it decided to integrate into the bloc of non-aligned countries.

The point of greatest tension came in 1974. That year, Turkish troops invaded Cyprus and established the unrecognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus on the island. Tensions began to emerge with Greece which, even today, continue to be a factor of instability, as we shall see later.

The Cyprus question did not become too important and, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Turkey continued to be an important ally of Washington. Between the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century, the country was considered a strong power, but with firm democratic foundations; a player that could act as a stabilising power in the Middle East region. 

However, the relationship of trust between Washington and Ankara seems to have been broken in recent years. All the tranquillity that Turkey once provided in the eastern Mediterranean has translated into nervousness. The consequences triggered by the failed coup d'état of 2016 have diametrically changed the way democratic countries view Turkey; what seemed to be a guarantor regime gave way to an authoritarian one, with very little room for internal criticism.

On the outside, Erdogan also began to go it alone. Perhaps the climax of this new scenario took place in June 2019, when the Turkish government bought several Russian-made S-400 air defence systems from the Kremlin. This transaction violated NATO's founding principles, since Russian missiles are designed precisely to locate and shoot down American fighters, such as the F-35. In the economic field, moreover, the Turkish president secured commitments to import Russian natural gas, through the Turk Stream project.

The picture, therefore, was as follows: the second largest NATO army by number of troops was not only deviating from the lines imposed by the United States, but, to make matters worse, was moving closer to Russia, which is supposed to be the main rival of the Atlantic Alliance.
 

Erdogan, however, still had new screenplay twists ready which, for the time being, have been translated into three different scenarios: Syria, Libya and the waters of the eastern Mediterranean.

In northern Syria, the Turkish army has carried out up to four different military operations since the withdrawal of the US armed forces. At first, the sending of soldiers to the neighboring country was justified by the presence of PKK terrorists among the ranks of the 'peshmerga', a Kurdish militia that was very important for the territorial defeat of Daesh.

However, it soon became clear that the ultimate goal was quite different: according to reports from US intelligence itself, Turkey has been arming rebel groups, many close to jihadist organizations, who are fighting against Bachar al-Asad's Russian-backed Syrian Arab Army for control of the territories around Idlib. This strategy, which seeks, among other things, to secure access to Syrian oil wells, has led Syrian and Turkish soldiers to enter into direct hostilities on more than one occasion.

At the end of February, in fact, a Syrian bombing killed at least 34 Turkish soldiers. In this situation, Erdogan requested formal support from NATO. The organisation chaired by the Norwegian Jens Stoltenberg merely issued a statement of support and Turkey was forced to negotiate a ceasefire itself with the Russians.
 

Libya is the other big arena where the interests of Turkey and Russia diverge. One could even say that the two conflicts are communicating vessels. Like Syria, Ankara also has few allies to back up its position on the ground. Together with Qatar, Turkey is the only country that is sending military support to Fayez Sarraj's National Accord Government (NAG), recognised as legitimate by the United Nations, in the face of the attacks by the Libyan National Army (LNA) of rebel marshal Khalifa Haftar.

The point is that Turkey is not only sending its own military: it is also transferring war militia from Syria to North Africa to defend its interests, both ideological - its friendship with the Muslim Brothers, present in the GNA - and economic - the gas reserves on the coast. The situation, in short, would be said to be, once again, of Turkey against the world. While Turkey is practically alone on Sarraj's side, Haftar's LNA receives logistical support from Russia and Egypt, as well as political blessing from such prominent players as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, France - and also the USA and Greece.

Since the fall of Gaddafi in 2011, NATO's role in the North African country has gone relatively unnoticed. It should be remembered that the dictator fell precisely as a result of an Alliance operation that was rather questioned from the point of view of public international law. After the chaos of the power struggle, the role of the organisation has now been blurred in a situation with two main sides in dispute, as each country is acting on its own.
 

The Libyan conflict has another derivative, which is access to gas resources in the eastern Mediterranean. It is here that NATO is most obviously being tested. Why? Basically, Turkey has set its sights on the gas fields off the Libyan coast and has already signed agreements with the NAM government for preferential access to them, so that a maritime corridor is established between the two countries' coasts.

However, Greece and Cyprus are back on the scene. The executives in Athens and Nicosia have branded the pact as illegal, as it contravenes existing provisions governing the law of the sea. The dispute is still open at present and extends to the area of Cyprus. Turkey has sent prospecting vessels into what it considers, in theory, to be the territorial waters of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which no country recognises.

The whole mess is resulting in growing tensions between Athens and Ankara. The government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis has strengthened its ties with Donald Trump's administration by acquiring war material, while Turkey continues to play its double game with Russia. 
 

NATO, meanwhile, is in a very difficult situation, as it sees two of its member states - precisely the two that joined in the first expansion, back in 1952 - going through an uncertain relationship, with no prospect of an amicable resolution in the future. In official statements, Stoltenberg supports all his allies equally and, in return, Turkey and

Greece, make their inclusion in NATO a fundamental point of their defence policy.
However, reality is proving to be more complicated, especially in the case of Turkey. Erdogan approaches Russia and then supports anti-Moscow interests in Syria and Libya. Similarly, he buys S-400 missiles and does not hesitate to apply to NATO for protection when they are badly hit. With this game of cat and mouse, what the future holds is an unknown.