The buckets of cold water Turkey is pouring on Finland and Sweden’s bids to join NATO may be coming from the sea around the shore of Cyprus, the divided Mediterranean island that is a bargaining chip for the Turkish president, Tayyip Erdogan. 

There is mounting evidence that Turkey could be using its status as a member of NATO to wield its veto power over the anticipated accession to the alliance of the two Nordic countries as a lever to force the international community to confer legitimacy on its de facto Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.

London’s Sunday Express recently reported that the leader of the TRNC — which is recognized by no other country but Turkey — requested that Mr. Erdogan put the status of the rogue state on the table in the NATO talks scheduled to take place later this month. The rogue state’s president, Ersin Tatar, told the British newspaper that his aim is for North Cyprus to be recognized as a separate country.

A former British Crown colony, Cyprus gained independence as a republic in 1960 but just 14 years later Turkey invaded, holding on to the northern third of the island where it established the so-called Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. United Nations peacekeepers monitor a buffer zone that bisects the island and splits Nicosia, the capital of the internationally recognized Republic of Cyprus, in two. Decades of half-hearted efforts to reunify the island have failed and an estimated 30,000 Turkish troops are still stationed in the northern breakaway state. Mr. Tatar is not alone in thinking that attempts to undo the division that followed partition are at this point essentially futile. 

The third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, Cyprus has been called the unsinkable aircraft carrier of the eastern Mediterranean and is of immense strategic importance for both signals intelligence and logistics purposes. It sits due south of Turkey, just west of Syria, north of Egypt, and is militarily allied to both Israel and Greece. Britain maintains two large bases on the island, both in the south: collectively, the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia constitute a British Overseas Territory.

The presence of the bases did not deter Turkey from invading in 1974, a fact lost neither on Mr. Erdogan nor some in London. According to the  Express, senior British ministers “are privately sympathetic to the idea” of recognizing the TRNC, a development that is much more plausible for post-Brexit Britain because the internationally recognized Republic of Cyprus happens to be a far-flung member of the EU. But it is not a member of NATO, and that is where Mr. Erdogan smells blood.

That does not mean he is going to attack — his forebears at Ankara already did the heavy lifting for him in 1974, using the pretext of a weak Greek-led attempt to join Cyprus and Greece, called enosis, to send in troops. But he may well press his bet while the casino is still open, so to speak. 

While international recognition of the TRNC would be politically unpalatable for virtually everyone outside of Turkey and northern Cyprus itself, it would restore to Mr. Erdogan some of the regional street cred he is rapidly shedding due to his bellicose rhetoric with respect to Greece’s sovereign rights in the Aegean Sea, his unilateral actions in Syria, and his failure to leverage Turkey’s oversight of the Bosphorus to keep Russian ships from entering the Black Sea. It is likely that in time it would also bolster revenues generated from tourism.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Turkey is using the global crisis unfolding around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a moment to extract concessions from the West and Moscow to achieve some of Turkey’s long-standing aims. But “blocking Sweden and Finland’s NATO membership over those countries’ alleged support for the Kurdish militants that Turkey is fighting” is likely a sideshow. The Ottoman Empire seized all of Cyprus in 1571 and Mr. Erdogan is widely seen as wanting to bring some of that historical swagger back home, and Cyprus — at least the northern chunk of it already in Turkish possession — is a prize too tantalizingly close to resist.

Some of that revisionist reflex was on display following a cabinet meeting yesterday at which Mr. Erdogan said, “Turkey saw the collapse of its 600-year-old state after the First World War. With the National Struggle we saved as much of the territory as we could in relation to what they tried to impose on us with the Treaty of Sèvres.” And “after  World War II, we faced the hypocrisy of the Allies, which kept us aside and did not include us,” he continued. “Turkey tore the shirts that had been worn on her, cut off the shackles, tore down the walls that had been built for her with her past and made the mortgages that had been imposed on her disappear.”

For a country that has just signaled that it wants to change its name from Turkey to the less avian-sounding Türkiye, it amounts to a lot of squawking, and too much for some. Greek newspaper Ta Nea asked today, “Is Erdogan Looking for a Way out of NATO?” Probably not, but in that paper’s estimation Ankara is “playing a dangerous game of blackmail” with NATO by trying to “instrumentalize” the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

In the run-up to the NATO summit at Madrid on June 28, look for Mr. Erdogan to dangle Cyprus more visibly before his Western interlocutors. The wise ones among them will remember that while Cyprus is a very pretty island, it is also a powder keg.

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Correction: Cyprus is located to the west of Syria. An earlier version of this article was inaccurate.