NATO’s bad boys: Turkey and Hungary play their own game

WASHINGTON — Turkey and Hungary came to the NATO summit ready to hedge and bargain.

On the face of it they’re both solid members of the alliance. Hungary spends 2.1 percent of GDP on defense, above the alliance target, and is modernizing its military. Turkey has NATO’s second-largest army after the U.S.

But neither Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán nor Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish president, make comfortable partners for the rest of the 32 member-alliance. The pair of populists — one defending Christian values, the other increasingly Islamist — have broader interests in common.

They both dally with Russia, they hedge on supporting Ukraine and they have foreign policies that often clash with NATO priorities.

They’re looking to ensure NATO is a purely defensive alliance — in other words that it keeps its nose out of Ukraine. They’re also gearing up for a possible change of government in the United States and cozying up to Donald Trump.

As soon as Orbán arrived in Washington from his much-criticized meeting in Moscow and Beijing, he sat down with Erdoğan. Later Thursday, he was due to fly to Florida to pay court to Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

Orbán used the NATO summit as his latest platform to preach his self-appointed “peace” mission — an effort to end the war in Ukraine on what looks like terms set by Russian leader Vladimir Putin, the war’s instigator.

“The issue of the Russia-Ukraine war was discussed,” Orbán’s office said in a statement following the meeting with Erdoğan, adding that the Hungarian PM “asked for the support of the Hungarian peace mission in view of the fact that Turkey has been the only successful mediator in the conflict so far.”

Hungary was the only NATO country that opted out of the alliance’s new mission to support Ukraine by coordinating the transfer of Western weapons and training Ukrainian soldiers.

Weeks before coming to the summit, Orbán forced then-Dutch PM Mark Rutte to sign and confirm respect for this position — a necessary kowtow before he approved Rutte’s bid to be the next NATO secretary-general.

Bargaining chips

Turkey also put Rutte through the wringer before signing off on his candidacy. Now, to the chagrin of U.S. and European diplomats, Ankara has a new demand, according to two NATO officials: that Turkey gets to host the NATO summit in 2026.

Turkey also caused last-minute trouble with the NATO summit declaration, which was issued on Wednesday evening.

Earlier this week, Turkey “reopened the declaration” on various points, according to a diplomat, describing the move as “rare” given the advanced stage of negotiation on the wording.

In the end, the declaration mentioned that NATO countries “look forward to meeting again at our next Summit in The Hague, the Netherlands, in June 2025, followed by a meeting in Türkiye.” The format (meeting as opposed to summit) and the timing (2026 or later) were deliberately left vague for countries to hammer out the details at a later stage.

Ankara also sought to water down the reference to NATO-EU cooperation. The issue has been a sore point for Turkey, whose EU candidacy exists only in name. On this, however, Turkey made less headway — 23 countries share membership in EU and NATO.

In the end, the NATO statement says the alliance “recognises the value of a stronger and more capable European defence that contributes positively to transatlantic and global security and is complementary to, and interoperable with NATO.” That won’t be music to Erdoğan’s ears — but he has to pick his battles.

To the chagrin of U.S. and European diplomats, Ankara is demanding that Turkey gets to host the 2026 NATO summit. | Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images

Similar but separate

Western diplomats in NATO have been watching the Ankara-Budapest tango for some years.

The biggest headache for most NATO allies arose when both countries slow-walked Sweden’s bid to join NATO — submitted in 2022 and approved only after more than 600 days.

While the two cause complications for the broader alliance, their demands aren’t always in sync.

Hungarian officials complained in private they were caught by surprise when Turkey moved on Sweden’s application in January, after Ankara secured the U.S. sale of F-16 fighter jets. Hungary, in response, started to move on Sweden and got an agreement to buy four more Swedish Saab JAS Gripen fighter jets.

Although both Orbán and Erdoğan have broken ranks with the rest of the alliance and met with Putin, their positions on Ukraine aren’t exactly the same.

The Hungarian leader has sought to undermine NATO’s role on Ukraine and parrots Putin’s talking points on the war, declaring that Ukraine won’t be able to hold out against superior Russian forces. Hungary also has no intention of following the rest of the EU in ending purchases of Russian natural gas.

Turkey has declared its support for Ukraine’s “territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence,” and does send weapons to Kyiv while maintaining a vibrant trading relationship with Russia — including big gas purchases.

Both are wary of entangling NATO in the conflict. Erdoğan cautioned on X that the alliance “should not be made a party to the war when designing steps to support Ukraine.”

Despite having policies wildly out of line with the rest of NATO, the alliance remains a core foreign policy priority for both countries. Indeed, Orbán even exhibited a sense of deference when he arrived in the summit, physically bowing to NATO boss Jens Stoltenberg and U.S. President Joe Biden while appearing onstage for an official photo.

Turkey has much wider interests than NATO. Its army is in Syria and regularly crosses into Iraq. It has tried to form a Turkic bloc that includes ex-Soviet countries like Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. It also regularly demands NATO focus more on fighting terrorism, an agenda that serves its national interests.

Orbán even made an informal appearance at the Turkic summit earlier this month, something that earned him a smackdown from the EU’s top diplomat Josep Borrell.

Days before Erdoğan met Biden and Stoltenberg, he showed up in Kazakhstan and attended a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a security and defense grouping founded by Beijing and Moscow, and asked for full membership.

But in a recent interview with POLITICO, Turkish Defense Minister Yaşar Güler said: “The most effective security organization in the Euro-Atlantic region is NATO … We think there is no need for any other formation.”