resolving this crisis in ukraine. just your thoughts, jim, on this. it was a brief meeting, but what were your thoughts? a couple things were interesting, and a lot of what josh said is absolutely right. i think a lot of the things that erdogan sent to biden, he wanted to show a personal connection between self and the president. he said in the past that was important with him, and he had more of a personal relationship with trump before happened and now has not had the same with biden, and now he s building that relationship, saying thanks for the calls and good luck with your re-election. he mentioned a new process and mechanism. that s important and is a big part of the package deal, that
concerns that turkey had about arms exports and terrorism within sweden and finland, the country that joined nato back in april. but behind the scenes there was a lot of wrangling by the turkish government trying to extract concessions on key issues, including trying to get the u.s. to sell f-16s to turkey, and we started to hear from president erdogan, and in the wake of the agreement all sides claiming that these issues were not linked and this was not essentially a barter, but we are hearing from the white house that they are going at full speed to sell the f-16s to turkey, and they are going to fully support turkey s bid to enter the eu. you can see how erdogan thrusts
near warm-ups, but now we are initiating a new process. this new process is a process of five years, and now you are getting prepared for the forthcoming elections and with the forthcoming elections i would like to take this opportunity to also wish you the best of luck. thank you very much. we look forward to meeting with you in the next five years. reporter: mr. president, is president zelenskyy thank you. time to move out. thank you so much. mr. president, are you worried this proposal has not had the support of president zelenskyy? guys, we re moving out. come on.
commented on the upcoming u.s. elections, i am sure, was appreciated by president biden. there s a question of whether or not erdogan would come to the united states, and that was also an incentive to get him to be more cooperate on the turkey issues. we have a chance to bring turkey closer to us economically, politically and militarily. it s not just about europe and russia, and we also have challenges in the middle east. the closest we came to war with russia over the last decade or more was in syria, and so we really need to work closer with turkey on the sticky issues where we don t agree 100%, but we at least agree that, you know, we don t want russia to be the overwhelming influence in syria. we need to counter balance and try to do what we can to help the syrian opposition and protect human rights there.
relationship with its nato partners and the eu members. the reason why this might be a real reality and really important for turkey is because turkey s economy is struggling, and they have had runaway inflation, or maybe not runaway, i m not an economists, but massive inflation over 70% last year and stands today at 38%. president erdogan needs to revamp his trade relationships, and of course, imports, the issue is, of course, russia. russia is still a trading partner of turkey. there s a real opportunity for turkey. i think erdogan needs the economic boost more than anything else, and that s why the eu is back on the table as well. josh, what will president biden do to try and keep nato unified when it comes to ukraine? his biggest challenge at this summit, josé, was to try and keep nato unified and to try to