Analysis: What Turkey Wants to Let Finland and Sweden Into NATO

Source:New York Times Date:25Jun2022

In an interview on Swedish television, a former NATO official, Stephanie Babst, said that Mr. Erdogan’s real agenda is domestic. “Primarily this is a message toward his electoral base at home,” she said. “He has an election ahead of him. The economic situation in Turkey is pretty gruesome and so he wants to demonstrate leadership. He wants to demonstrate that he is a heard leader and so he is, I am afraid to say, using Sweden and Finland in order to get his strategic messages across.”