Foreign Relations & International Law

The Lawfare Podcast: Turkey, NATO and Alliance Membership

David Priess, Nick Danforth, Rachel Rizzo
Wednesday, July 6, 2022, 12:00 PM

Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
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Earlier this year, Finland and Sweden applied to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But both of their applications were held up, due to an objection by Turkey. NATO being a mutual security alliance, any one member can prevent new countries from joining. To fully understand the background dynamics at play here and to explain the agreement that the three countries recently signed, allowing the applications to move forward, Lawfare Publisher David Priess spoke with two people who have covered Turkey from a multitude of angles. 

Nick Danforth is the author of The Remaking of Republican Turkey: Memory and Modernitysince the Fall of the Ottoman Empire. He has also covered U.S.-Turkish relations for the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Woodrow Wilson Center and the Bipartisan Policy Center. Rachel Rizzo is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council's Europe Center, where she focuses on European security, NATO, and the trans-Atlantic relationship.


David Priess is Director of Intelligence at Bedrock Learning, Inc. and a Senior Fellow at the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security. He served during the Clinton and Bush 43 administrations as a CIA officer and has written two books: “The President’s Book of Secrets,” about the top-secret President’s Daily Brief, and "How To Get Rid of a President," describing the ways American presidents have left office.
Nick Danforth has covered U.S.-Turkish relations for the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Woodrow Wilson Center, and the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Rachel Rizzo is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center. Her research focuses on European security and the transatlantic relationship. Prior to the Atlantic Council, she worked as the Director of Programs at the Truman Project and Truman Center for National Policy. From 2019-2020, she spent a year as a Robert Bosch fellow in Berlin and spent over five years at the Center for a New American Security. She began her career as a financial analyst at Goldman Sachs.

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