Sensemaker: Gobble gobble

• Biden said the US would defend Taiwan militarily if it was invaded by China.
• The UN said the number of displaced people has passed 100 million, including 8 million from Ukraine.
• Manchester City came back from 2-0 down to beat Aston Villa 3-2 and win the English Premier League.

The most embarrassing of Putin’s failures since February is the mooted expansion of Nato to include Sweden and Finland. It is the exact opposite of what he was wanting to achieve by invading Ukraine, and impossible to hide from his own people. But Turkey’s President Erdogan is trying to prevent it happening.

Or is he?

The truth is more complex and more reassuring. Erdogan has a de facto veto over Nato expansion because it has to happen by consensus. In return for not using that veto he wants concessions on two fronts, while he walks a tightrope on a third.

Kurds. Erdogan’s public problem with Sweden and Finland joining Nato is that both give shelter to Kurdish exiles whom Turkey considers terrorists. The Scandinavians take a different view. They share the official position of the US and EU that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (the PKK) is a terrorist organisation, but they note that i) not all Kurds oppressed by Turkey’s increasingly autocratic regime are PKK members; ii) the Kurdish YPG played a central role in defeating Isis in Syria; and iii) their domestic Kurdish communities pose no threat to Ankara.

Erdogan wants a change in tone on the Kurdish question from Finland (which hosts around 30,000 Turks and Kurds) and especially Sweden (which hosts around 230,000) but is unlikely to insist on the return of named exiles. He is more worried about… 

Weapons. Turkey wants to use this crisis to get back into Nato’s Top Gun team. It wants F-35 fighters from the US but was dropped from the F-35 programme (even though it was a launch customer) for buying Russian S400 surface-to-air missiles in 2019. The Pentagon feared the Russian technicians who came with the rocket system would get a close-up look at America’s most advanced jet. Turkey was also barred from buying the F-16, and wants that ban lifted too. 

Russia. This is the tightrope. Russians love sunbathing in Turkey and Erdogan has a close personal relationship with Putin. His S400 purchase was above all an assertion that an independent Turkish foreign policy means freedom to buy anything from anyone, and Turkey’s recent role hosting Russian-Ukrainian ceasefire talks showed it’s still trusted by both sides. 

But…

• Erdogan has also cultivated ties with Crimea’s Muslim Tartar minority, which opposes Russian rule.
• He wants Turkey to have its own relationships with Eastern European countries which likewise oppose Russian revanchism. 
• He has continued to supply Ukraine with lethal Bayraktar drones which have proved so effective at slowing the Russian invasion.
• And he knows allowing Sweden and Finland to join Nato would be the last straw for Moscow; no more comradely invites to the Kremlin.

Three senior Turkish officials who spoke to Bloomberg at the weekend said Ankara would agree to Nato expansion if its concerns about Kurdish militancy were taken on board and its military procurement goals were met.

They will be – most of them, at least. The war has created a new set of imperatives for Nato, and one is to find a way for Sweden and Finland to join. So in the end it will not only expand the alliance in the north but bind in Turkey more tightly in the south. 

To note:

• Turkey’s complaints about Kurds are not synthetic. Its internal war with the PKK has cost 40,000 lives. Meanwhile, Sweden’s current prime minister, Magdalena Andersson, owes her slim majority to one Kurdish MP brought onside with a joint statement condemning Erdogan’s treatment of Kurds. The statement is accurate, but for Erdogan, it’s still personal.
• Turkey cannot simply be bought off. An F-35 “bribe” on its own might succeed only in enraging Greece, locked in its own regional arms race with its neighbour. Nato could seek more access to the Black Sea for western warships as part of the deal, for example, to protect grain convoys from Russian ships and mines.
• Sweden and Finland will drastically change Nato. Unlike most existing Nato members apart from the US and the UK, they are already militarily self-sufficient. Sweden is especially strong in the air; Finland in the Baltic and the Arctic. 

No wonder Biden says their Nato applications have America’s “full, total and complete backing”. Erdogan is not standing in their way. He’s just naming his price.