Member-only story
Finland’s NATO Membership Runs Into an Expected Obstacle
And it says a lot about the organization.
I’m not used to seeing the name of my country as a trending topic on Twitter and a headline on international news every day, but that’s what has happened after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Finland and Sweden leaving behind their decades-long neutrality to seek NATO membership has been all the buzz in the past week, but the project has already run into a very expected obstacle: autocrats.
On Friday of last week, Turkey’s President Erdogan — do we still call him ‘President’ if he’s an autocrat? — answered in a very predictable way: by saying no, sending the message that Finland and Sweden shouldn’t even bother trying.
He used the excuse of the two nations’ history with accepting Kurdish refugees — who the Turkish government considers militants and terrorists — and the arms embargo placed by Finland and Sweden on Turkey after the country’s involvement in Syria.
Finland is not great at accepting refugees, something that was underlined by the Syrian crisis. But at least in the ’90s, we did welcome a number of Kurds, oppressed by Turkey and Hussein’s Iraq. Families, women, children and men. They’re hardly terrorists, although any independence-minded population is an obvious threat to…
