No chance Turkey will be 'kicked out of NATO'
Turkey’s importance for the alliance remains despite differences while a former ambassador says NATO has no rules for “kicking anyone out.”
The US-led fight against the Islamic State (IS), and in particular the battle for Kobani, the predominantly Kurdish town in northern Syria that is shouting distance from the Turkish border, has turned into a “stress test” for Turkey’s NATO membership, if one is to go by some Western opinion-makers.
These opinion-makers continue to push the theme that Ankara is not doing its share in fighting IS, if not aiding and abetting IS against the Kurds, and should therefore be given notice that its value as a member of the Western alliance is rapidly diminishing.
French philosopher-writer Bernard-Henri Levy is just one of the prominent Westerners who lent his weight to this view recently in a piece he penned for the New Republic on Oct. 12.
In his piece titled "Shame on Turkey for Choosing the Islamic State over the Kurds," Levy maintained that the battle against IS was “the moment of truth, the now or never, for the (NATO) alliance and the system of collective security that was established in the region in the aftermath of the Second World War.”
