Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has embraced a “North Korean-style attitude” toward Greece, a top official implied in response to Erdogan’s latest threat against his NATO neighbor.
“Threatening Greece with a missile attack by a NATO ally is both unacceptable and utterly condemnable,” Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias said Monday. “North Korean-style attitudes cannot and must not be allowed to enter into the North Atlantic alliance.”
Greece and Turkey joined NATO together in 1952, an expansion that anchored the trans-Atlantic alliance in the eastern Mediterranean. Yet the fraught history of the Ottoman Turkish empire, which ruled over Athens for centuries prior to Greece’s 1821 war of independence, has combined of late with maritime border disputes and Erdogan’s tense relationship with U.S. officials to breed acrimony between the allies.
“Now we have started to build our missiles. Of course, this production frightens the Greeks,” Erdogan said Sunday, referring to a recently tested short-range ballistic missile. “When you say [Typhoon], the Greek is scared. [Greece] say it will hit Athens. Of course, it will hit it.”
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Turkey and Greece have had several intense maritime disputes in recent years, which Dendias has characterized as “a threat with war” from Erdogan’s government, a once-unthinkable prospect for two members of NATO, bound by an Article 5 treaty pledge that obliges all members of the alliance to rally if any member is attacked. Greek officials have reinforced military positions on islands in the Aegean Sea over Turkish objections.
“Greece is making every attempt to increase the tension with unreasonable, illogical, and unlawful demands and claims, with constant provocative actions and aggressive rhetoric,” Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said Monday. “Those who want their future to be good should turn from the mistakes of yesterday and today.”
Those tensions have festered in parallel to multiple disputes between Washington and Ankara, including a controversy over Erdogan’s decision to purchase advanced Russian S-400 anti-air defense systems, a decision that prompted U.S. officials to expel Turkey from the F-35 stealth fighter program. Greek officials have applied to join the F-35 program, as well, while discouraging U.S. officials from providing Turkey with upgraded F-16 fighter jets.
“If you try to buy something (to arm yourselves) from here and there, from America to the islands, a country like Turkiye will not be a bystander. It has to do something,” Erdogan said Sunday.
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s government responded that Athens will be “neither terrorized nor intimidated” by Erdogan’s truculent rhetoric.
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“Mr. Erdogan thinks that as many times as he repeats the irrational and unjust, he can make it rational and just,” spokesman Giannis Oikonomou said. “That is not going to happen.”
