NATO Secretary-General: Sweden to Join NATO by July

NATO was created in 1949 to counter the Soviet Union. In 1990, then-US Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would move “not one inch eastward” after absorbing the soon-to-be unified Germany.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told German media that he is confident Sweden will join the bloc by July at the latest.

The next NATO summit will be held in Washington on July 9-11, and Stoltenberg expects Sweden will be a NATO member before the conference kicks off.

Sweden and Finland abandoned decades of neutrality to request NATO membership in May 2022. Finland quickly gained approval but Sweden has been blocked by Turkiye and Hungary.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan previously accused Sweden of not taking action against the Kurdish Workers’ Party, which has been classified as a terrorist organization by not only Ankara but also the EU and the US. Sweden has a relatively large Kurdish population and has accepted Turkish dissidents.

The PKK has been running an insurgency in Turkiye for decades, largely operating out of areas in Syria and Iraq.

In July, a Swedish court convicted a man accused of working to finance the PKK, and later that month Turkiye and Sweden signed a “new bilateral security compact,” Sweden agreeing to resume arms shipments to Turkiye. Erdogan has also requested his country be allowed to purchase F-16 fighter jets from the United States.

In the fall, Erdogan announced he was withdrawing his country’s opposition to Sweden’s accession into NATO, and in October he signed the accession protocol and submitted it to the Turkish parliament. Some Turkish lawmakers still oppose the process and have demanded more concessions from Sweden.

However, Stoltenberg says Sweden has honored its commitments to Turkiye and has already made enough concessions.

Hungary’s opposition is based on President Viktor Orban’s assertion that Swedish politicians and media lie about the state of democracy in the country. Orban stressed in a December news conference that there was no deal between his country and Turkiye on Sweden joining the military alliance.

"There is no Hungarian-Turkish agreement" Orban said, adding that approval "will be decided only by [the] Hungarian parliament...when lawmakers decide the time has come for it. They don't have a great willingness to make this decision."

New additions to NATO must be approved by its current members unanimously.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stressed that NATO expansion does not contribute to world peace and that the alliance is a relic of the Cold War.