NATO’s Appetite To Unlimited Expansion Continues To Grow

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Written by Uriel Araujo, researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.

On June 12, Swedish authorities in Stockholm decided to extradite a Turkish national who had been convicted of a drug crime in his home country in 2013. The man is a self-proclaimed supporter of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and claims that the real motivations behind his deportation actually lie in his Kurdish politics, the PKK being an outlawed party in Turkey. The West, in any case, remains bent on having Sweden join NATO, following the steps of Finland, and Turkey in turn remains the only obstacle, making good use of its vetoing power within the Alliance’s structure to obtain leverage.

As I wrote, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will not allow the Nordic country’s accession into NATO unless Washington changes its Kurdish policy in the Middle East. The US ambassador to Turkey, Jeff Flake, has acknowledged, in an interview with Axios, that it is “unlikely” Sweden will join NATO before next month’s Vilnius summit (as Washington had hoped). There is, however, some room for political and diplomatic bargaining, as Ankara is trying to purchase a new batch of F-16 fighter jets from the US, and, although the American presidency supports it, Congress still needs to approve the deal. Thus, US lawmakers are trying to use the $20 billion sale as leverage to have Ankara dropping its opposition to Stockholm’s accession.

This Swedish development is part of a larger context of Stockholm trying to “appease” the Turkish authorities in Ankara. Just last month, the country  tightened its anti-terrorism laws, in a clear response to Turkey’s allegations about Sweden being a safe haven for (Kurdish) “terrorists”. The political and diplomatic pressure on Ankara, however, has increased: during talks at the White House on June 13, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and US President Joe Biden himself all called for Turkey to approve the Swedish application.

The pressure, in fact, is not upon Ankara only. American Senator Jim Risch, a powerful voice within the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has threatened to block a $735 million arms sale to Hungary over the latter’s delay in approving Sweden’s accession. He said:

“Given promises that were made to me and others last year that this vote would be done, and the fact that it is now June and still not done, I decided that the sale of new US military equipment to Hungary will be on hold.”

The US and the EU have been accused of meddling into Hungarian internal elections in 2022, by backing the opposition against Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Moreover, the Western bloc and NATO’s appetite for expansion extends to the Balkas also. In the region, there are four NATO members (Greece, Spain, Romania, and Slovakia) that do not recognize the state of Kosovo, which declared its independence from Serbia in 2008, after a referendum. At the time, the  UN International Court of Justice on Kosovo ruled that the territory of a given state is not obliged to apply for permission to the country’s central authorities in order to declare its sovereignty away from it. This of course is yet another instance of Western double standards and hypocrisy on Crimea, for example.

Last month, amid the increasingly tense Kosovo-Serbia dispute, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić demanded that NATO-led troops stationed in Kosovo protect Kosovo Serbs from ethnic violence. Kosovo, a new state not recognized by Serbia, is also pursuing NATO membership. American senators Gary Peters, of the armed services committee, and Chris Murphy, a foreign relations committee’s member, during a visit to Kosovo’s capital city Pristina, have urged the country to implement a Western-brokered peace deal with neighboring Serbia, so that it can join both NATO and the European Union.

The Finnish and Swedish NATO bids are thus part of the continent’s militarization (its “NATOization”), as pursued by the US, which has also made clear it desires an increasingly nuclearized Europe. The two countries’ membership, As a matter of fact, will result in extending the Alliance’s territorial reach as far out as the Russian eastward Arctic flank, thereby making Russia the only non-NATO state in the Arctic. This can be described in no other way than as the further “encircling” of Russia.

Considering the Atlantic Alliance’s well-known will to expand, since 1999 at least, which was, by the way, a notorious breach of the 1990 promise, one could even reason that Russia’s key goals have been defensive in nature and mostly a response to that, and that NATO’s enlargement was one of the main causes of the Ukrainian crisis 9 years ago and remains so today.

The US-led political West’s willingness to work with the opposition in Hungary (a NATO member) indicates just how comfortable it feels with depriving Budapest of sovereignty in making both external and internal political decisions. Washington’s actions to promote its own interests without even taking into account the positions of its own partner and allies has consistently been a characteristic feature of US foreign policy.

The decision taken by the political leadership of Finland and Sweden in turn to apply to join NATO without holding a referendum is a clear indication that the authorities in these nations ignore the views of their own populations on key issues pertaining to the development of these countries. Amid the still ongoing energy crisis and the rising costs of accommodating the waves of Ukrainian refugees, upon applying to join the world’s largest military alliance, these Nordic countries are basically signing up for enormous increases in national budget expenditures in order to fulfill NATO membership requirements. This will also have social and political costs domestically.

To sum it up, NATO’s reckless expansion is bound to increase domestic tensions within the European bloc and to further provoke and antagonize Moscow, thus making peace an increasingly distant prospect.

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