There is no question that Turkey has been testing the patience of its NATO allies in recent years, sometimes to near-breaking point.

The examples are manifold — blocking Sweden’s accession to the alliance because of an argument about anti-Turkish Kurdish groups; refusing to join sanctions against Russia following its 2022 all-out war against Ukraine and then helping to breach the measures: and buying Russian S-400 anti-aircraft systems from the Kremlin at the expense of its place in the US-led F-35 program.

Some of the rhetoric from President Tayyip Erdoğan and his ministers has been provocative and the response in the West has also been angry — the New York Times has described him as “something of a stickup artist,” senators have attacked him and NATO membership rule changes proposed to punish his government’s behavior.

Let’s just draw breath and attempt to understand what’s going on here, because NATO needs Turkey.

In many respects, it has proved a good NATO ally. Since joining in 1952, it has helped NATO guard the “fence” that separates institutional and rules-based orderliness in Europe from less rule-abiding Near-Eastern neighbors. There is no European security without Turkey.    

Turkey’s underlying sense of insecurity — apart from some very unstable neighbors, like Syria — comes from an Ottoman legacy of wars lost to the Russian Empire. Turkey formally replaced the Porte in 1923 and inherited from its founder, Kemal Atatürk, a determination not to lose territory within Anatolia and Thrace. 

The Ottoman Empire once encompassed nearly the entire Black Sea Region, something that was challenged as Russian imperialism moved southward to seek control of the Turkish Straits and ice-free access to the sea. The Ottomans fought 12 wars against Russians between 1568 and 1918, losing 10 but successfully denying Russians access to the Mediterranean. 

After the Ottomans were defeated in World War I, the British and French dealt them a humiliating peace through the Treaty of Sèvres. The 1919 accord awarded Britain control of the Straits and partitioned Anatolia between the French and Greeks. 

Kemal Atatürk’s nationalists rejected Sèvres, abolished the Ottoman government, and in 1922 defeated the Greeks in the Turkish War of Independence. Turkish negotiator Ismet Inönü preserved Anatolia and Thrace, and reclaimed control of the Straits for Turkey with the 1922 Treaty of Lausanne, the only post-World War I treaty still in effect. 

But Lausanne was not all gains. It cost Turkey oil-rich Mosul in Iraq, while the Greeks kept the Dodecanese islands off the Turkish Aegean coast and Britain maintained control over Cyprus. These islands reduce Turkey’s unimpeded access to the Mediterranean. This helps explain at least one of the recent flashpoints between Turkey and the West, when Turkey pushed ahead with oil and gas exploration in the Mediterranean, most recently from 2020-22. That saw its warships and Greek vessels engaged in several confrontations.

The seabed off southern Cyprus contains very considerable reserves of gas. The already established gas fields amount to more than a year’s annual European consumption, exploration is continuing and production will commence in 2026.

Cyprus holds even more significance since it covers the approaches to Turkey from the Eastern Mediterranean and Suez Canal. Atatürk was conscious of Cyprus’s importance in 1928, knowing that British rule would eventually end. This happened in 1960, although the UK still maintains two military sovereign base areas on the island.

But the creation of an independent Cypriot state dominated by its Greek majority was never really accepted by Turkey and in 1974 it invaded the north of the island, where it has maintained a largely unrecognized statelet ever since.

All of the above helps explain why EU membership has long eluded Turkey, even though it was accepted as a candidate in 1999. Western European suspicion about its politics and the depth of its democratic roots, as well as concerns about Turkish immigration within the bloc, have made France and Germany slow the process (indeed, in 2018 President Macron told Erdoğan there was no chance of his country winning membership.)

This has not been helped by Erdoğan, who has often put political calculations ahead of the required legal, fiscal, and human rights reforms needed for EU entry. The bloc also requires minority protections for the Kurds and is repelled by the locking up of journalists and the closure of independent news outlets. Journalists now take direct orders from the state.

Yet the message heard by Turks from their European neighbors was more complex. In their view, Turkey was good enough to protect Western Europe through NATO but not good enough to join the inner sanctum of EU prosperity.      

Erdoğan has looked elsewhere with an increasingly independent-minded foreign policy that has seen Turkish troops sent to northern Syria, Turkish military equipment and advice to Azerbaijan, and a profitable, transactional relationship developed with the Kremlin.

Russia is Turkey’s top crude oil and natural gas supplier and thanks to Western sanctions, Russian tourists flock to Turkey. One cannot reasonably expect that the fragile inflation-prone Turkish economy, its weaknesses exacerbated by Erdoğan’s mismanagement, would refrain from benefiting from convenient energy supplies and Russian capital flight (though it has now been warned by the US to moderate its military technology trade with the Kremlin.)

NATO is nonetheless fortunate that an ally controls the Turkish Straits. This not only makes Bulgarian and Romanian NATO memberships more viable but also reduces Russian access to the Mediterranean. Turkey closed the Straits to all warships in early 2022, consistent with the Montreux Convention, and this has benefited Ukraine by preventing reinforcements from reaching the Russian Black Sea Fleet, which has meanwhile been seriously diminished by Ukrainian military action.

Applying lessons from Turkey’s Ottoman legacy and acknowledging its role on the borderlands between geopolitical disorderliness and tidiness provides an object lesson in strategic competition. Without Turkey, there is no European security. 

Frank Okata is a graduate of the US Naval Academy and a career Surface Warfare Officer in the US Navy with ship, shore, and task force command experience.  The views presented are his and do not necessarily represent the policies or positions of the Department of Defense or its components.

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.