Turkish President Erdogan Discusses Bilateral Ties, NATO With His US Counterpart Biden
US President Joe Biden and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan held a telephone conversation on Monday where bilateral relationship and cooperation as NATO allies were critical areas of discourse. Erdogan won a third consecutive term as President of Turkey on Sunday.
In a statement, the White House said, “They (US President Biden and Turkish President Erdogan) expressed their shared commitment to continue working together as close partners to deepen cooperation between our countries and people. They also discussed their readiness as NATO Allies to address regional and global challenges, including strengthening transatlantic security at the NATO Summit in Vilnius.”
I look forward to continuing to work together as NATO Allies on bilateral issues and shared global challenges.
— President Biden (@POTUS) May 28, 2023
The NATO summit is scheduled to be held in Vilnius, Lithuania from 11 to 12 July 2023. Finland became the newest member of the Cold War alliance this year. Turkey was instrumental in blocking the bids of Sweden and Finland to join NATO but later both the Nordic States and Ankara signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to settle disputes among them.
What is NATO?
NATO is a military alliance comprising 27 European nations, 2 North American nations, and 1 Eurasian nation. Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States were the Alliance’s original 12 founding members in 1949.
The other member countries are Greece and Turkey (1952), Germany (1955), Spain (1982), the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland (1999), Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia (2004), Albania and Croatia (2009), Montenegro (2017), North Macedonia (2020) and Finland (2023).
NATO claims that it is dedicated to the peaceful settlement of problems. It possesses the military might to conduct crisis-management operations if diplomatic efforts are unsuccessful. These are carried out on their own or in collaboration with other nations and international groups by a United Nations mandate or the collective defence provision of NATO’s founding treaty, Article 5 of the Washington Treaty.
