Any student of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s negotiating methods knows that the Turkish president is the master of leverage, waiting until his interlocutor is at their weakest before making his final play.
His methods can be brutal. Leaked minutes from a 2015 meeting with EU leaders about a shaky deal on stemming migration from Syria recorded him saying: “We can open the doors to Greece and Bulgaria anytime and we can put the refugees on buses … So how will you deal with refugees if you don’t get a deal? Kill the refugees?”
Luxembourg – from where the then EU Commission president Jean Claude Juncker hailed – was “the equivalent of a little town in Turkey”, he taunted.
In that context, holding back Turkish approval of Sweden’s membership of Nato until the eve of this week’s summit in Vilnius was to be expected. Erdoğan has been fighting for Turkish interests on three fronts: a tougher crackdown on Turkish Kurds in Sweden; lifting the de facto US Congress veto on the US sale of F-16s to Ankara; and – in a blindside late twist – demanding progress over Turkish aspirations for visa-free travel inside the EU.
In all three cases he made progress without having to set a precise date by when the Turkish parliament would approve Sweden’s Nato membership. Even now not every piece in the jigsaw is firmly in place.
Sweden has amended its constitution, changed its laws, significantly expanded its counter-terrorism cooperation against the PKK (the Kurdish separatist group) and resumed arms exports to Turkey.
It has also agreed to present a roadmap “as the basis of its continued fight against terrorism in all its forms and manifestations” and reiterated that it will not provide support to the YPG/PYD Kurdish group in Syria.
Sweden has also reiterated – a word designed to show no new concession has been made – that it will not provide support to what Turkey describes as the Fethullah terrorist organization (FETO), an entity the Turkish government perceives as a clandestine network led by the preacher Fethullah Gülen.
Nato also agreed to set up an anti-terrorist coordinator. More importantly, Swedish courts are getting tougher with Swedish Kurds who infringe the law.
On the issue of F-16s, Turkey’s national defence minister, Yaşar Güler, spoke by phone late on Monday with his US counterpart, Lloyd Austin. In a glowing statement, the US defence department said the pair “lauded the long history of military cooperation between the United States and Turkey and applauded our continued close cooperation”.
It continued: “They also discussed the positive talks between Turkey, Sweden and Nato secretary general [Jens] Stoltenberg, as well as the [US] Department of Defense’s support for Turkey’s military modernisation.”
More importantly Bob Menendez, the chair of the Senate foreign relations committee and a great friend of Greece, said he would decide within a week whether to lift his veto on the F-16s and remarked there had been a lull recently in Turkish belligerence towards Greece, and hoped this was “a permanent reality”.
Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, had been bending his ear to this effect, he revealed. The $6bn (£4.6bn) deal, stalled since 2021, would include the sale of 40 jets as well as modernisation kits for 79 warplanes already in the Turkish air forces command’s inventory.
It’s not clear that Erdoğan made as much progress on the issue of Turkey’s EU membership, but in reality the Turkish president probably knew that was a non-starter. It is more likely he is hankering after a renegotiated customs union agreement and visa-free travel. With the extreme right on the march in Spain, Germany, France, and Scandinavia, the political resistance to such deals will be near total.
Charles Michel the European Council president diplomatically hailed a “good meeting” with Erdoğan, adding in a non-committal way that they had “explored opportunities ahead to bring EU-Turkey cooperation back to the forefront and re-energise our relations”.
Few in Nato warm to Erdoğan’s self-absorption and transactionalism, but distaste for his methods is insignificant given the prize. In Sweden too there will be rejoicing. A Pew Research Center survey of 24 countries released on Monday showed Sweden’s attitude to Russia was in a class of its own. An astonishing 98% of people have a negative view of Russia, 78% have a favourable view of Nato while 92% have no confidence in Vladimir Putin’s handling of world affairs.
Little wonder that after a day of giddying negotiations with Erdoğan, the relieved Swedish prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, had a celebratory drink in Vilnius late on Monday night.
