Turkish invasion sparks NATO crisis but eviction is unlikely

But despite the high political-military tensions, Turkey is very unlikely to be ejected from the 29-member alliance, for NATO has seen tense times and survived them before.

Turkey has NATO's second biggest army, after the United States, and keeping the country inside NATO helps keep a lid on Turkey's historic tensions with its neighbour Greece. "At the moment, this is the greatest political-military challenge the alliance faces," Ian O. Lesser, vice-president at the German Marshall Fund think-tank, said Wednesday. "Obviously as an existential matter, it's not on a par with deterring Russia in places like the Baltics or around the Black Sea. But in terms of a political crisis within the alliance, and potentially a security crisis, it's very, very high on the agenda.

Indeed, Stoltenberg has shied away from any public criticism of Turkey -- or of any other NATO member -- and recalled that the alliance plays no role in Syria, beyond helping with the surveillance of air traffic over the country from abroad. Turkey has done this in the past, in 2015 after a series of extremist attacks on its territory and in 2012 when a fighter jet was shot down over Syria. Poland did so in 2014, when tensions in Ukraine were at their height.

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