Cold Turkey: why is Erdogan resisting Nato’s expansion?

Driving a hard bargain is the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s chief survival skill – one that has kept him in power for nearly as long as his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. And the basic principles of bargaining are twofold: never give something away for nothing, and make your threats to walk away convincing.

No surprise, then, that Erdogan’s buzz-killing announcement last week that Turkey would oppose Swedish and Finnish membership of Nato was made in characteristically blunt terms. Speaking of a planned visit of Nordic diplomats to Ankara, Erdogan asked: ‘Are they coming to convince us? Excuse me, but they should not tire themselves.’ He directly contradicted his own diplomats, who a day before in Brussels had broadly signalled that Turkey’s approval of Nato’s latest expansion was a done deal. That good cop, bad cop routine is another classic from the Erdogan playbook of diplomacy.

Will Turkey actually block Finnish and Swedish accession to Nato – which requires unanimous approval by all members? A senior EU source with direct knowledge of the negotiations predicts that the deal will be done ‘soon… once [Erdogan] has extracted as much as he can’ in exchange for his blessing.