Sweden’s and Finland’s NATO bid is not ready yet
Welcome back to Foreign policys SitRep! We have some bittersweet news to share with you first: Our colleague Colum Lynch, a leading reporter covering the UN and diplomacy, is leaving FP for greener pastures. He is an incredible colleague, mentor and journalist, and we will miss him a lot. For fans of Colum’s reporting, keep an eye out for him for his next move.
And with that, here’s what’s going on today: Turkey and Croatia are signaling that they can say “new” to NATO expansionUS President Joe Biden finally gets two top diplomats in place, and the United States’ highest corruption watchdog for Afghanistan takes on both Biden and former US President Donald Trump.
If you want to get a status report in your inbox every Thursday, please register here.
Welcome back to Foreign policys SitRep! We have some bittersweet news to share with you first: Our colleague Colum Lynch, a leading reporter covering the UN and diplomacy, is leaving FP for greener pastures. He is an incredible colleague, mentor and journalist, and we will miss him a lot. For fans of Colum’s reporting, keep an eye out for him for his next move.
And with that, here’s what’s going on today: Turkey and Croatia are signaling that they can say “new” to NATO expansionUS President Joe Biden finally gets two top diplomats in place, and the United States’ highest corruption watchdog for Afghanistan takes on both Biden and former US President Donald Trump.
If you want to get a status report in your inbox every Thursday, please register here.
NATO expansion? There will (perhaps) be a no from Turkey, Dawg
After months of flirting with it, Finland and Sweden have finally decided that they want to join NATO and join the military alliance. (Thanks again, Russian President Vladimir Putin.) The two countries will meet US President Joe Biden on Thursday morning.
However, joining NATO is not an easy process, not even for two developed democracies with strong militaries that seem to be just the right fit for the alliance.
The unanimous consent of all 30 NATO members, ratified by votes in parliament (and in the case of the US Senate) across Europe and North America, is required.
Almost everyone is fully involved in expanding NATO to include two new Nordic friends, especially in the wake of Putin’s brazen invasion of Ukraine. We say almost because there are a small handful of NATO members who smell a little opportunity in the game.
Spoiler alert. And by opportunity, we mean to signal that they will not support Finland and Sweden to join the club unless (blink, blink, push, push) the rest of the current or incoming members only make them a few first. Enter Turkey and Croatia, our first two spoilers on NATO’s expansion train.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan signaled this week that he will not support Finnish and Swedish membership because they are not harsh enough against Kurdish separatist groups that Turkey considers to be terrorist organizations. Oh, and Finland and Sweden struck an arms embargo on Turkey in 2019 because of its invasion of Syria. So perhaps – and we are speculating some educated people here – Turkey can signal that it will change its attitude towards NATO expansion if these two aspirant members make any changes of their own.
Balkan surprise. Then there is Croatia. After first pledging full support for NATO membership last month, Croatian President Zoran Milanovic threw a curve and decided that, no, Croatia might not support Finland and Sweden’s NATO membership unless European countries support any electoral changes in neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina. .
He was not exactly subtle. “Turkey will definitely not move from the table before it gets what it wants,” Milanovic said Total news about Croatia. “How do we fight for our interests?”
Play hardball? Does this mean that Finland’s and Sweden’s membership is dead in the water? It’s not impossible, but it’s still highly unlikely, according to six European officials who spoke to SitRep about the process. Their reading about the situation is that these announcements are merely transaction negotiation tactics, designed to extract some national political or political gains from the rest of the alliance. Once resolved, they will embark on NATO expansion.
You could call it opportunism, subversive blackmail or simple stubborn realism in the emotionless world of international relations. We have heard that it is called all of the above from various officials who trace diplomacy behind the scenes.
The irony is that the more the rest of NATO – especially some of its most powerful members, such as the United States, Britain, Germany and France – want Finland and Sweden to join quickly, the more other NATO members can decide now is the time to raise awareness of the X or Y issue before signing on to NATO expansion.
The consensus among officials we have spoken to is that the train has left the station; now that Finland and Sweden have formally asked to join, it is only a matter of time – and sorting out some diplomatic headaches – before doing so.
However, the clock is ticking. In the eyes of Finland and Sweden, as well as most other NATO members, time is of the essence. Right now, they are in this difficult, vulnerable interim period, where they have declared that they want to join NATO but have not yet agreed to the extension of NATO’s umbrella for mutual defense. If Russia were to try some underlying efforts to derail Finland and Sweden’s NATO membership, it would be time now.
It is unclear how likely this is, given how Russia has basically accepted that Sweden and Finland are already fundamentally part of NATO law and how overworked and stuck its military is in Ukraine right now.
Some countries have promised interim security guarantees to Finland and Sweden to ward off any plans that Moscow may have to try to stop Finns and Swedes from joining NATO. And Finnish decision-makers have been consistent in their messages that they are not too worried; their military is doing well, and they are used to dealing with their great neighbor to the east.
Suffice it to say that there may be some more bumps in the road to NATO expansion.
That was confirmed by the US Senate Bridget Brink to be the US Ambassador to Ukraine and Barbara Leaf to be Deputy Foreign Minister for Middle East Affairs yesterday. Brink will be the first Senate-confirmed ambassador to Ukraine since Marie Yovanovitch was ousted by the Trump administration in May 2019. Leaf’s confirmation had been upheld for more than a year by Republican lawmakers.
Atlantic Council Cameron Hudson joins the Center for Strategic and International Studies Africa Program as a senior associate.
What should be high on your radar, if not already.
Failure in the mission. The Special Forerunner of Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) is out with a condemnatory report that takes on both the Trump and Biden administrations to deal with the Taliban and assures the militant group of withdrawing US troops that were crucial in supporting the Afghans. armenian.
FP columnist Lynne O’Donnell, who was in Kabul until the last month of the war, writes that SIGAR – which has long tracked down the corrupt use of US funds in Afghanistan – believes that Biden’s efforts to follow up US former President Donald Trump withdrawing conditions destroyed the morale of the Afghan army.
Under pressure. The United States is preparing a significant $ 500 million military aid package for India in an effort to wean New Delhi from its long-standing dependence on Russian weapons. Bloomberg reports.
The move would make India one of the United States’ largest recipients of military aid, as the United States appears to starve Russia on arms export revenues over its invasion of Ukraine. India has already started receiving supplies of the Russian air defense system S-400, which ranks some US officials.
Indefinite capitulation. Russia said this on Thursday 1,730 Ukrainian troops had capitulated in Mariupol, Ukraine, in recent days after Ukrainian officials said this week that they were creating a prisoner exchange with Moscow for some of the warriors who left the besieged Azovstal steelworks. The figure would be much higher than the capitulation figures recognized by the Ukrainian government, initially believed to be in the hundreds.
However, there may be reason to doubt Moscow’s accuracy: the Kremlin has reported far fewer Russian deaths in Ukraine than Western officials believe the military has suffered.
Bud. John Gans, a former Obama administration official who wrote definitely tome on the US National Security Council, wrote in Foreign policy this week about the death of Robert “Bud” McFarlane at the age of 84. McFarlane was former US President Ronald Reagan’s third national security adviser and served during the Iran-Contra scandal.
“His story is a reminder of what is owed to those who are fortunate enough to work at the highest levels of government – and the toll that the service can take,” Gans wrote.
Friday 20 May: US President Joe Biden is going on a four-day trip to South Korea and Japan.
Saturday 21 May: Australia’s national elections are taking place. Votes are showing the race is too close to call between incumbent Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s Conservative coalition and the opposition Australian Labor Party.
“The result is an absence of controls and balances in Russia and the decision of a man to launch a completely unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean Ukraine.”
– Former President of the United States George W. Bush makes a verbal flub during an event in Dallas on Wednesday.
Sorry, Canada. But your least favorite export—Justin Bieber-is in the news again. Canada’s coffee series from Tim Hortons now sells “Timbiebs”, a play on their classic monk hole for timbits. Do you need something to wash down Timbiebs, you say? You can order it with a refreshing ice-cold “Biebs Brew.”