Erdogan Says E.U. Must ‘Clear the Way’ for Turkey Before It Will Support Sweden’s NATO Bid

Though I agree with you in spirit on the topic of “a single NATO country that has slipped into autocracy shouldn’t be able to hamstring the whole damn alliance”, in practice, due to the Montreux Convention, Turkey fully controls access to the Black Sea, which was pretty much the entire reason they were invited into NATO in the first place way back in 1952.

Hungary, however, is a different matter, and does not bring significant strategic value to the alliance.

That said, I do think it might be a good idea to make some sort of “override the asshole” provision within NATO, such that a single country couldn’t effectively hold up and materially threaten (through inaction) the security of the entire alliance.

Turkey has been shooting for that for years. The effort stalled after Erdogan and his party got increasingly authoritarian, which the rest of the EU (barring Hungary I guess) really did not like. This was him (hilariously) trying to tie Sweden’s NATO accession to Turkey’s own EU accession, which - besides being absolute nonsense because they’re two entirely separate, albeit largely overlapping geopolitical entities - forced him to do an about-face on that statement roughly 8 hours later.