Sweden and Finland in NATO
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Another 15 million people joined the NATO alliance on Tuesday. Finland and Sweden, formerly neutral countries but close to Russia, gave in to Turkish blackmail, paving the way for them to join the Western alliance. (Every NATO member, including Turkey, has a veto against new members joining.)
Circumstances were a bit bad, as both Sweden and Finland abandoned their support for Turkey’s oppressed Kurdish minority in order to block their own path to NATO membership. Russia does not plan to invade them at the moment, but as soon as Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, both Scandinavian countries knocked on NATO’s door.
The problem, even if no one mentions it out loud, is nuclear weapons. The two Baltic countries do not have their own nuclear weapons (although Sweden once considered acquiring them), and now President Vladimir Putin and his enabler point out nuclear attacks every time something goes wrong with his war against Ukraine.
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 these two countries into NATO will make the Russians even more paranoid and therefore even more likely to attack their neighbors (although the latter part of that warning is never fully worded). But this is pure nonsense.
The Russians are indeed paranoid, but it is a state of being, not a response to any particular act that they interpret as aggressive. They sincerely come to their paranoia, in the sense that they have been invaded by the “A-team” of future world conquerors (the Mongols, Napoleon, Hitler) and live in a country without “natural” borders.
But it’s paranoia, and it will be there whatever other people do. 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.
After 40 years of Soviet military occupation, 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 those countries, because otherwise they would have tried to build up their own defenses against Russia.
Historical possibilities are usually very debatable, but it is almost certain that if Poland had not been able to join NATO and be covered by its nuclear guarantee, it would have its own nuclear weapons by now. Given the country’s long history of subjugation and brutalization of Russia, the Poles would have seen any other course as pure madness.
Yes, all the countries that joined NATO “provoked” Moscow, but when you are dealing with a career paranoia, there is no choice. In fact, at no point since 1945 has the Western powers had the military strength to successfully invade Russia on the ground. Since around 1960, they have also not had the capacity to win a nuclear war 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 (a) it lacks the necessary superiority of conventional military forces (even after the recent demonstration of their own army’s inferior state), and (b) 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 Vladimir 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.