Secretary General “Rote” and Türkiye’s expectations from NATO

According to Webangah News quoted by Tasnim News agency, Mark Rutte, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, as the Secretary General The new NATO military pact was introduced. Rutte succeeded Norwegian Jens Stoltenberg and it is said that the Turkish president helped him in this direction. After Rutte went to Istanbul at the end of April and met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Kurds, Ankara announced its support for his general secretary.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the leader of the Justice and Development Party, after a diplomatic tussle, mediated to Klaus Iohannis, the president of Romania alone. Rutte’s rival will leave, and in this way, the same politician who had repeatedly taken hard and extreme positions against Erdogan, Turkey and the Islamic world, has now become the helmsman of NATO. It will be hosted by Washington until July 11, and US President Joe Biden and his counterparts will welcome Rutte there. 

Due to the necessity of consensus votes of all members, Rutte had to negotiate with Erdoğan to get agreement. Now we have to see what happened when Erdogan agreed with his secretary general. All this has happened in a situation where many Turkish politicians believe that Turkey has not only gained nothing but suffered losses during the long period of seventy years of being a member of the NATO military alliance. 

During Stoltenberg’s era, Turkey could not pass the US military embargo and did not achieve anything special, but now it hopes to gain points during Mark Ruthe’s tenure.

Erdogan is in a situation of The extreme anti-Putin general secretary has supported that there are doubts about the future direction of Ankara-Moscow relations and it is not clear whether this relationship will undergo new developments or not.

What Stoltenberg didn’t give, what will Rutte give?
One of the major problems of Turkey and NATO in recent years has been the disagreement over defense and weapons issues.

The dispute that apparently started when Turkey bought the S-400 missile system from Russia. After the contract was finalized, Stoltenberg asked Erdogan several times to reconsider the deal. But he never commented sharply on the said contract and, in a conservative way, allowed the decision on this matter to be in the hands of the United States alone. The Democratic Party of America dealt harshly with Turkey and imposed a series of arms embargoes on this country, only one of which is the expulsion of Turkey from the list of buyers of the advanced F-35 fighter and also the exclusion from the list of producers of 925 small parts of the said aircraft. It had a lot of financial benefits for Turkey. 

Despite the fact that the former NATO Secretary General’s advisors team linked the issue of sanctions against Turkey only to the purchase of the S-400 missile system, Erdogan’s team has a different point of view.

Erdogan’s defense advisers say, it is not only America that has persecuted Turkey. Because, in addition to America itself, several NATO member countries, including the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy, own multiple Patriot missile systems, and if they had kept these systems in Turkey for a long time, Ankara would not have had to buy the S-400.

But these countries finally kept these missiles on the border of Turkey and Syria for 6 months and then took them home with them. Of course, it is also necessary to mention that based on the clear opinion of Turkey’s political and security experts and analysts, there was no threat from Syria against Turkey, and Erdogan’s insistence on deploying missiles in order to respond to Syrian attacks is only a show. And it was a political show. 

The former Secretary General of NATO, not only did not intervene in the sale of F-35 and F-16 to Turkey, but also did not pay special attention to the sale of other weapons of NATO countries to Turkey. But now Erdoğan hopes that the Dutch Mark Rutte will deal with Türkiye from the beginning. 

What does Turkey expect?
Turkey played an active role in the selection process of the new NATO Secretary General and Erdogan He has tried to get commitments to bring benefits to Turkey in the coming months. 

During the meeting between Mark Rutte and Erdoğan, 3 important requests of the Turkish President were shared with him by Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan:
1. Ankara from Rutte in the case of “fighting terrorism” , to help Turkey and ask NATO members not only to understand the US security concerns in Syria, but also to hand over the fugitive members of the PKK terrorist group.

2. Preventing the restriction of arms sales Within the union, it is another expectation of Erdoğan. It is clear that what Erdogan and his team mean is to convince the new NATO Secretary General, Spain, Italy and Germany to sell their jointly produced Phantom fighter to Turkey. 3. Erdogan announced to Rutte that NATO’s approaches to those members of this club who are also members of the European Union are different from the foreign members of the European Union, and this discriminatory treatment must be ended. Erdogan asked Rutte after took the helm of NATO, at the summit in Washington, to clearly declare not only the PKK but also all the satellite entities of this group as terrorist organizations. But Rutte only said this sentence: “We will definitely emphasize the fight against terrorism in the statement.” That is, in clear words, Rutte has announced that a new political directive on fighting terrorism will be approved at the Washington meeting, but it will only address the general lines and the names of the organizations will not be mentioned.

Turkey wants the so-called militias. The People’s Protection Units (YPG) in northern Syria, as well as the PKK, are to be designated as a “terrorist organization”, but neither the US nor the European allies are willing to accept this proposal. 

Another expectation of Ankara is that the complete cancellation of defense sanctions against Turkey is on the agenda. But the United States and Germany have not accepted this request and since Turkey attacked the American-backed Kurds in northern Syria in 2019, they implemented their sanctions.

Who does not know that this is the first Western sanction against It was not Turkey, and in 1974, during the Turkish occupation attack on the island of Cyprus, a young senator named Joe Biden wrote a document that, after being approved by the Senate, imposed the heaviest political sanctions on Turkey.

Senator who later in his election campaign and before reaching the post of US president, announced that he will try to remove him from power by supporting Erdogan’s opponents in a democratic process. 

In a general summary, it should be said that the friendship between Turkey and NATO has often been a one-sided seventy-year relationship and this western military club has never taken Turkey’s political and security concerns very seriously.end of message/