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In 2017 (was it that long ago!) there was an incident where Turkish secret police attacked anti-Erdogan protestors in Washington DC. It might have got Turkey on the radar.
The other thing that comes to mind is Turkey holding up Finland’s NATO admission, which would line up with the timeline quite well.
To completely sidetrack the conversation, is there a way to kick members out of NATO? Because Turkey needs to go. They just kinda... suck on every dimension.
There's no official mechanism that allows removal of a member that doesn't consent. If the alliance is dependent on however the USA feels about a member at any given time this diminishes the value of joining the alliance. The value of the alliance is also diminished by an adversarial member that does adversarial things too. Maybe to a lesser extent.
There's nothing that practically stops all the other members agreeing to boot Turkey out, considering that decision "unanimous", then writing a new rule about removal after the fact. Officially the alliance member needs to consent to removal to leave.
That's all a lot of mess when NATO and the US can just wait out Erdogan and hope the next guy is more compliant. Despite the theatrics and politics they did host support for US through the GWOT. Turkey also hasn't kicked all NATO personnel out of the country recently. Which they did in the 70's as I recall. So maybe they've always been a bit of an adversarial partner in the alliance. The grandstanding, bloviating, and opportunistic haggling is the price to pay for a relatively, if not quite as important as 50 years ago, important strategic ally.
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Being able to almost singlehandedly block in Russian access in and out of the Black Sea (the only alternative is the Volga-Don canal) is incredibly valuable, and probably the main reason we put up with their shenanigans.
Wrong canal. You're thinking of the Volga-Baltic Waterway and White Sea-Baltic Canal, which together allow Russia to move stuff from the Black Sea to the Baltic or White Seas (the latter of which gives uninterdictable ocean access). The Volga-Don Canal connects the Black and Caspian Seas, but that's of much more limited value since the Caspian Sea is a lake.
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Seems not that valuable to me given that we have complete air superiority in the Mediterranean. Time to make Turkey pay their freight. Threaten to kick them out and they might actually act like valuable alliance members and not an embarrassment.
Per the Montreux convention, Turkey gets to block warships of warring parties without itself being a party to the war. If the US had to apply its Mediterranean air superiority to prevent Russia from reinforcing the BSF, they would have to (threaten to) directly fire on the Russians, which would let the Russians feel like they have license to shoot down US drones over the Black Sea, which would still be very detrimental to UA. Any attempt to claim that a naval blockade in international waters is not in fact an act of war would bite the US in the ass over Taiwan, as China could start that one sooner than the US argument could be memoryholed.
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