Türkiye Is Not An Important NATO Member. Stop Pretending It Is.
Jan 18, 2023
By Michael Rubin*
Source:https://www.19fortyfive.com/2023/01/turkiye-
Türkiye’s Foreign Minister Mevlüt Cavusoglu will visit Washington, D.C. today. High
on his agenda will be Türkiye’s request for American F-
The White House’s logic is two-
U.S. Concessions to Türkiye, or Coercion
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan are wrong on both counts.
To accede to Turkish blackmail is to justify it.
Because NATO is a consensus-
The Biden administration, like each of its predecessors dating back to the Eisenhower era, coveted Türkiye’s NATO membership because of what it might bring to the table: Türkiye has 355,000 active duty men under arms. Compare that to France, with only slightly more than 200,000 active duty personnel in its armed forces, or the United Kingdom, which has just less than 200,000. To include the total military—active duty, reserve forces, and paramilitaries—is to inflate Türkiye’s numbers even more. Türkiye then brings almost 900,000 men into the equation, more than the 19 smallest NATO members combined.
NATO Participation
In Brussels this past weekend, I had an opportunity to speak to a former military
planner who had worked on a NATO operation. He made a good point: Statistics about
the size of the armed forces of NATO members are often irrelevant. When planning
a NATO operation, NATO leaders go to each country and ask what they are willing to
contribute. A country might have 100,000-
Put another way: If Türkiye promises 5,000 troops but Poland offers 10,000, then it is right to suggest that Türkiye is more than four times more important to the alliance?
This was the case with NATO’s Operation Resolution Support in Afghanistan. In February
2021, the United States contributed 2,500 troops, Türkiye just 600, less than Italy,
Romania, Germany, the United Kingdom, and even non-
When I would walk the streets of Kabul, for example, I would see billboards far from
NATO headquarters promoting bilateral Turkey-
Simply put, Türkiye’s on-
The time has come to call Türkiye’s bluff.
*Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he
specializes in Iran, Turkey, and the broader Middle East. A former Pentagon official,
Dr. Rubin has lived in post-