Turkey and Hungary have not yet accepted Sweden’s and Finland’s bids to join the US-led military bloc
US President Joe Biden’s administration has left NATO allies Turkey and Hungary off the invitation list to next week’s pro-democracy summit, Foreign Policy magazine reported on Thursday, citing three US officials familiar with the decision.
The two countries were also rejected from last year’s first iteration of the summit, an event that, despite only being held twice, Biden has hailed as one of his foreign policy successes.
A State Department official confirmed that all participants in the 2021 summit had received an invitation to this year’s event, plus some extensions. But, he said, the Biden administration “wasn’t interested in this event being seen as a sweeping assessment of the strength of another country’s democracy.”
Rob Berschinksi, senior director of human rights and democracy at the National Security Council, told al-Monitor that while Turkey was “an important NATO ally of the United States and an incredibly important partner,” Washington had “been quite clear in terms of [its] assessment of the status of democracy and human rights within the country”, namely that it was declining.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s announcement last week that the country would start ratifying Finland’s NATO membership but not Sweden’s likely contributed to the decision to leave it off the list a second time. While Erdogan has not ruled out Sweden being allowed into the military alliance, he stressed that Stockholm’s refusal to hand over more than 210 alleged terrorists to Turkish custody was a dealbreaker.
Hungary, which Biden memorably denounced as “totalitarian” in 2020, has fallen out of favor among NATO allies for its refusal to back the toughest sanctions the EU has tried to impose on the Russian oil and gas industry. With about 80% of its natural gas coming from Russia, Budapest has repeatedly pointed out that an embargo would hurt Hungary and other European nations far more than it would punish Moscow for the conflict in Ukraine.
The Hungarian prime minister’s office earlier this week reiterated calls for a ceasefire in Ukraine and condemned Britain’s decision to send depleted uranium munitions to Kiev. The country’s opposition to allowing Ukraine into the EU will not change unless “basic human rights norms are respected” regarding the use of EU languages โโin Ukraine, Gergely Gulyas, head of the prime minister’s office, told reporters on Thursday, although Hungary has expressed their support. because Finland and Sweden join NATO.
The Summit for Democracy will take place on March 28-30 in Washington, as well as in partner countries Costa Rica, South Korea and Zambia.
(RT.com)
Source: sn.dk