Why Did They Let The Turkey Join The Band?

Perhaps the reason Turkey is still a part of NATO, is simply because there is no precedence for removing members. It does raise the question of what exactly would require a country to be removed from the alliance.

In short, Turkey cannot and will not be formally expelled from Nato. However, upon its receipt of the S-400s, it will no doubt find itself increasingly isolated inside Nato’s civilian and military bodies.

Turkey has been a NATO member since 1952, and during the Cold War it represented the main bulwark against possible Soviet offensives on the Alliance’s southern flank. However, there have always been significant discrepancies between Ankara and its Western partners.

Yet 68 percent think that Turkey can never become a full member of the Union, 65 percent of the respondents think Turkey’s membership has been blocked by European countries, 54.4 percent of them believe it is because of the religious and identity differences and 51.5 percent of them see the EU “not reliable and sincere”.

Turkey controls the flow of Middle Eastern refugees into European NATO, a crucial role whereby a friendly Turkey can help stabilize its neighbors – or an unfriendly Turkey could unleash a human flood into Europe. After vote against coronavirus relief package, Golden calls for more…

Perhaps the reason Turkey is still a part of NATO, is simply because there is no precedence for removing members. It does raise the question of what exactly would require a country to be removed from the alliance.

Giscard’s comments were roundly condemned by Europe’s political elite. Enlargement Commissioner Günter Verheugen said he did not believe Turkish membership of the EU would destroy the 15-member bloc, while Turkish members of the Convention accused the French politician of viewing the Union as a “Christian club”.

The European Commission recommended that the negotiations should begin in 2005, but also added various precautionary measures. The EU leaders agreed on 16 December 2004 to start accession negotiations with Turkey from 3 October 2005.

Turkish Kurdistan or Northern Kurdistan (Kurdish: Bakurê Kurdistanê‎) is the portion of Turkey, located in the Eastern Anatolia and Southeastern Anatolia regions, where Kurds form the predominant ethnic group. The Kurdish Institute of Paris estimates that there are 20 million Kurds living in Turkey.

NATO response. Back in October 2019, when Turkey launched an offensive in northern Syria, both the EU and NATO urged Turkey to show restraint and avoid any unilateral action that might lead to further destabilisation of the region. Nevertheless, the alliance still condemned the late February attack on Turkish troops in Idlib after Turkey invoked …

Four countries are currently trying to join NATO through those plans: Georgia, Bosnia/Herzegovina, Montenegro and the Macedonian Republic. The member nations of NATO are represented by a delegation, each with one presiding “permanent representative” who is generally a seasoned diplomat or military officer.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, is an intergovernmental military alliance of 28 European and North American countries, ranging from the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Canada to Albania, Bulgaria and Turkey. It was formed in 1949 as a deterrence against the Soviet bloc armed forces in Eastern Europe.

Therefore, after 60 years, Turkey is still waiting at the doorstep of Europe not because of the state of its democracy, or its economy or because of its decision to buy Russian made S-400 missiles but because of the Cyprus problem. “Why Turkey is not solving the Cyprus problem?”

The perception of a threat further precipitated in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, once the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê-PKK) insurgency initiated its armed attacks against Turkey from the early 1980s onwards and established a living space on the Qandil Mountains in northern Iraq.

The Allies’ last, half-hearted attempt to create at least a small Kurdistan took place during yet another conference of the Allies in the Paris suburb of Sèvres in 1920. Planned for eastern Anatolia, or Asia Minor, squeezed into borders to which the Kurds objected as too little, this Kurdistan came to naught.

NATO has taken no official steps to suspend Turkey’s membership. In fact, Turkey is still in good standing with the institution. In a joint press conference last week with Turkey’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said: “Turkey is a strong member of our Alliance.”

Among other areas, it defines Article 5’s ambit as including the territory of Turkey and the forces, vessels and aircraft of NATO members located in the Mediterranean Sea. But it crucially doesn’t cover attacks on Turkish forces on Syrian territory. This means Turkey cannot invoke Article 5 on the basis of the escalation in Idlib.

Five EU member states, all who have declared their non-alignment with military alliances, are not NATO members: Austria, Finland, Ireland, Malta, and Sweden.

Since U.S. troops left their region, roughly 180,000 Kurds of northeastern Syria have been displaced, and over 200 have been killed. Those Kurds, soldiers who’d battled the Islamic State and families, had hoped to secure a future Kurdistan state in areas now targeted by Turkish warplanes and patrolled by Russian mercenaries.

NATO allies agreed to increase air defence systems to help Turkey protect its population and territory, and expressed strong political support for Ankara. Yet, they didn’t discuss the possible activation of Article 5 – under which an armed attack against one ally shall be considered an attack against them all.

Separately, at the United Nations Security Council, the NATO allies France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Poland introduced a statement condemning Turkey’s incursion into Syria. Turkey did have an ally on its side there. Ironically, given the alliance’s Cold War roots, America joined with Russia and declined to endorse it.

Assistance, yes, but not direct military type. A website, Allies Of South Vietnam, by SGM Herbert Friedman (Ret) mentions Turkey specifically as one of the more active (?) of the 40 countries who (just after the US sent full troops) then gave non military assistance.

This soon became a case of more allies, more problems. When Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974 following a Greece-backed military coup, the two allies came into direct conflict; in fact, Greece left NATO over it, before later rejoining.

(Other U.S. allies, namely France and Germany, also opposed the 2003 Iraq War, though France was not fully participating in NATO at the time.) As for that whole democratic-values thing, the military stepped in to run the country about every decade or so.

There were a number of reasons Britain didn’t join the Vietnam war. The Suez Crisis occured where the US opposed Britain. Britain had been in embroiled in two SE Asia based conflicts in Malaysia and Indonesia before the Vietnam war, mostly alone and had no wish for a third.

Updated July 03, 2019. The US entered the Vietnam War in an attempt to prevent the spread of communism, but foreign policy, economic interests, national fears, and geopolitical strategies also played major roles. Learn why a country which had been barely known to most Americans came to define an era.

Senators Lindsey Graham and Chris Van Hollen are pushing bipartisan legislation to sanction Turkey over its Syria incursion; Graham has also floated suspending Turkey from NATO altogether.

If the Germans had penetrated much further into the Caucasus during “Case Blue”, rather than turning north towards Stalingrad the British could well have forced Turkey into the war, either by a blockade and mining campaign, as in Norway earlier, or by landings on the Anatolian peninsula.