NATO's Turkey Problem: Ankara's Drift Toward Strategic Independence

Ever since Donald Trump returned to office, the talk of the town in capitals from Washington to London and beyond has been the threat that the growing divide between the United States and Europe poses to the NATO alliance. There is good reason to be concerned about that rift. France literally had to deploy soldiers to Greenland earlier this year to ward off the prospect of an American invasion of allied territory.

But for all the attention paid to the Atlantic rift, the alliance’s biggest fault line may be widening elsewhere. Turkey, a NATO member since 1952, has just unveiled its first intercontinental ballistic missile. It is rapidly building out a domestic defense industry designed to operate independently of its allies. And it has spent the Erdogan era making it abundantly clear that Ankara’s interests and NATO’s interests do not always align.

With Europe’s attention fixed on Russia while Turkey increasingly plays a pivotal role in the Middle East and North Africa, that rift is only going to grow. The story of NATO’s Turkey problem is the story of an indispensable member quietly building the means and the worldview to act on its own.

Key Takeaways

Turkey has unveiled its first intercontinental ballistic missile, the Yildirimhan, making it the only non-nuclear NATO member to pursue such a weapon. It is not yet fully operational and Turkey lacks a domestic test range to fly it at its advertised range of over 5,500 kilometers.
Entry into NATO is effectively a one-way ticket. The alliance was deliberately structured so that no simple majority could expel a member, a safeguard drawn from the betrayal of Czechoslovakia before World War II.
Turkey’s geography is its trump card. Ankara controls the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, hosts Incirlik Air Base and roughly 50 American nuclear gravity bombs, and operates the Kurecik early-warning radar that underpins NATO’s ballistic missile defense.
Erdogan has dismantled the secular establishment Ataturk built, gutting the military after the 2016 coup attempt, purging some 150,000 people from state institutions, and reconverting the Hagia Sophia into a mosque.
The collapse of relations between Ankara and Jerusalem is becoming a cold war between a key NATO member and America’s most important Middle East partner, complicated by Hamas leadership and finances rooted in Istanbul.
Turkey’s defense exports have grown roughly fortyfold under Erdogan, from about 250 million dollars a year to over ten billion, and it now fields the second-largest military in NATO behind only the United States.
Turkey’s economic fragility, including chronic inflation, a sliding lira, and mass youth disillusionment, may be the very weakness that keeps it tethered to the West.

Drifting Apart

Ever since Turkey joined NATO back in 1952, it has always been something of an outlier, long seen as neither West nor East but occupying a middle ground between the two. This divide is best exemplified by the Bosphorus Strait, the body of water that cuts through Istanbul, the country’s most populous city. Unlike most waterways that run through a city, this is not just an internal divide. It is the border between two continents: on one side you are in Europe; cross the strait and you are in Asia, all without leaving the city.

During the Cold War, the threat of the Soviet Union kept Ankara anchored firmly in the West, and Turkey pulled its weight as an alliance member. It hosted American nuclear weapons at the height of the Cold War, contributed troops to the Korean War, and served as the southern wall against Soviet expansion into the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

It was not exactly smooth sailing. Turkey nearly went to war against fellow NATO member Greece during the 1970s over Cyprus, while the Turkish military staged coups in 1960, 1971, 1980, and, to a lesser extent, again in 1997. Each intervention aimed to pull the country back toward the secular, Western-aligned orientation that Ataturk had set upon.

Still, for about fifty years the relationship was, if not smooth sailing, then at least one that was adequately navigating choppy waters. But then came the early 21st century and a major shift in Turkey’s internal politics.

Much of NATO was none too thrilled when Recep Tayyip Erdogan came to power as prime minister in 2003. He was the founder of the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, which was created because his previous parties, plural, had been shut down by the courts. He was also associated with a much less secular political tradition that had been clashing with Turkey’s establishment for decades. As mayor of Istanbul back in the 1990s, he went on record saying that “democracy is like a streetcar.

When you come to your stop, you get off.” He was not exactly an encouraging figure for the direction of the country in Western eyes.

But none of the moves he made, especially in the early years of his tenure, were particularly authoritarian, and some chalked this up to him having simply evolved his beliefs. If anything, he emerged as something of a reformist, even if some of his methods were a little unorthodox.

Erdogan also initially seemed focused on further integration into the Western-led order. Turkey had become a formal candidate for EU membership in 1999, and the early AKP reforms moved the needle toward accession. Formal talks opened in 2005, in what was truly a different world only twenty years ago. The talks eventually stalled over human rights, with a growing sense in European capitals that Erdogan’s democratic backsliding was here to stay.

That backsliding was not limited to domestic politics either. The rivalry between Turkey and Greece began to heat up again under Erdogan, whose government approved measures like sending military jets over Greek airspace, resulting in a deadly collision in 2006. While this was nowhere near the level of crisis seen during the Cyprus standoff in the mid-1970s, it still marked a serious fracture in NATO unity.

Really, though, “Greece and Turkey nearly going to war” has been something NATO planners have had to live with as a concept since the two were admitted. It was what happened a decade later that really gave other alliance members chills.

In 2017, Ankara signed up to purchase two Russian-made S-400 air defense systems. It was an unusual move to begin with, given the extensive American fortifications stationed in the country. But Turkey had long been building up its own domestic military hardware programs and evidently did not want to be solely dependent on Washington.

Even so, the choice of Russian kit was particularly problematic. This was post-2014, long after Crimea had been annexed. Integrating made-in-Moscow hardware into NATO’s defense architecture raised about a million red flags in capitals spanning from Washington to London to Warsaw and beyond. The Pentagon made good on its threats to expel Ankara from the F-35 program entirely over the deal, but beyond that, not much else was made of it.

The S-400 has been sitting in Turkey for half a decade now. It was ultimately never integrated into NATO air defense and has sat in storage since.

All of which begs the question: why blow up a program as lucrative as the F-35 over a system with less-than-stellar reliability that you are not even going to use? Well, that is sort of the point. It was done as a sign of operational independence. And that move, perhaps better than anything else, just about sums up Turkey’s current relationship with the rest of NATO: officially allied, geographically strategic, occasionally useful, frequently a pain in the alliance’s side.

But as the 2020s grind on, that pain may be growing. In Syria, Libya, the Caucasus, and beyond, Ankara has pursued a foreign policy that often brings it into conflict with either European goals, American goals, or sometimes both.

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A One-Way Ticket

One thing to bear in mind is that even if the alliance did determine that it would be better off with Turkey outside the tent, there is not a great deal that can be done about it. Entry into NATO is a one-way ticket. It was specifically set up so that the alliance could not vote, on a simple majority, to get rid of a member if it became politically inconvenient for them to stay.

That safeguard was a lesson taken from the betrayal of Czechoslovakia before World War II, when Britain and France threw the Czechs under the bus in an attempt to appease Hitler. It was a gamble that failed since, as it turned out, he was literally Hitler. But even if NATO could theoretically expel Turkey, there is no guarantee that a majority of its members would want to do so.

Turkey’s geography, which was the decisive factor in bringing it into NATO in the first place, cannot be overstated. The country shares a land border with Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Europe, all areas of major importance.

This location has long given the alliance all sorts of geographic advantages. Ankara alone controls the Bosphorus and Dardanelles Straits, which just so happen to be the only maritime link between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Critically, this includes naval access for the Russian Navy, leverage Ankara demonstrated it was willing to use after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, when it closed the straits to all warships.

That geographic leverage is then reinforced by what the United States, and NATO more broadly, have physically built on Turkish soil over the last seven decades. Incirlik Air Base serves as the primary American military hub in the region, a logistics, refueling, and strike platform that has underpinned every major US operation in the Middle East for decades. It also hosts somewhere around 50 American nuclear gravity bombs, originally stationed there as a sign that Washington trusted Ankara enough to extend it the nuclear umbrella.

A few hundred kilometers east, the early-warning radar at Kurecik is a cornerstone of NATO’s ballistic missile defense. It is the sensor that lets the American shield actually protect Europe from threats from the East. Without it, the system is, in the words of one CSIS assessment, “crucially degraded.” And critically, Incirlik is not a sovereign American base. Turkey owns and commands it. Every American operation there runs through bilateral agreements that Ankara can, in theory, revisit at any time.

And then there is the migration question. Turkey had been hosting nearly four million Syrian refugees for years, a burden it has repeatedly asked Europe to help shoulder, and which the EU has paid Ankara billions of euros to manage. In 2019, Erdogan famously threatened to “open the gates and send 3.6 million refugees your way.”

A few months later, when a Syrian government airstrike killed at least 33 Turkish soldiers in Idlib, the single deadliest day for the Turkish military since it first intervened there, he made good on that threat, or at least a watered-down version of it. Within hours, Ankara ordered its border police to stand down and directed thousands of refugees toward the Greek frontier at Edirne, in a similar way to how Lukashenko in Belarus has been weaponizing migrants for political purposes. The crisis was eventually contained, but the demonstration was clear enough: when Ankara has cards, it is not afraid to use them.

The Yildirimhan and the Ambition Behind It

And that brings us to today, where Turkey has just unveiled its first intercontinental ballistic missile. The Yildirimhan, as they call it, is not your average, everyday missile system. Turkey is now the only non-nuclear member of NATO to possess such an advanced weapon.

The reason these systems are so rare is no accident. For most countries, they are simply not needed. Regional powers the world over have shrugged them off, from Poland to Saudi Arabia to even nuclear-armed Pakistan, because their reach is so far outside of the country’s neighborhood, usually defined as having a range of over 5,500 kilometers. For an American audience, that is roughly the distance between New York and London, or from Tel Aviv to Bangladesh.

The only alliance members who have built them are the US, UK, and France, in part because their nuclear deterrent required it.

The Yildirimhan is not fully operational yet, and the testing phase can be a hell of a process in and of itself. Turkey does not even have a domestic test range capable of putting this thing through its paces. That is part of why Erdogan announced plans for a 900-square-kilometer so-called spaceport in Somalia, a country where Turkey already operates its largest overseas military base. It is framed as a civilian space-launch facility, but nobody is pretending it is not also the only realistic site Ankara has to flight-test a missile at anything close to its advertised range.

But whether this thing flies tomorrow, next year, or next decade is not really the point. The point is that this development exists to hold capitals you do not share a continent with at risk. No regional power builds one unless it has decided that the regional frame is no longer big enough to contain its ambitions. Ankara can already project influence throughout the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and much of northern and eastern Africa without this weapon.

So just what Erdogan wants to do with all this expanded range is the million-dollar question. And the reason that question matters as much as it does is that the ICBM is not being developed in a vacuum.

The Counter-Revolution

To understand where all of this is pointed for the NATO alliance, you have to look past the hardware and into what has been happening inside Turkey itself, because Erdogan has been hard at work rebuilding the country’s identity into one that better fits his worldview.

The Turkey that joined NATO way back when may have been transitioning to democracy, but it was after a very aggressive Westernization campaign by Ataturk, who had stripped the religious establishment out of public life, replaced Ottoman-era Islamic law with European legal codes, and went so far as to change the Turkish alphabet from the Arabic script to the Latin one.

Erdogan came from a political tradition that had spent decades on the losing end of that arrangement, viewing those changes as deeply regressive to Turkish identity, culture, and Islamic heritage. Once in power, he got to work undoing large parts of it.

It was slow going at first, but a failed coup back in 2016 allowed him to absolutely gut the military, which Ataturk had designed to essentially be guardians of the Turkish system. It might not have been frequently seen elsewhere, but their system was quite literally set up for the military to intervene when the government got too far out over its skis.

Erdogan did not stop with the military, though. Somewhere around 150,000 people were purged from state institutions overall: officers, judges, academics, teachers, you get the idea. Almost overnight, Turkey became one of the world’s top jailers of journalists. A year later, he rewrote the constitution to overhaul the parliamentary system entirely, concentrating power in a new executive presidency, which he then ran for and, shockingly, won.

And in the summer of 2020, with the secular establishment effectively dismantled, Erdogan converted the Hagia Sophia, a cathedral under the Byzantines, a mosque under the Ottomans, and a museum since Ataturk that strictly banned all religious services for Muslims and Christians alike, back into a working mosque. It was the most visible piece of evidence yet that Ankara was done pretending it was still on a secular path.

The shift extended well beyond just symbolism, though. Back in 2012, a retired Turkish brigadier general named Adnan Tanriverdi, who had been pushed out of the official armed forces in 1997 for his Islamist sympathies, founded a private military company called SADAT with the state’s blessing. You can think of SADAT as being, more or less, the Turkish equivalent of what Russia’s Wagner Group was back in its heyday: a nominally private outfit that operates very much in the grey zone where its actions are not officially the state’s responsibility, but everyone knows who is really calling the shots.

SADAT has provided military training and security assistance to organizations across Libya, Syria, West Africa, and beyond. What makes it unusual, even by the standards of private military companies, is how open its mission statement is about what it is for. Its corporate manifesto describes its purpose as freeing Muslim countries from, and this is a direct quote, “dependence on Western crusader imperialist countries and to help establishment of a defensive collaboration and defensive industrial cooperation among Islamic countries with the intent of serving Islamic union.”

Now, Turkey is not the only NATO member with a majority Islamic population. There is also tiny Albania, while North Macedonia’s population is split nearly fifty-fifty. But it is the only member to abandon that tradition of secularism. All that aside, though, where that worldview really collides with that of NATO’s biggest player, the United States, does not involve political Islam. In fact, it involves a country that is not even a NATO member.

”Worse Than Hitler”

To say that Erdogan is not a fan of Israel is a little like saying that the Irish are not particularly fond of Oliver Cromwell. While many NATO leaders have voiced concern over Israel’s actions in Gaza, they have generally done so using cautious or diplomatic language. In 2024, though, Erdogan declared that Turkey “firmly backs” Hamas, and called Netanyahu “worse than Hitler.” And yes, that is a direct quote. Not exactly a warm relationship, to say the least.

But what makes this notable is not just Erdogan being blunt. It is that Ankara has actual infrastructure in place to act on these pronouncements, and increasingly seems to be willing to do so.

Much of Hamas’s senior leadership lives in Istanbul today, something that has only accelerated as Qatar has steadily been kicking them out. The man running Hamas’s West Bank operations, a position that opened up after Israel killed Saleh al-Arouri in early 2024, set up shop in Turkey, along with a financial network of reportedly over half a billion dollars in Turkish real estate and businesses. Just three months before he was assassinated, Ismail Haniyeh was personally hosted by Erdogan.

Israeli intelligence has claimed the relationship goes further, tying a 2024 bombing in Tel Aviv directly to a Hamas network operating out of Istanbul. While Israeli attribution of attacks has, let’s say, a certain slant, the fact that the question is even being asked tells you something about how far this relationship has deteriorated.

Throughout it all, Turkey has been the most aggressive external power lobbying for Hamas to retain a political role in post-war reconstruction, pushing Washington and the Trump-appointed Board of Peace overseeing the territory to recognize Hamas’s political wing as a legitimate Palestinian counterpart.

And Hamas is not the only anti-Israel group working with Ankara either. American sanctions dating back to 2022 have targeted Turkish businessmen, including one with reported ties to Erdogan’s inner circle, for facilitating Iranian oil revenues that wound up funding the IRGC’s Quds Force and its proxies, Hezbollah chief among them. After Syria was deemed to be no longer a reliable transit route for Iranian cash and arms transfers to Lebanon, Turkey has allegedly stepped in to fill the gap, with multiple suspected flights documented, and Israeli intelligence flagging two specific commercial flights from Turkey to Beirut in February of that year that it said carried suitcases full of cash earmarked directly for Hezbollah’s military operations. Israel formally complained to the UN Security Council, while Turkey, for its part, has denied involvement.

Now, you might reasonably ask why Ankara should care. After all, Israel is not a member of NATO. On paper, this should trouble the alliance no more than, say, the Falklands dispute between Britain and Argentina did in the 1980s.

But, of course, things are not so simple. Because Israel is an extremely close ally of NATO’s most important, most powerful member: the United States. And the crumbling relationship between Ankara and Jerusalem is effectively turning into a cold war between a key NATO member and America’s most important partner in the Middle East.

So far, the US has managed to avoid taking sides, since neither capital has forced the issue. But if Washington were forced to choose a side, the answer is not really in doubt. The American commitment to Israel is one of the most politically immovable aspects of foreign policy in existence. It has survived every electoral shift for the better part of a century, and at least under the Trump administration, does not seem likely to change any time soon.

Which raises an obvious question: just how is Turkey avoiding Trump’s wrath over all of this?

The New Iran?

When it comes to revisionist powers taking on the international system, examples abound of rogue regimes trying to show how they can go it alone and stick it to what they perceive to be an American-dominated international order. Some of them have had serious success, like China. Others have tried and failed, which increasingly seems to be the case with Russia. And others are downright insane, shoutout to North Korea. But the one that keeps coming up in conversations about Turkey is Iran.

This comparison really kicked off earlier this year when former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett declared that Turkey was “the new Iran,” leaving analysts debating just how well the analogy fits. Iran is something of a poster child of resistance to the United States. Since the Islamic Revolution back in 1979, it has largely defined its raison d’etre around opposing what it sees as American and Israeli imperialism in the region.

While Iran has had success in building its Axis of Resistance, ranging from Hezbollah in Lebanon to the Houthis in Yemen to Hamas in Gaza and beyond, it has come at a hell of a cost. That cost has been covered extensively in past WarFronts analysis. What is so relevant today is how much it hindered Tehran’s ability to be the power that it long wanted to be. Iran has found workarounds, but the sanctions regime made life pretty miserable for the Iranian people, and the economic implications have limited the impact it has been able to have abroad.

The Islamic Republic captivated international audiences from just about day one, when it stormed the American embassy in Tehran and kidnapped the diplomatic staff working there, ultimately holding them for over a year. The revolutionaries justified this on the basis that the US had wronged them through support of Israel and the ousted Shah. But regardless of how legitimate that grievance was or was not, it did not exactly send an “open for business” message to the wider world on behalf of the new government.

There were ups and downs in the Iranian economy in the years that followed, but things never really got going the way the government would have liked. The war with Iraq was absolutely devastating: eight years of brutal, World War I-style trench warfare that left roughly half a million dead on both sides and the economy in ruins.

Even though the situation that came afterward was indeed an improvement, the Islamic Republic was nevertheless something of an international pariah for most of its existence. Forty-plus years of sanctions, which intensified significantly as time progressed, with only a comparatively short reprieve under the 2015 JCPOA, locked the country out of the international financial system, froze it out of Western capital markets, and forced it to run an entire shadow economy of barter deals, oil-for-gold smuggling, and front companies set up in just about whatever country would take them to stay under the radar.

All this was only compounded by the exorbitant cost of building and maintaining its Axis of Resistance. Tens of billions of dollars poured into Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and the Iraqi militias over the course of decades, a parallel foreign policy run through the Revolutionary Guards that kept Iran relevant across the region but drained an economy already running on fumes from what little investment would have otherwise been available to it.

Turkey has been watching this unfold and has drawn the exact opposite conclusion on how to accomplish its goals. To Ankara, Iran is a model alright, a model of what not to become.

Ankara is fortunate enough to have a much better starting point. Erdogan has not had to build any of the foundations of a regional power from scratch, because most of them were already in place when he came to office back in 2003. Turkey was not quite the military power it is today, but it was not exactly a country you wanted to pick a fight with either. It had also just entered into a customs union with the European Union that gave Turkish exporters near tariff-free access to the world’s largest single market, and a seat at the G20 to boot.

From there, Erdogan focused on transforming his country into an arms manufacturer that, twenty years later, now competes directly with the countries Turkey used to have to buy from. Their crown jewel is their genuinely world-class drone program, which has turned Turkey into the world’s largest exporter of armed drones for several years in a row. They are also producing their own artillery under license from South Korea, building a fifth-generation fighter jet that Indonesia has already signed on for, and just last year sold 45 trainer jets to Spain.

Overall, defense exports have gone from about 250 million dollars a year when Erdogan took office to over ten billion last year. That is a fortyfold increase under a single government. And they are now the second-largest military in NATO, behind only the United States itself.

And unlike Iran, none of it cost Turkey a single sanction, a single seat at any international table, or a single day outside the Western financial system. In short, while the Islamic Republic tried to build itself into the Middle East’s dominant military power, Turkey has likely already succeeded.

A Tough Road Ahead

And yet, for all this progress, Turkey is not in quite as enviable a position as it would like to be.

Between 2018 and 2023, Erdogan fired or forced out three separate central bank governors, all for the same offense: raising interest rates in response to inflation that steadily crept higher, standard central bank procedure throughout most of the world. The premise of his rate agenda was explicitly theological. He called high rates the “mother and father of all evil,” framing himself as a defender of what he described as “Islamic finance.” Eventually, after burning through enough governors, he succeeded in getting interest rates slashed across the board, even as inflation continued to increase.

By late 2022, with the official inflation measure running at 85 percent year over year and a more internationally trusted independent metric putting it closer to an eye-watering 185 percent, Erdogan was forced to reverse course. He reinstated Mehmet Simsek, a former finance minister who was seen as just about the only person left who could get the Turkish economy back under control.

Simsek pulled it off, kinda. He had to hike the central bank’s interest rate all the way up to 50 percent in order to do it, and held it there for nearly a whole year. Just for context, the US equivalent is currently just north of three and a half percent, and American politicians are complaining that that is too high.

By the time 2025 was coming to a close, inflation was down to the low 30s, a hell of an improvement, but still something that would be considered a crisis in many other countries. The lira itself tells that story just as clearly. It has lost roughly 17 percent of its value against the dollar over the past year alone, sliding past 45 to the dollar earlier this month. That is not the kind of trajectory that attracts the long-term foreign capital Ankara needs to fund everything it is building.

It is not just foreign capital heading for the exits, either. Nearly a third of Turkish 18-to-24-year-olds are neither employed nor in education, the highest rate in the developed world, and surveys suggest two-thirds of them want to leave the country entirely.

In other words, Turkey may have a growing military machine, but the domestic economy propping it up is nowhere near as healthy as it should be. Just to look across other major players in the Middle East, inflation in the UAE is somewhere around 2 percent, and Saudi Arabia is actually even less than that. Their currencies may not see the international use the US dollar does, but both are widely seen as being a far safer place to park your cash than the lira.

Realistically, that gap might end up being what saves NATO from having to make a choice between Ankara and Jerusalem. While Turkey is undoubtedly a major military player today, the ambitions that Erdogan clearly has need more than just hardware alone. And with Turkey heavily dependent on Western market access, it is not at all sure that Ankara will be willing to make moves that would anger NATO’s most powerful member.

All this leaves the alliance stuck in something hard to put into just a few words. It has a member that sometimes acts like an ally, sometimes like a rival, and sometimes, such as when Erdogan blocked Sweden’s accession for over a year, like a professional thorn in NATO’s side. And yet, Turkey’s own weaknesses keep it from fully breaking away.

But while this fissure can still just about be papered over, that is likely to change in the coming years. As Turkey and Israel increasingly find themselves at the heads of opposing blocs in a growing Middle East cold war, it becomes more and more likely that one nation will force the issue. And then the rest of NATO will have to decide whether to side with alliance member Turkey, or follow the lead of the United States as it full-throatedly backs Israel. Whatever the outcome, that crisis will make the drama over Greenland earlier this year look like a mild tiff by comparison.

Presented by

Simon Whistler

Simon Whistler is one of YouTube's most prolific educational creators. WarFronts is his deep dive into military history and conflict analysis.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Yildirimhan, and what makes it significant for NATO?

The Yildirimhan is Turkey’s first intercontinental ballistic missile, making Turkey the only non-nuclear member of NATO to possess such a weapon. ICBMs are defined by a range of over 5,500 kilometers, and among alliance members only the US, UK, and France have previously built them, largely because their nuclear deterrents required it. The Yildirimhan is not yet fully operational, and Turkey lacks a domestic test range to fly it at its advertised range, which is part of why Erdogan announced plans for a 900-square-kilometer spaceport in Somalia — the only realistic site Ankara has to flight-test the missile at anything close to its full range.

Why can’t NATO simply expel Turkey if it becomes a problem?

Entry into NATO is effectively a one-way ticket. The alliance was specifically set up so that members could not vote, on a simple majority, to remove another member that became politically inconvenient. That safeguard was drawn from the betrayal of Czechoslovakia before World War II, when Britain and France abandoned the Czechs in an attempt to appease Hitler. Even if expulsion were theoretically possible, Turkey’s geographic leverage — controlling the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, hosting Incirlik Air Base with around 50 American nuclear gravity bombs, and operating the Kurecik radar that underpins NATO’s ballistic missile defense — means there is no guarantee a majority of members would want it.

What happened with Turkey’s purchase of the Russian S-400 system, and what did it reveal?

In 2017, Ankara signed up to purchase two Russian-made S-400 air defense systems. Integrating Russian hardware into NATO’s defense architecture raised red flags across allied capitals, especially given that this came after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. The Pentagon expelled Turkey from the F-35 program over the deal. The S-400 was never integrated into NATO air defense and has sat in storage ever since, making the purchase essentially a sign of operational independence — a demonstration, more than a capability, that Ankara was prepared to defy the alliance when it suited Turkish interests.

Why does Turkey’s deteriorating relationship with Israel matter to NATO?

Israel is an extremely close ally of NATO’s most powerful member, the United States. Erdogan declared that Turkey firmly backs Hamas and called Netanyahu worse than Hitler, while much of Hamas’s senior leadership now lives in Istanbul and a financial network of reportedly over half a billion dollars in Turkish real estate is tied to Hamas operations. American sanctions have also targeted Turkish businessmen for allegedly facilitating Iranian oil revenues that funded Hezbollah. If Washington were ever forced to choose a side, its commitment to Israel is one of the most politically immovable aspects of American foreign policy, which would put Turkey directly in the crosshairs.

How has Turkey’s defense industry grown under Erdogan, and what does it now produce?

Turkey’s defense exports rose from about 250 million dollars a year when Erdogan took office to over ten billion last year, a fortyfold increase under a single government. Its crown jewel is a world-class drone program that has made Turkey the largest exporter of armed drones for several years running. It also produces artillery under license from South Korea, is building a fifth-generation fighter jet that Indonesia has already signed on for, sold 45 trainer jets to Spain last year, and now fields the second-largest military in NATO behind only the United States.