Hello Europe Podcast Podcast

At the top of NATO, Erdogan spoilsport

The leaders of the 29 NATO states have gathered since Tuesday, December 3 in London. Although this summit marks the 70th anniversary of the Atlantic Alliance, the anniversary is not festive. Tensions complicate exchanges between several members of the Alliance with, in the role of the main spoilsport, the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

This summit promised to be the theater of frank explanations between leaders, in particular between the French president Emmanuel Macron and his Turkish counterpart. They met on the sidelines of the summit, alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Officially, the meeting, which lasted about an hour, would have " gone very well ". This is in any case what Recep Tayyip Erdogan said some time later. As a reminder, a few days earlier, the head of the Turkish state had asked Emmanuel Macron to " check his brain dead ." He was responding to criticisms by the French president about NATO's difficulties, illustrated by the Ankara offensive against Kurdish forces in northern Syria.

Their meeting in London was announced all the more stormy that a few hours ago, Emmanuel Macron had given a layer by accusing Turkey of working " sometimes with intermediaries of the IS ", the Islamic State group. The French president called on Ankara to clarify its " ambiguities " vis-à-vis these " groups ", without further details.

What stir the anger of Turkish President

Recep Tayyip Erdogan has certainly not reacted to Emmanuel Macron's last remarks, but they are all the more likely to have irritated him that they are returning the thesis that the Turkish president had come to defend at this summit: in the clear that it is not his country that associates with terrorists, but some NATO powers, since they support politically and for some militarily the Kurdish forces in Syria. The Turkish president has never accepted that the United States, but also France, choose to fight the Islamic State group alongside Kurdish YPG fighters even though they emanate directly from the PKK, a group that the Western powers consider he, as a terrorist.

Ankara sulks NATO

Turkey refuses to support Nato-sponsored defense plans for the Baltic States and Poland until the Alliance officially qualifies the YPGs as a " terrorist group ".

Ankara's allies are shouting blackmail, but these maneuvers illustrate at least two developments. First, that of Turkey, which is no longer this pillar of NATO ready to align almost automatically with the other Western powers. The country of Recep Tayyip Erdogan claims an independent foreign policy. This resulted, in particular, in its purchase from Russia of a state-of-the-art S-400 air defense system. The other evolution is that of NATO, and its difficulty in maintaining political cohesion when its members do not necessarily have the same hierarchy of threats. For Turkey, clearly, the number one threat is not the Islamic State group. These are the land claims of Kurdish armed groups.

On the same subject