"After the nationwide 'Let's leave NATO' campaign was launched by our party, the number of collected signatures approached 100,000 in six days and is growing daily," Ozgur Bursali, general secretary of the Vatan Party, told Sputnik.
We see a great interest in the campaign. The Turkish people oppose NATO because they understand that the alliance and the United States are the main threat to our country. There are irresolvable contradictions between Turkey and NATO. These contradictions will further intensify in the near future, as a result of which Turkey will leave NATO and create an alliance with truly friendly countries.
Earlier this week on January 25, Deputy Leader of the Vatan Party Ethem Sancak told the press that Turkey could leave the US-led military bloc in five to six months. He quoted US-Turkey differences in the Middle East and campaigns against the Quran in Sweden and the Netherlands. Sancak referred to recent polls apparently showing that roughly 80% of Turkish respondents believe that the US' policies towards their country are hostile and destructive.
However, spokesman for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AK Party) Omer Celik denied Sancak's statement the same day. "This is out of the question. We are one of the founding countries of NATO," stated Celik.
Still, it's hard to deny that clouds have been gathering on the horizon of Turkey-NATO relations for quite a while.
Turkey's NATO Membership in a Nutshell
Turkey’s membership protocol to NATO was signed on October 17, 1951, and the nation became a NATO member on February 18, 1952. The country has the second-largest army in the bloc and hosts the Allied Land Command Headquarters.
Even though Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, maintained friendly ties with the USSR, his successors joined the western bloc at the beginning of the Cold War. Turkey benefitted from the Truman Doctrine (1947) and the Marshall Plan (1948) offered by the US. In 1950, Turkey even sent its troops to fight on the US side in the Korean War (1950-53).
With a foot both in Europe and Asia and control over the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, Turkey offered utter geopolitical importance for the transatlantic military alliance. At the same time, however, NATO had to reconcile itself with the decades-long enmity between Turkey and Greece, both alliance members. In July 1974, Turkey militarily intervened into the Republic of Cyprus to thwart a coup d'etat by Greek Cypriots and shield Turkish Cypriot civilians.
On November 15, 1983, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) was proclaimed. The republic’s independence was recognized only by Turkey. The UN Security Council condemned the move, while NATO turned a blind eye to the fact that a territorial dispute over Northern Cyprus contradicted its founding principles.
Still, during the Cold War, Turkey largely followed NATO's major imperatives considering the Soviet Union an adversary like the rest of the military bloc. The situation drastically changed after the USSR's collapse.
Exactly on the day when the USSR ceased to exist, then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin wrote to NATO saying Russia hoped to join the alliance some time in the future. The letter was read at the alliance's headquarters by then-Ambassador to Belgium Nikolai N. Afanasyevsky. (Instead of permitting Russia to join, NATO opted to breach its non-expansion vow and opened the door to Moscow's allies from 1997.) In the aftermath of the USSR's collapse began the era of Russo-Turkish rapprochement.
Over the past several decades, Russia and Turkey have intensified economic, political and military cooperation which triggered sharp criticism from the US-led NATO bloc. In particular, Turkey's decision to acquire the Russian-made S-400 missile defense systems in December 2017 led to Ankara's expulsion from the US-led multinational fifth-generation F-35 fighter jet program in 2019 - even though Turkey invested $1.4 billion (TL 24.2 billion) in it. Washington also froze the sale of F-16 fighters to the republic.
In response, the Turkish Presidency of Defense Industries signaled in October 2021 that it could acquire Russia's Su-35 and Su-57 fighters instead. To cap it off, Turkey has not joined the anti-Russia sanctions regime spearheaded by the US and its NATO allies following the beginning of Moscow's special military operation to demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine.
Likewise, regardless of the displeasure from the US and its NATO allies, Turkey carried out three major operations in northern Syria against Kurdish militias and organizations backed by Washington between 2016 and 2019.
In 2018, Berlin expressed discontent with Ankara's use of the German-made Leopard 2A4 main battle tanks against Kurdish militants. European press wrote at the time that the tanks were sold to Turkey on the understanding that they were not used against the Kurds. For its part, Ankara drew attention to massive NATO weapons supplies to the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) outlawed in Turkey as terrorists along with the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK).
Ankara has also repeatedly expressed concerns over NATO's growing closeness with Greece. The Turkish security expert drew attention to US plans to move main military assets from the Incirlik Air Base to Crete.
In July 2022, Greek Defense Minister Nikolaos Panagiotopoulos announced that he had discussed Greece's potential entry into the F-35 program with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Sean Burke, the director of the Pentagon’s F-35 joint program office. Turkey is also dissatisfied with Greece's reported military deployments on the east Aegean islands, which were ceded to Greece by the Ottoman Empire on the specific and strict condition that they be kept demilitarized.
The most recent bone of contention between Turkey and the bloc is the accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO. Ankara agreed to green-light Helsinki and Stockholm's NATO membership under a set of conditions concerning the activities of Kurdish and Fethulla Gulen's organizations (FETO), banned by Turkey, in the two European states.
Nonetheless, these conditions have not been fully met so far, according to Ankara. To pour more gasoline on the flames, a copy of the Quran was burnt in front of the Turkish embassy in Stockholm on January 21. The police didn't intervene to stop the action. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned Sweden on January 23 that it should not expect his backing to join NATO following the incident - which was seen as insulting by Turkey and other Muslim countries.
US Politicians Issue Threats to Erdogan Ahead of Elections
Washington hawks have not concealed their irritation with Ankara's unwillingness to bow down.
Last week, former US National Security Advisor John Bolton called on the NATO military alliance to expel Turkey from the bloc. Furthermore, Bolton urged the alliance to support Turkey's opposition parties ahead of the general elections scheduled for May 14, 2023.
"With Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at the helm, Turkey is again 'the sick man of Europe'," Bolton claimed in his January 16 op-ed. "Yet there’s a chance he can be stopped, if the West takes bold action to help ensure his domestic opposition gets a fair shake in upcoming presidential elections (…) No country is entitled to participate in the alliance, and Mr. Erdogan hasn’t been behaving like an ally."
Bolton is well known as an ardent proponent of regime change operations in the countries not following Washington's dictat. To complicate matters further, some Turkish politicians already have deep suspicions that the US had a hand in the failed military coup d'etat attempt against Erdogan on July 15-16, 2016, along with Turkish scholar Fethullah Gulen's operatives.
"NATO is an occupation tool of US imperialism," Baris Doster, Turkish political scientist and international relations expert from the University of Marmara, columnist for the major socio-political newspaper Cumhuriyet, told Sputnik.
"This is an organization created in order to keep allied countries in the sphere of influence of the United States, to shape not only the foreign policy and national security of these countries but also their domestic policy in accordance with American interests."
Doster argued that the interests of the US-NATO and Turkey did not coincide and will never coincide.
"NATO is the biggest threat to Turkey's independence and sovereignty," the political scientist underscored. "When it comes to the activities of the terrorist organizations PKK, YPG and FETO, support for coups and other sensitive issues for Turkey, NATO always takes the side opposite to Ankara. Therefore, Turkey must definitely leave the alliance."