Former U.S. Presidential National Security Advisor John Bolton published a pre-election message for Erdogan in The Wall Street Journal.
The main goal of the article is to raise the issue of Turkey’s exclusion from NATO.
Bolton unfolds this message. He notes that Turkey is not behaving as an ally. The culprit is Erdogan. Turkey’s current president is dangerous. He has purchased S-400, is preventing Sweden and Finland from joining the Alliance, etc.
The next important message of the article is that Erdogan will not allow for fair elections in Turkey. In Bolton’s opinion, this would already be a reason to expel Turkey from NATO (the charter does not provide for a procedure for expelling countries from the alliance).
“Turkey’s failure to conduct free and fair elections would be the final trigger in deciding whether to revoke its NATO membership,” the politician wrote.
On the same day, in addition to Bolton, the John Quincy Adams American Think Tank also cautiously raised the topic of NATO division, “the principle of limitless horizontal [NATO] expansion has heightened the risk of internal contradictions among NATO’s increasingly diverse membership, making it more difficult over time to distill common geopolitical goals and to maintain the credibility of the Article V commitment that is at the heart of the alliance.”
Bolton’s article immediately spread through the Russian media as a kind of positive message.
But don’t take such talk as a strategic victory for Russia in the field of international diplomacy. The USA will of course give Erdogan a hard time, but the West will not kick Turkey out of NATO (if it will) so that Ankara will build up ties with Moscow.
The West can tear Turkey away from NATO only to send it to war with Russia. It is, after all, a safer option for the West to strengthen its position in the conflict without getting directly involved in a war with Moscow.
And while Bolton was aggressively attacking Erdogan in public, the US Congress removed from a report on US-Turkish relations the phrase that Ankara’s foreign policy since joining NATO in 1952 has been the least oriented toward the West.
Translated from https://t.me/OrientalStories/601
