President Joe Biden met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania on Tuesday and praised the authoritarian Turkish leader for having the “courage” to stop blocking Sweden from joining the alliance.
Erdogan’s poor record on human rights and dodgy re-election campaign did not appear in Biden’s fawning remarks.
“Mr. President, it’s good to see you again. It’s a delight to be with you, and, you know, we’re in this historic meeting, resolving a lot of things, I hope. And we made it all the more historic by the agreement you reached yesterday in the admission of Sweden and how you’re going to proceed,” Biden told Erdogan during their hour-long meeting in Vilnius.
“Thank you for your diplomacy and courage, and how you took that on. And I want to thank you for your leadership. Mr. President, this summit is reaffirming our commitment to NATO, and the NATO defense and allies in NATO and I hope we can make it even stronger,” Biden gushed.
Biden told Erdogan he looks forward to meeting with him again over “the next five years,” which would presume Biden wins re-election. Erdogan recently won his own re-election bid with questionable tactics and began his third decade of increasingly authoritarian rule.
Contrary to Biden’s praise, there was not a whiff of “courage” about anything the iron-fisted ruler of Turkey did with respect to Sweden. Erdogan certainly is not worried about angering the Turkish public by being too nice to the Swedes. He is secure in power for years to come.
Erdogan stubbornly opposed allowing Sweden into NATO since late last year, largely because Sweden refused to crack down on demonstrations against the Turkish government by outlawed and exiled Kurdish groups, prominently including the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
In May, the PKK and its supporters in Sweden enraged the Turkish government by projecting a PKK flag onto the Swedish Parliament building while the Turkish election was in progress.
“It is completely unacceptable that PKK terrorists continue to act freely in Sweden, which is a candidate for NATO. We expect the Swedish authorities to investigate this incident and hold its perpetrators accountable,” an Erdogan spokesman thundered at the time.
In June, Sweden agreed to extradite a self-proclaimed PKK supporter and Turkish national living in Sweden to face decade-old drug charges, a move widely seen as an effort to mollify Erdogan. The Turkish president remained largely unmollified until this week.
Speculation is rife about Erdogan’s price for dropping his veto on Sweden, which was increasingly irritating to other members of NATO and threatened to make a mockery of the Vilnius summit.
The most obvious payoff would be moving forward on Turkey’s long-stalled membership application to the European Union, a price Erdogan explicitly demanded for approving Sweden’s NATO membership on Monday. EU spokespeople have been taking pains all week to insist they will not lower their standards for Turkey in a crude bargain to get Sweden into NATO.
The Biden administration hinted on Tuesday that Erdogan might be rewarded by finally granting his persistent requests to purchase American F-16 fighter jets. White House officials insisted Biden has always favored making the sale, but the administration did not begin lobbying Congress in earnest to approve an F-16 deal until Erdogan caved on Sweden.
Turkey may still have trouble collecting its F-16s, because some members of Congress are reluctant to approve the sale, chief among them Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez (D-NJ).