No longer the obedient NATO ally, Erdogan floats nuclear option

CNN — It’s no secret that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sees his country as the pre-eminent Muslim power in the Middle East. Last year, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told CBS News that the Kingdom “does not want to acquire any nuclear bomb, but without a doubt if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible.” And, in part, the Turkish leader’s remarks may have simply been his trademark blunt – and sometimes incendiary – rhetoric. Ziya Meral, senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, says that, at the moment, “there is no tangible sign that Turkey is set to pursue nuclear weapons, nor that we are witnessing a substantial shift in Turkey’s decades-long policy of not pursuing them.” “In practical terms, it would take a decade with substantial financial commitment and against substantial global pressure, both of which would make truly costly and damaging,” Meral told CNN. He told an audience last month that under President Erdogan, Turkey “wants to see itself as shifting away from Europe and being more in the Middle East and more Eastern leaning so that it can play situations to its own advantage.” It’s a view echoed by commentator Aaron Stein, who wrote in foreign policy website War on the Rocks that Erdogan: “Seemed to be using nuclear weapons as a straw man to make a broader argument about Ankara’s place in the world, and how the American and Western systems with which Turkey had long associated itself are unfair and require change.” “He was expounding on a more personal, deeply held grievance about Turkey’s global role,” Stein says. Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said on Twitter earlier this month that the US was “long overdue to give up fiction” that Erdogan’s Turkey was an ally.