Time to Rethink Turkey, the Sick Man of NATO

NATO is arguably the most profound and consequential alliance in modern times. An attack on one is an attack on all, states Article 5 of NATO’s founding document. But beyond the pact of collective defense, the NATO charter represents something deeper: a shared worldview, strategy, and vision for peace. But a closer examination of Turkey, NATO’s increasingly unreliable ally, suggests something very different.

Recent world events have offered a stark reminder the evil exists in the world. On Oct. 7, more than 1,000 Hamas terrorists breeched into Israel by land and air and murdered over 1,200 innocents in a shockingly barbaric assault that would do ISIS proud. The Hamas hordes dismembered and burned babies, raped and sliced the bellies of pregnant women, mowed down entire families in their homes, and dragged scores of children and elderly back into Gaza as human pawns.

Most civilized observers were left in shock by the carnage, unreservedly condemned the barbarism, and voiced support for Israel’s right to uproot the Hamas terror mafia. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, however, criticized the Jewish state and justified the brutality of the Hamas assailants.

Erdogan’s refusal to condemn the perpetrators of single bloodiest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust continues a long and ignoble history of his providing aid, comfort, and refuge to Hamas. Not only is Hamas dedicated to the destruction of Israel, but also to the disruption of any currents toward peace in the Middle East.

Now consider events that preceded the Hamas massacre by less than three weeks. On September 19, salvos of Azerbaijani bombs destroyed the Armenian Christian exclave, Nagorno-Karabakh, after its captive citizens were subjected to an Azerbaijani blockade for nearly 10 months, an event that international legal experts widely recognized as genocide.

The Armenian-populated exclave has a long and complex history. Despite being the indigenous home of Armenians for millennia, the Soviet Union gifted the parcel to the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, resulting in a simmering dispute when communism collapsed some three decades ago. Since then, it had operated as a fiercely embattled, self-governing Armenian entity.

Within days of the September 2023 Azerbaijani attack, almost all 120,000 of Nagorno-Karabakh’s indigenous Armenians fled for their lives to neighboring Armenia, thus consummating the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Armenian exclave.

NATO member Turkey’s support for Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing campaign is the worst-kept secret in U.S. foreign policy circles. Indeed, Turkey is Azerbaijan’s foremost patron and supplier of arms, without whose green light Azerbaijan would almost certainly not have moved on Nagorno-Karabakh.

The ties, in themselves, are no surprise. Turkey and Azerbaijan share a deep historical and strategic partnership rooted in a common Turkic cultural bond.

While the history of this conflict is complex, some facts are straightforward: Armenia is a democracy and Azerbaijan is a kleptocratic police state being run into the ground by its corrupt ruling Aliyev family. Azerbaijani dictator Ilham Aliyev, in the wake of seizing Nagorno-Karabakh, has made clear that Armenia is next. Without Western vigilance, Azerbaijan will soon attack sovereign Armenian territory, with Turkish connivance, in order to carve out a land corridor from Turkey to Azerbaijan and the oil-rich Caspian Sea.

If attacking Christians in the Armenian homeland wasn’t enough, Turkey has also launched a sustained series of military incursions, from 2016 to present, into historically Syriac Christian areas in northern Syria and Iraq where American troops are present, destroying 2,000-year-old Christian communities and holy sites.

These are not the only demonstrations of Turkey’s misalignment with its NATO allies. Erdogan also spent most of 2023 squeezing concessions out of the Western powers while holding up Finland’s and Sweden’s NATO accession—seen as a vital part of the Western response to Russia’s assault on Ukraine.

Despite the devastation inflicted on Ukraine, Turkey has unflinchingly maintained economic ties with Russia, refusing to join U.S.- and EU-led sanctions, and thus provided a lifeline for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Total exports from Turkey to Russia increased from $5.7 billion to $8 billion in 2022. Turkey has also refused to join EU sanctions restricting air travel to and from Russia and has enabled wealthy Russian oligarchs to obtain Turkish citizenship.

In return, in July 2022 Putin wired $5 billion to Turkey for the construction of the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast.

If this strikes you as behavior unbecoming of a Western democracy, you wouldn’t be wrong. Turkey was a fledgling democracy when Erdogan, the leader of the Islamist AK Party, was elected prime minister some 20 years ago. Much like Putin in Russia, Erdogan proceeded to dismantle the frail Turkish democracy brick by brick.

The Erdogan government has restricted freedom of the press through the closure of independent media outlets, and the intimidation and imprisonment of journalists critical of the government. He has compromised the judiciary’s independence and dictated laws to impede civil society organizations. Substantial power has been adversely and illegally obtained by Erdogan, while his opponents languish in prison.

It was solely on the basis of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s secular legacy—as well as the country’s strategic location straddling Europe and Asia—that NATO welcomed Turkey as a strategic ally in 1952. Alas, international relations are not static, and Turkey has sufficiently demonstrated, over decades, that it is no longer a stalwart ally. It is time for the West to face this problem squarely.

In the dying days of the Ottoman Empire, due to internal rot and the decay of its international stature, Turkey was known as the “sick man of Europe.” In recent decades, for the same reasons, Turkey has become the “sick man of NATO.” By mutating into a democracy-in-name-only, presenting an afront to Western values, and by fomenting mayhem in its region, Turkey has become more of a menace than ally to NATO. It should be called out and put out.

Richard Ghazal is Executive Director at In Defense of Christians. He is a retired U.S. Air Force judge advocate and intelligence officer.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.