Turkish president and NATO secretary of state avuşolu: the status of relations between the US and the NATO allies

The Secretary of State said on Thursday that the US will soon be able to call the two NATO allies.

Both Sweden and Canada would like to see them join the alliance at the NATO summit in July. However, a significant hurdle stands in the way of this becoming a reality: Turkey has yet to give the plan its formal and official blessing.

Turkey’s president doesn’t like to have Sweden andFinland in his country on security grounds. The PKK is a banned terror group in Turkey and the United States and Sweden, but Turkey says both countries are helping them. Erdogan says he would like these individuals to be extradited; Sweden has made clear this won’t happen.

Erdoğan has also called on Finland to publicly abandon the arms embargo it imposed on Turkey in 2019, after it invaded northern Syria. A step which Sweden — which had joined the embargo — took in September.

“It is possible for us to assess the candidacy of Finland separately and this will no doubt be a topic that is discussed in the meetings we have today,” said Çavuşoğlu at a press conference in Ankara, Turkey alongside NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.

“After the declaration that a different decision could be reached in relation to Finland, we discussed this matter with the countries involved and NATO,” he said.

The avuşolu story: Turkish-Sweet relations in the fight against terrorism and Turkey-Hungary

Relations between Turkey and Sweden also deteriorated after Çavuşoğlu accused the Swedish government of being complicit in the burning of the Quran at a protest in Stockholm in January.

“They have removed any restrictions on arms exports, strengthened their legislation on terrorism. And Sweden is also amending their constitution and stepped up the cooperation with Türkiye, also established a permanent mechanism to continue to work closely with Türkiye in the fight against terrorism,” he continued.

Turkey is not the only nation blocking the move: Hungary has also failed to ratify the Nordics’ accession which further muddies the waters. However, right now getting Turkey on side is considered the priority.

Editor’s Note: Marja Heinonen, a Finnish author of several books, has more than three decades’ experience as a journalist, editor and in academia, and holds a doctorate in communications. The views expressed here are her own. CNN has more opinion on it.

Finnish and Finnish: Can NATO “hand in hand” with Sweden be negotiated”? Comments on Prime Minister Biden’s announcement in Budapest

We’re not just neighbors; We are bound together by centuries of shared history. Parts of Finland were ruled for 500 years (sometimes uneasily, to be honest) by the kingdom of Sweden. And along with Finnish, Swedish is one of two official languages in Finland. Finns are very good at communicating in the language.

The Russian neighbor that was once part of the Soviet Union made us develop robust military defenses in order to keep us out of war. For a long time, Finns thought our eastern neighbor had become a peace loving trading partner, and no longer posed a threat to our national security.

In his meetings in Poland this week, US President Joe Biden highlighted the importance of the article to leaders from nine countries who were on the front line of any potential hostilities with Moscow.

According to political watchers in Hungary, the application process will likely go on for a while this spring. Hungary will vote on NATO bids from both Sweden andFinland in March, and officials have signaled that they expect to approve both bids.

So it would appear that July’s NATO summit could also seal the fate of Sweden – and definitively determine whether Helsinki ditches its old friend and forges ahead into the military alliance alone.

For the last few months, that possibility has been talked about in political circles and among average citizens in my country of over five million people. Officials from both countries are plowing ahead, even amid growing uncertainty as to whether the two Nordic allies can move forward together.

Finland’s Prime Minister Sanna Marin said at a press conference in Stockholm this month that Helsinki would join NATO “hand in hand” with Sweden. There are, however, varying interpretations of “hand in hand.”

Some Finns think, in fact, that it makes sense for us to go first, given the more than 800-mile long border we share with Russia, creating a greater security risk. If Sweden and Finn join first, it won’t make a difference at all, according to others. Both nations want to close the deal as soon as possible.

A survey done by TaloustuTKimus found a slim majority in Finns that would join the alliance ahead of Sweden.

The NATO leader said that Turkey,Finland and Sweden will meet next month to address the challenges that have hampered Sweden’s accession application.

There are a lot of officials who spoke with CNN who are pessimists. They think the chances of Erdogan shifting his position before July 11 are as good as zero and are already thinking beyond that summit.

“The image he has created of a strongman who gets results for the Turkish people has been shattered,” explains Gonul Tol of the Middle East Institute’s Turkey program. There is a lot anti-Kurd sentiment in Turkey at the moment. This is a good topic for him to bang his drum and a dramatic U-turn would only make him look weaker.”

“Russia has been a lifeline economically for Turkey after other nations imposed sanctions for their activities in Syria, their cooperation militarily with Russia and other hostile activity,” Tol explains. “Without Russian money, Erdogan would not have been able to raise wages or provide financial support to students. He is now promising mass rebuilding, post-earthquake. Russia is still seen as an attractive partner by the president.

Like many Western officials, Tol believes the Turkish claims about Sweden and Finland harboring terrorists provide perfect cover for Erdogan not to engage at a politically inconvenient time on the NATO question.

The three parties are having talks about the election, but there is a conversation about how much political capital they will need to spend if they win.

For this to happen, officials are bracing for Turkey to make more realistic demands than the handing over of individuals it deems to be terrorists, such as the lifting of sanctions or the US allowing Turkey to buy the fighter jets that the country badly needs to keep its air force up to date.

The fate of the NATO alliance after the first Ukrainian invasion of Ukraine: Orban’s legacy and the propaganda agenda of the Kremlin

Viktor Orban has indicated that he isn’t opposed to the Nordic nations joining, but has been trying to stall a decision.

Orban is considered to be the EU leader closest to Putin. Katalin Cseh, a Hungarian Member of the European Parliament, describes Orban’s blocking of the Sweden andFinland bids as “quite simply” another favor to Putin. She believes that Orban, who has been accused of drifting towards autocratic leadership, has “invested over a decade to copy his policies and build up a Putinist model,” and that any perceived NATO victory over Putin “puts his whole regime in jeopardy.”

The irony isn’t lost on many that one of the main reasons Putin gave for invading Ukraine was to put a stop to what he claimed was NATO expansion. The fact that his aggression might have pushed a historically unaligned country into NATO is still seen by most in the West as a huge own goal by the Kremlin.

Until an agreement is reached, however, the future of the alliance remains somewhat up in the air. Since the start of the conflict,Sweden andFinnish have picked a side. If the war was to end abruptly, it is unlikely that they would return to their previous positions of neutrality.

The risk for NATO and the broader Western alliance comes if they fail to join the alliance at all and the Kremlin can use it for propaganda purposes. If that happens, even if the war suddenly ends, the narrative of a divided West will continue to be the drum that NATO’s opponents can bang.