Turkey’s gradual distancing from Western values and aggression towards fellow NATO allies has not been addressed within the military alliance, diplomats and officials told the New York Times in an article published on Monday.
A more aggressive, nationalist, and religious Turkey is increasingly at odds with its Western allies over Libya, Syria, Iraq, Russia and the energy resources of the eastern Mediterranean.
The country has become “the elephant in the room” for NATO that few within the alliance want to discuss, the NYT said, citing European diplomats.
“It’s getting hard to describe Turkey as an ally of the US,” said Philip H. Gordon, a foreign policy adviser and former assistant secretary of state who dealt with Turkey during the Obama administration.
Despite that, Turkey is getting a kind of free pass, analysts say, its path having been cleared by a lack of consistent US leadership, exacerbated by President Trump’s contempt for NATO and his clear admiration for Erdogan.
“You can’t say what US policy on Turkey is, and you can’t even see where Trump is,” Mr. Gordon said. “It’s a big dilemma for US policy, where we seem to disagree strategically on nearly every issue.”
But NATO officials’ general meekness in standing up to Turkey has not helped, analysts say, pointing to the group’s secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, whose job is to keep the 30-nation alliance together, but who is considered excessively tolerant of both American and Turkish misbehavior.
The last serious discussion of Turkey’s policies among NATO ambassadors was late last year, despite the purchase of the antiaircraft system, the S-400.
Other countries, like Hungary and Poland, also fall short on the values scale, argued Nicholas Burns, a former NATO ambassador now at Harvard. But only Turkey blocks key alliance business.
Turkey has blocked NATO partnerships for countries it dislikes, like Armenia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.
More seriously, for many months Turkey blocked a NATO plan for the defense of Poland and the Baltic nations, which all border Russia. And Turkey wanted NATO to list various armed Kurdish groups, which have fought for their independence, as terrorist groups — something that NATO does not do.
Some of these same Kurdish groups are also Washington’s best allies in its fight against ISIS and Al Qaeda in Syria and Iraq.
Turkey has pursued its own national interests in northern Syria, where it now has more than 10,000 troops, and in Libya, where its military support for a failing government helped turn the tide in return for a share in Libya’s rich energy resources.
Also, Turkey said it was providing aid rather than arms to Libya. NATO officials say that its military committee is investigating and that the evidence is not as clear-cut as the French suggest.
