Finland and Sweden joined NATO last week. Why? Nuclear weapons …
Another 15 million people – Finland and Sweden – joined NATO last week. The formerly neutral countries near Russia changed their stance after Ukraine’s invasion of Russia earlier this year. They are small countries that Russia could eventually overwhelm by a large number, but they are rich and the Finns, at least, reckon that their well-trained armed forces could make a Russian conquest slow and expensive. Since there was no good reason for Moscow to invade them, until February it seemed to be enough. Then suddenly it was not. The problem, even if no one mentions it out loud, is nuclear weapons. The two …
Another 15 million people – Finland and Sweden – joined NATO last week. The formerly neutral countries near Russia changed their stance after Ukraine’s invasion of Russia earlier this year.
They are small countries that Russia could eventually overwhelm by a large number, but they are rich and the Finns, at least, reckon that their well-trained armed forces could make a Russian conquest slow and expensive.
Since there was no good reason for Moscow to invade them, until February it seemed to be enough.
Then suddenly it was not.
The problem, even if no one mentions it out loud, is nuclear weapons.
The two Baltic countries do not have their own nuclear weapons and now President Vladimir Putin and his enabler point to nuclear weapons every time something goes wrong with his war.
The only way that Finland and Sweden can get protection against Russian nuclear blackmail is to join NATO, whose three members (USA, Great Britain and France) have their own nuclear weapons.
Since all NATO members are obliged to protect every member during an attack, it gives the Swedes and Finns a nuclear guarantee.
There have, of course, been the usual warnings from the usual sources that letting Sweden and Finland into NATO will make the Russians even more paranoid and therefore even more likely to attack their neighbors.
But this is pure nonsense.
The Russians are really paranoid, but it is a state of being, not a response to any particular act that they interpret as aggressive.
They come through their paranoia honestly, in the sense that they have been invaded by the “A-team” of future world conquerors (the Mongols, Napoleon, Hitler).
The Russians never really intended to conquer Western Europe, but they put their own puppets to power in all Eastern European countries and turned them into satellites after World War II.
It was “defensive” in their own minds, but it felt like aggression to everyone else.
Not only did the Russians impose their own communist system on all these countries and cut them off completely from the rest of Europe with the “Iron Curtain”; they ruthlessly crushed all the revolts of the submissive peoples – in East Germany in 1953, in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968 – and imprisoned or executed tens of thousands of people.
After 40 years Soviet military occupationTherefore, it was inevitable that these Eastern European countries would seek refuge in an enlarged NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
And it was necessary for NATO to take in these countries, because otherwise they would have tried to build up their own defenses against Russia.
The Russians are not stupid.
They are paranoid because of their history, but they can count.
On one level, they fully understand that NATO could not invade them because:
- it lacks the necessary superiority of conventional military forces (even after the recent demonstration of the inferior state of its own army); and
- Russia has nuclear weapons.
So they have unreasonable fears, but they also know how to use the known fact of their paranoia to justify their own aggressive actions.
In the hands of a man like Putin, this can be a powerful diplomatic tool, and the only sensible way to counter it is to refuse to enter the intellectual swamp at all.
Just stop psychologizing about the Russians and do whatever seems reasonable and necessary.