https://apnews.com/article/sweden-turkey-nato-membership-veto-erdogan-f16-6bdc19e81d84a0ab18ac2d48ca65b507
The Turkish Parliament’s foreign affairs committee gave its consent to Sweden’s bid to join NATO.
We've caught on to how this works now. I anticipate about two more iterations of tedious, drawn out flip-flopping and misinformation during the remaining steps before we are either finally let in or the whole thing fizzles out.
There is already very heavy pressure on Turkey to let Sweden in, so I don't see this having any chance to fizzle out, Turkey may be a valuable member, but there are limits to their value.
Zero chance NATO lets the Black Sea and Bosporus + Dardanelles fall into russia’s sphere.
Black Sea or Baltic Sea.
Get both and you've cut off 2/3 of Russia's major ports. (facing west)
I think getting out of Mediterranean at Gibraltar is worth more than getting into the black sea. If Turkey wants to play hardball with EU USA and NATO, they will quickly realize how much they are the underdog, and no idiot dictator shouting his stupidities can prevent that.
Turkey is not playing by the rules, but is exploiting a situation, despite the it would benefit Turkey too to have Sweden in NATO.
If Turkey can't respect the mutual interests of an international institution they themselves benefit from, they can go fuck themselves.
Some things can be bought at too high a price.
It’s very different. Turkey completely controls access to the Black Sea, which ties into several MAJOR river networks across Europe. The strait of Gibraltar is much wider, and also not controlled by a single nation, so it’s far less feasible to block, for a lot of reasons.