Since their invasion of Syria, Turkey has been something of an outlier within NATO. Some nations are openly criticizing them for the attack, and some suggesting expelling Turkey from NATO outright, though no mechanism exists for doing that.
During this week’s meeting, Turkey’s President Erdogan looked to create a major potential obstacle to one major focus, the NATO military buildup in the Baltic States to “defend” against Russia. Erdogan threatened to block this plan entirely if the alliance doesn’t announce that they view the Syrian Kurds’ YPG as terrorists.
Erdogan insists he wants NATO’s help in fighting the Kurds, and has threatened to object to everything NATO does at the summit if they don’t agree to focus on the terrorists. This demand is almost certainly a non-starter, but if Erdogan follows through, it precludes any unanimous votes.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg appeared dismissive of the whole matter, saying that NATO’s entire alliance will respond militarily to any attacks of the Baltic countries.
DMs from Estonia and Lithuania, two of the Baltic states, were even more dismissive, calling the Turkish position a “second-tier problem” that will be easy to sort out.
The US has declared some Kurdish factions as terrorist, however clearly we don’t give a $hit based on our actions.
All of the attacks by NATO, and now they are worried about Turkey defending themselves?
Turkey learned after WWI that to effectively commit genocide you can’t be the only one with filthy paw prints all over the corpses.
“NATO” will defend the Baltics? Who exactly would that be?
The only NATO nations with a substantial army are the US and Turkey. The US is over extended, and Turkey isn’t going to do it.
Brave talk, but no troops.
The Baltic countries are wonderful democracies to defend . These democracies won’t allow immigrant to vote . Not even children of immigrants or grand children or grant grand children of immigrants . Is that the kind of democracies you want to defend .Imagine how elections would go in the USA with those same democratic rules. This way these Baltic countries are always in a lot of trouble with a very large minority of their people . After the Soviet Union dissolved they passed these new laws . The Baltic countries also tore down their statues of the allied soldiers that fought in the second world war . The Baltic countries wanted to put up new statues . Statues of the Axes soldiers that fought in the 2cd W war . The United States doesn’t look to be very smart defending these NAZI Baltic countries . A Russian invasion or even a threat of a Russian invasion would probably force these unreasonable NAZIs to behave much better . But that is not going to happen as long as the US Army stands behind them and threatens Russia instead .