There’s a Turkish joke about a political prisoner who goes into his prison’s library and gives the librarian a list of books he’d like to check out. The librarian looks at his list and then responds apologetically, “I’m sorry. We don’t have these books. We only have their authors.”

Turkey has already humiliated Sweden by successfully extorting concessions in the hope that the Swedish government could get Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to lift his consensus-busting veto on Sweden’s NATO accession. The Swedish foreign minister has already said that Sweden will distance itself from the Kurdish militias in Syria who liberated captured Yezidis and fought the Islamic State at a time when Erdogan supported the militant group.