Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said he would no longer block Sweden's accession, after a year of doing so
assembled on Tuesday in Vilnius, Lithuania, for the defense alliance’s annual summit. But the biggest news of this year’s NATO summit may be what took place in the lead up to it.
After hours of talks with Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg on Monday, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan agreed to lift his veto of Sweden’s NATO membership bid. His U-turn comes after Stockholm reaffirmed its support behind for Turkey’s longstanding bid to join the E.U., and, some have speculated, Washington’s announcement on Tuesday that it“Sweden will become a full member of the alliance,” Stoltenberg said of the decision on Monday.
For over 200 years, Sweden has had a long history of military non-alignment that was shaped by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, which saw the country break diplomatic ties with France and permit the U.K. to use Swedish Pomerania as a military base. Napoleon prompted Russia and Denmark to declare war on Sweden, which ultimately lost to the powerful coalition. “Sweden had to withdraw from Northern Europe’s power politics around 1809.
Then, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, public opinion in Sweden shifted in favor of joining NATO. AWhy was Erdoğan holding up Sweden’s NATO membership bid?
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