No, Really, NATO Can't Expel Turkey

If Turkey is being unreasonable in its demands, the rest of the alliance is being careless in its willingness to add new security commitments without thinking through the implications.

Some of the Bloomberg editors’ complaints about Turkish foot-dragging don’t hold up very well:

Turkey’s intransigence doesn’t just jeopardize the Nordic countries’ membership bids; it puts Europe’s wider security at risk.

Europe’s “wider security” is not at risk if these states don’t join the alliance. It may be annoying or inconvenient for Turkey to delay or block their accession, but it is not all that important for the security of the alliance. The editors’ own arguments can be turned around on them fairly easily. If Finland and Sweden are “now uniquely vulnerable to Russian coercion” because they have declared their intentions to join the alliance, that suggests that bringing them into the alliance is not exactly the low-cost option that supporters have made it out to be. Whatever the alliance might gain from adding new members, it will also take on new liabilities and responsibilities. If “the alliance’s resources are stretched from assisting Ukraine,” bringing in new members seems to be at best a wash and will probably end up adding to the alliance’s burdens rather than lightening them. If Turkey is being unreasonable in its demands, the rest of the alliance is being careless in its willingness to add new security commitments without thinking through the implications.