US and European officials expect that Turkey’s challenge to Finland’s and Sweden’s accession to NATO will come to an end at the alliance’s summit in Madrid this week, with leaders potentially working towards an eleventh hour meeting.

“Turkey saw a major leverage effect in Finland’s and Sweden’s request,” said a European official who spoke on condition of anonymity to talk about sensitive diplomatic talks. “They try to maximize this the way they always do.” Turkey’s desire is to keep the Western world guessing, several officials said, and the Biden administration has been reluctant to intervene.

“The Americans do not want to end up in the middle of this because the price will then go up,” the European official added. Turkey’s typical diplomatic strategy is to avoid concessions at the last minute, such as a meeting between US President Joe Biden and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the Madrid summit.

US and European officials expect that Turkey’s challenge to Finland’s and Sweden’s accession to NATO will come to an end at the alliance’s summit in Madrid this week, with leaders potentially working towards an eleventh hour meeting.

“Turkey saw a major leverage effect in Finland’s and Sweden’s request,” said a European official who spoke on condition of anonymity to talk about sensitive diplomatic talks. “They try to maximize this the way they always do.” Turkey’s desire is to keep the Western world guessing, several officials said, and the Biden administration has been reluctant to intervene.

“The Americans do not want to end up in the middle of this because the price will then go up,” the European official added. Turkey’s typical diplomatic strategy is to avoid concessions at the last minute, such as a meeting between US President Joe Biden and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the Madrid summit.

Turkey is trying to put forward a number of requests for the NATO summit, officials said, including easing defense exports. Erdogan sees Western restrictions as too restrictive and has called for the repression of Kurdish-affiliated groups in Scandinavia. Turkey has previously used a number of strategies to vigorously arm NATO, requiring the unanimous consent of all 30 member states to make the most decisions.

Turkey has been in conflict with Washington over the purchase of Russian-made air defense systems S-400 and, as a consequence, it was frozen out of the US supply chain for the manufacture of the F-35 fighter aircraft. The United States and Turkey also turned their heads over the Syrian civil war, with Washington supporting forces that Ankara saw as a threat.

“Turkey is taking its position in NATO as something to be used to their own advantage, even if it is not on the issue at hand,” Mick Mulroy, a former deputy secretary of defense under the Trump administration, told Foreign policy in a text message. “Hopefully, they will not block Finland and Sweden because of the F-35 / S-400 issue or in an attempt to force the United States out of the partnership with [Syrian Democratic Forces]. ”

Erdogan’s stance against Finland’s and Sweden’s membership requests – which beats most of the rest of the alliance with 30 nations – has also proved popular for him politically ahead of the likely presidential election in 2023. The Kurdish question has become a hotspot in Swedish politics; Turkey, Finland and Sweden are set to hold a personal meeting on Tuesday before the summit.

But Erdogan has his own political considerations to worry about at home that could control his calculation. Inflation has risen to more than 70 percent amid global market fluctuations from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – and some economists fear it could rise to triple digits by the end of the year, the worst during his 20-year rule. These economic problems cut into the heart of Erdogan’s political base ahead of the likely 2023 election, which means that the Turkish mercury leader needs a political victory.

“He knows that because NATO works unanimously, Swedes will need to meet or come close to parts of Turkey’s demands,” said Soner Cagaptay, head of the Turkish research program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “So he knows it’s a fight he can win, which is why he took it to the open. He says, ‘If I win this behind closed doors, I’ll get no shock in my popularity.”

Erdogan has several wishes. He wants European states to designate the Kurdish People’s Defense Forces (YPG), the backbone of the US-led force against the Islamic State in Syria, as a terrorist group. He has also asked Sweden to prevent the collection and recruitment of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been running a low-level insurgency in southern Turkey since the 1980s and which the US and EU consider a terrorist group. It could postpone the accession process to 2023, Cagaptay said. Turkey has also been keen to get Sweden to lift an informal export ban on Ankara during its invasion of Syria in 2019, to get NATO to focus more on security along its southern flank and to get F-16s from the US that were promised after Trump the administration kicked the ally out of the F-35 program to buy the Russian air defense system.

“He sees this as a way to polish his nationalist credentials,” said James Jeffrey, a former US ambassador to Turkey who served as the foreign ministry’s top Syrian envoy until 2020. And ahead of the summit, some US officials have dampened expectations of how quickly Finland and Sweden join the NATO alliance.

A senior U.S. defense official spoke to reporters traveling with U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin this month, saying the Biden administration does not focus on a specific date for NATO membership, but is still confident that the expansion of the alliance is a matter of when, not if. The European official said that in six months’ time, Sweden and Finland will either join NATO or the border.

“If I were a Russian military planner, I would look at … Finnish territorial defense capability, and it’s a planning nightmare for the Russian military,” said the senior US defense official.

Both countries are major investors in US-made F-35 fighter jets, but some European officials are worried that they lack sufficient air defense to deal with the Russian threat on the long borders with Finland and Norway in the far north to deal with the ongoing Kremlin. missile threat from Murmansk.

But support for both countries to join the alliance seems to be growing with tensions over Kaliningrad, Russia’s military exclave bordering the Baltic members of the NATO alliance, on high alert after Lithuania banned the transit of certain goods into the area, according to the EU. sanctions.

One thing that Erdogan has really missed from the Biden team that he consistently received from former US President Donald Trump is high-level attention. The two leaders have rarely been involved. And that makes it harder for the White House to get a clear reading on what drives Erdogan – and who has his ear.

“It is always difficult to know what Erdogan’s results are because he is not predictable,” Jeffrey said. “He is shooting from the hip, he is changing and he is constantly listening to very nationalist forces on the one hand and what would be considered rational people who have a good idea of ​​how Turkey should fit into the Eurasian security empire.”