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Former US Ambassador to Greece Nicholas Burns expressed strong support for the Trump administration’s decision to impose sanctions on Turkey, speaking at the Second Conference on Southeast Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, which is taking place in line.
Nicholas Burns emphasized that the United States had asked Turkey to reconsider its decision on the S-400, but Ankara has not done so and it is correct to impose sanctions, he added. There must be a penalty for the Turks for that, he noted.
Nicholas Burns, who teaches diplomacy and international relations at Harvard, expressed confidence that today we are in the most difficult period of US-Turkish relations for more than a generation. “You have to go back four or five decades to find an equally difficult time, because of Turkey’s decision on the S-400, which is very dangerous,” he added.
Referring to Turkey today, he said that it has become authoritarian in many ways, led by an authoritarian leader. Note that you cannot call it a democracy.
Regarding Greek-Turkish relations, he said that Turkey unfairly challenges Greece’s sovereignty in the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean, interfering with the gas rights of Greece, Cyprus and Israel.
In this context, Nicholas Burns said that it is important to impose sanctions on Turkey, adding: “If the Turks leave? I doubt it.”
“NATO is still important to them, but there may be a time when the Turks have to be marginalized.”
At this point, he said that NATO flagged Greece during the dictatorship between 1967 and 1974, adding that we may have to deal with a variation of the same problem today with Turkey.
He also said that sanctions should be imposed on Turkey within NATO, because it behaves in an authoritarian manner, as well as in Hungary and Poland. He explained that both NATO and the EU are democratic organizations, alliances of democracies and we do not want to have authoritarian countries.
Source: ΑΠΕ-ΜΠΕ
