NATO’s bad boys: Turkey and Hungary play their own game
The Hungarian leader has sought to undermine NATO’s role on Ukraine and parrots Putin’s talking points on the war, declaring that Ukraine won’t be able to hold out against superior Russian forces. Hungary also has no intention of following the rest of the EU in ending purchases of Russian natural gas.
Turkey has declared its support for Ukraine’s “territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence,” and does send weapons to Kyiv while maintaining a vibrant trading relationship with Russia — including big gas purchases.
Both are wary of entangling NATO in the conflict. Erdoğan cautioned on X that the alliance “should not be made a party to the war when designing steps to support Ukraine.”
Despite having policies wildly out of line with the rest of NATO, the alliance remains a core foreign policy priority for both countries. Indeed, Orbán even exhibited a sense of deference when he arrived in the summit, physically bowing to NATO boss Jens Stoltenberg and U.S. President Joe Biden while appearing onstage for an official photo.
Turkey has much wider interests than NATO. Its army is in Syria and regularly crosses into Iraq. It has tried to form a Turkic bloc that includes ex-Soviet countries like Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. It also regularly demands NATO focus more on fighting terrorism, an agenda that serves its national interests.
Orbán even made an informal appearance at the Turkic summit earlier this month, something that earned him a smackdown from the EU’s top diplomat Josep Borrell.
Days before Erdoğan met Biden and Stoltenberg, he showed up in Kazakhstan and attended a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a security and defense grouping founded by Beijing and Moscow, and asked for full membership.
But in a recent interview with POLITICO, Turkish Defense Minister Yaşar Güler said: “The most effective security organization in the Euro-Atlantic region is NATO … We think there is no need for any other formation.”
