Erdogan: NATO Summit has been a great diplomatic victory for Turkey

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, “Although the opposition is trying to overshadow the NATO Summit, it has been a great diplomatic victory for Turkey. This fact is confirmed not only by our interlocutors, but also by everyone who has reason, conscience and a minimum level of knowledge of diplomacy.”

Erdogan met with journalists and answered their questions after the NATO Summit of Heads of State and Government held in Madrid, the capital of Spain.

“The Madrid Summit was an important opportunity to deliver a message of unity and solidarity during this critical period,” President Erdogan said, noting that they reaffirmed the main role played by NATO in terms of the security of the Euro-Atlantic geography on this occasion. He went on to say, “At the summit, we adopted a new Strategic Concept that sets out NATO’s goals and will guide the work that needs to be done in the coming period.”

Erdogan who stated that Sweden and Finland’s applications for membership in NATO were one of the outstanding issues in the context of the summit by nature, continued as follows:

“We have maintained the principles and firm attitude that we have put forward at this point from the very beginning, also in Madrid. We have expressed to them that these countries should make binding commitments and take concrete and clear steps towards our legitimate demands, especially in the field of combating terrorism. We have registered all these issues with the memorandum signed after the quadrennial summit, which we held under the auspices of the Secretary General. In addition to the achievements achieved by our country with this memorandum, Turkey has signed many firsts, especially in the field of combating terrorism. For the first time, a special session on ‘Terrorism and the South’ was held at the North Atlantic Council at our request. The fact that terrorism is one of the two main threats with all its types and manifestations has entered the Alliance’s top guidance document. On the basis of our borders and national security, we have made references to the 360-degree approach in every document. For the first time in the Strategic Concept, we have recorded that terrorist organizations threaten our ‘peoples and lands’, as well as our ‘security forces.”