Hot Pursuit Ahval

After a series of surprises, crisis and turns of Turkey, Sweden and Finland are formally invited to NATO as members. Marc Pierini, a former ambassador of the EU in Ankara and currently a senior researcher with Carnegie Europe, shares his broad analysis of the various aspects of the dramatic process.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s distancing of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is becoming more tangible and a crisis within NATO, created by Turkey’s objections to the membership of Sweden and Finland, begs the question of whether years of appeasement of Erdoğan by the West has reached a dead end, said Merve Tahiroğlu, Turkey Program Director at the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED).

It is very difficult to see an endgame for Turkish foreign policy, because for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, there is no endgame, said Hamit Bozarslan, Director of the Centre for Turkish, Ottoman, Balkan, and Central Asian Studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris, France.
Turkey, under Erdoğan's leadership, escalates series of challenges and crisis within NATO, in the neighbourhood and region. Pushing Sweden and Finland into a corner, Erdoğan ups the ante also with the United States and seems all set for a large-scale incursion into Syrian and Iraqi soil. What's at stake? Has Erdoğan passed the Rubicon? How can NATO react? Will the region's Kurds once more end up as losers of the grand power game? Ahval’s Editor in Chief Yavuz Baydar talked to a top expert, Prof Bozarslan on the issue, for Hot Pursuit podcast series on Wednesday.

President Erdoğan's announcement of an imminent incursion onto northern Syria has complicated his spat with NATO. What will Sweden and Finland do, to meet Turkey's conditions to lift its veto on NATO membership? What is the prime reason for Sweden to keep its relations with the Syrian Kurdish YPG forces? At the end of the day, will the USA be able to cut Gordion's Knot? Jan Hallenberg, a top Swedish expert on NATO and a senior researcher with the Insititute of International Relations (UI) explains the context to Yavuz Baydar, Editor of Ahval News.

Yavuz Baydar speaks with Suat Kınıklıoğlu, a top expert on Turkish foreign policy.

Turkey’s decades old neo-Ottomanist ideology has been transformed and strengthened under the administration of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said Cengiz Çandar, a senior Turkish columnist and Middle East expert.

In a discussion with Ahval editor-in-chief Yavuz Baydar for the Hot Pursuit podcast, Çandar spoke about his latest book “Turkey’s Neo-Ottomanist Moment - A Eurasianist Odyssey”.