This was always the case. Turkey needed to help in Korea (1950) to get into NATO (1952). With annexation of half the Cyprus, and the tensions with Greece and buying NATO-incompatible S400 defense missiles from Russia, it kept being a problem-child. It weirdly remains also the only member which recently had armed conflict against Russia.
It's still a member though because of geopolitics. It's risky business but it has its rewards.
I don't see the same situation in Ukraine.
Disclosure: I'm from Turkey but I despise some of the acts I named above. I won't name which because I still want to go there and see my parents every once in a while.
Turkey was completely blackhanded as a military ally by NATO, long before Erdogun. NATO made an extremely costly error of accommodating the Greek junta, and later closing eyes on Cyprus.
By all reasonable judgement, NATO should've backed Turkey, and not Greece, but they did it the other way around.
If not for that, it wouldn't have set seeds of doubt which lead to the situation you see now, and probably would've averted the 1980 coup.
Turkey has NATO's most powerful conventional military on this side of the Atlantic, second NATO army by size, and conventional firepower after the USA.
Macaron trying to intimidate Turkey, and marginalise Turkey's NATO role in this day, and age is absurd, and suicidal. Turkey leaving NATO = say bye bye half of NATO's conventional force on this side of the Atlantic. Turkey's troops could not be replaced by ANY NATO member since USA is already overstretched.
I could've added much more strong words.
Are you sure you are being neutral here? I'm pretty sure the Turkish army was the oppressor, at least in this case... and what Greek junta?
> Turkey has NATO's most powerful conventional military on this side of the Atlantic
Conventional military means nothing. Turkey can't even close the Bosporus in these times of war because of Russian pressure. Just read the news.
By the way I sound like a typical "reformed former citizen who hates their roots", I know. But I actually love the country, just not the politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_junta
It collapsed just 3 months after the Cyprus events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974_Greek_legislative_electio...
The junta was gone, but NATO countries, and Turkish state had to live together ever since.
"NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO."
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_8443.htm
Assuming Russia did nothing it would have happened eventually.
The reason NATO exists is because small countries in europe were afaid of USSR, and nowdays Russia.
Nato is defensive pact, as such there is no threat coming from nato to any non nato country.
Now a independent neighbor of Russia is trying to join nato to not be bullied by russia. Russia is not liking it because they will not be able to fuck with Ukraine any more and not because they are afraid of anything.
This war is a proof why Ukraine was 100% justified to seek nato membership not other way around.
We should stop victim blaming Ukraine.
I dont see any reason why NATO working to destabilize Libya that passes muster that doesnt apply equally well to Russia. The idea that it was acting defensively is a farce. A conservative assessment is that Libya is a model for what they are aiming for in Russia in the long term.
Ukraine is the victim and Russia is the aggressor but the west essentially gave a stick to a child and encouraged it to poke the bear before running away and hiding behind a rock.
We could have prevented this.
Russia claims its a democratic country with highest standards of freedoms, why would they feel threatened?
> "an immediate ceasefire in Libya, including an end to the current attacks against civilians"
Anyone claiming NATO was an aggressor akin to what Russia is doing now is a fool.
Russia feels threatened because NATO was set up specifically to oppose them and is not all that interested in democracy that doesnt threaten western hegemonic interests.
You dont exactly see NATO threatening Mohammed bin Salman for invading Yemen do you?
And if democracy is so important why is it official policy that the crimean referendum be annulled rather than re-held?
>Anyone claiming NATO was an aggressor akin to what Russia is doing now is a fool.
NATO destroyed Libya. The fact it did it at arms length is immaterial.
To pretend it is not a threat to Russia is farcical.
By west you mean US? Its not like europe was active in any of those, bar illegal invasion of Iraq and Afganistan lead by US forces.
> Russia feels threatened because NATO was set up specifically to oppose them
Hmm I wonder why? Why nato was not set up to stop those dangerous Turkish people, or blood thirsty Ukrainians, but peaceful USSR, and then Russian Federation lead by exKGB spies... hmmm I wonder why anyone would be concerned.
> official policy that the crimean referendum be annulled rather than re-held?
LOL, ok you are a troll at this point. Fighting with 'whataboutism' is pointless
If you and putin love democracy so much why dont you setup referendum for Chechnya people? Lets see how that vote goes.
> NATO destroyed Libya. The fact it did it at arms length is immaterial.
Nato targeted and destroyed Libyan army, know your facts. There was no ground forces ever deployed.
To pretend NATO ever threaten any aggression to Russia, Russian civilians or Russian soil is a farce bigger then you.
Why is this often mentioned? What is Germany’s rationale and is this still a certainty? Perhaps these comments were more closely related to Schröder (because gas pipeline) but certainly a different generation now.
edit: France and Germany were the two opposed countries.
I mean, i can understand some controversy around the actions of Turkey because of a variety of reasons, but Germany?
Two reasons:
1. Germany depends on Russia for gas, and the two countries have business and economic ties
2. Germany and France are the main 'providers' in the EU, kinda like California, Texas, New York in the US. They have to pay more if they admit a big poor country like Ukraine (44m pop., and would be second poorest in EU after Greece. Pop. of Germany and France: 83m, 67m respectively).
It was about NATO, not EU membership.
First of all is the close history that the Social Democrats have with Russia, dating back to former Chancellor Willy Brandt and the Neue Ostpolitik, and renewed by the 1998-2006 former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder who initiated the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline and infamously worked as a high-profile lobbyist for Gazprom after his period and is rumored to be a close personal friend of Vladimir Putin for years now.
Then we have the history of the 1968-era hippies, the peace movement and large parts of the radical left, which has to this day strong ties to the Green Party, the Left Party (which is the successor of the former GDR's ruling SED) and partially also to the Social Democrat Party. Many of my comrades are still stuck in the Cold War anti-imperialist mindset (where only the Western / NATO sphere is seen as an aggressor) and fail to see that both modern China and Russia are imperialist agents on their own. Hopefully the events of the last few days will wake up some of them, though.
And finally, the entire gas clusterfuck.
1) A lot of residential heating - not just in Germany by the way, but also across wide parts of Eastern Europe and Italy - depends on either gas or oil, as electric heating is ridiculously expensive (at >30 ct/kWh!).
2) electricity. The Conservative/Christian Democrat CDU, whose Chancellor Merkel ruled for the last 16 years before finally getting booted out of office last year, took pride in demolishing the domestic solar and wind turbine industry (the former by cutting subsidies which was followed by Chinese dumping taking over the market, the latter by imposing ridiculous zoning requirements [1]) and was happily accepting "donations" (aka legal bribery) from the fossil fuel industry, and their Bavarian sister party CSU (as well as a number of various local NIMBY movements, called "Bürgerinitiativen") keeps throwing impediments against high-power electric lines to expand the electric grid so that it can distribute Nothern German-generated wind power to the South (Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg). Combined with the phase-out of coal-fired plants and nuclear plants, gas peakers have risen in importance [2].
3) We don't have many alternatives as a continent to source gas from, other than pipelines. There are no LNG import terminals in Germany [3], we have to rely on the import capacity of the Netherlands, France and Belgium [4]. At the same time, the Dutch gas field at Groningen is suffering from earthquakes following the gas extraction [5], Norway doesn't have much spare capacity [6] and the UK only has enough gas reserves to make 42% of their own demand [7], not to mention the Brexit aftermath which included the UK getting booted off the EU energy market.
4) We have a lot of industry (especially petro-chemical and metal) relying on gas for energy and as a raw material. About a third of industrial energy consumption is gas-based [8].
We are in a "perfect storm" situation, and now over 40 years of lackluster politics across the board are crashing down on our head.
[1]: https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/landespolitik/windraeder-abs...
[2]: https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/deutschland-braucht-neu...
[3]: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/knappe-gaslieferungen...
[4]: https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/technologie/lng-termina...
[5]: https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/gasfoerderung-in-den-niederla...
[6]: https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/norwegen-regierungsch...
[7]: https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2021-09/gaspreis-grossbritann...
[8]: https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2021/12...
What used to be East Germany then is Germany now. It's not exactly a crazy development.
But there are indeed some nostalgics here, who like Putin and the eastern empire.
Also take into account that until recently, Russia has been considered a reliable business partner in Germany, to the point that many Germans considered a russo-german partnership to be more advantageous than the current transatlantic one. While support for that idea waned in popularity a little after the Crimea takeover, some, now more on the political fringes, still do today.
There was zero chance Ukraine would have ever been admitted to NATO. Everybody understood that, including Putin and his generals. And while NATO and the U.S. maintained the official position (perhaps better characterized as a non-position) that any country, including Ukraine, remained free to apply to NATO, member states like Germany would have vetoed and almost certainly privately gave such assurances to Putin. Moreover, the last decade of shenanigans from Turkey and then Hungary have soured even the U.S.'s appetite for future NATO admissions of any country outside Western and Central Europe.
Ukraine missed its window for NATO membership by about 20 years. Today the U.S. wouldn't even seriously imply Ukraine had a chance at membership. Russian apologists would point out that Ukraine already entered quasi-formal "dialogue", but fail to mention that such such dialogue has been frozen for nearly 20 years. The status quo (which has no actual substance, anyhow) is for all intents and purposes permanently frozen. One might reasonably criticize NATO and the U.S. for leaving things as they are--to fester. The counter argument is that by making a formal concession it would only embolden Russia, which would never change their tune even if NATO formally renounced the possibility of Ukraine joining. Perhaps more importantly, it would be a huge loss for Ukrainian reformists. (There was a similar motivation behind the EU's long refusal to state the obvious regarding Turkey's membership in the EU.)
Beyond Putin's general revanchist sentiments, what he and other Russian leaders really worry about is de facto Ukrainian-EU economic integration, not NATO. There's little chance (but perhaps non-zero, and greater than Turkey's) Ukraine could ever join the EU anytime soon. But there's an infinite number of intermediate relationships, all of which disfavor Russia--at least from the Russian perspective.