How Activists Shaped Sweden’s NATO Debacle – POLITICO
Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a consultant at Gallos Technologies.
Sweden’s process to join NATO should have been the easiest accession in the alliance’s history — then Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan decided to play hardball, mixing legitimate fears of terrorism with electoral opportunism.
Unfortunately, various activists in Sweden, with ties to the Kremlin, then decided to take advantage of this very painful situation, and by aggravating Erdoğan and Turkey, they have now helped turn the country’s NATO membership from virtually guaranteed to one that is now in grave danger – and other countries should learn from this mess.
When NATO leaders gathered for their summit in Madrid last July, there was a buzz in the air: the allies were looking forward to welcoming two new members – and to do so within months rather than years. It was certain that they would approve and quickly ratify the membership applications of Sweden and Finland – two countries that were already extremely close NATO partners and would also bring significant military assets to the alliance.
Unfortunately, there was also the issue of Turkey’s presidential election.
“I would advise future NATO applicants to check the member states’ election schedule before submitting their application,” an exasperated Swedish lawmaker told me last year. But then Erdoğan had made it clear that Turkey will not ratify the application from Sweden – and as a result Finland – anytime soon, possibly not until after Turkey’s presidential election, now tentatively scheduled to take place in May.
All along, the Turkish president, as well as officials who speak on his behalf, have been communicating via the news media that Sweden had not fulfilled the commitments it had made in the memorandum it signed with Finland and Turkey last June. The agreement was designed to allay Turkey’s concerns that Sweden – and to a much lesser extent Finland – is hosting Kurdish activists whom Ankara sees as a threat to national security.
And this is where activists who are against Swedish NATO membership seem to have discovered an opportunity.
Last week, a small pro-Kurdish group calling itself Sweden’s Rojava Committee showed up at Stockholm City Hall with a picture of Erdoğan. The dummy was then hung by the feet. Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson called the act sabotage, while Erdoğan’s spokesman Fahrettin Altun tweeted: “We condemn in the strongest possible way the targeting of Turkey and its democratically elected president by members of the terrorist organization PKK in Sweden. . . That PKK terrorist[s] can challenge the Swedish government in the heart of Stockholm is proof that the Swedish authorities have not taken the necessary measures against terrorism – as they have claimed in recent days.”
Four days later, a group of far-right activists led by Danish provocateur Rasmus Paludan collected in front of the Turkish embassy in Stockholm and burned the Koran. Ankara quickly responded: “This incident has once again shown that Sweden has not given up supporting terrorism,” Numan Kurtulmuş, vice chairman of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, told reporters and adds that Turkey will therefore never ratify Sweden’s NATO application.
At the same time, this turbulent development has now led to Finland floating so far unimaginable idea that it may join NATO without Sweden.
This means that Sweden’s virtually perfect application was sabotaged – potentially fatally – by a minimal number of activists with very different agendas, and now it looks like Russia may well have been. stir up trouble.
The Koran-burning protest was organized and partially funded by Chang Frick, a journalist who once worked for the Kremlin-controlled news magazine Russia Today. Frick runs a contrarian website, Nyheter Idag, and has previously worn a t-shirt with the face of Russian President Vladimir Putin – although he has more recently supported Ukrainian refugees.
– It is incredibly difficult to discern who is behind such activities in a liberal democracy and which activities are fully or partially manipulated by foreign actors, says Anton Lif, crisis management consultant at Swedish Combitech. “Until there is evidence showing malign influence, I will assume that these protests were simply part of free speech in Sweden, but obviously such activities can also be exploited by nefarious actors,” he added.
Indeed, one wonders if Russia actually had a hand in the spectacle, and if the activists are simply useful idiots. Regardless, other countries should take note.
The first lesson here is to secure an iron-clad agreement from other countries before launching a major foreign policy initiative. The reason why Erdoğan’s views are important at this stage is that Sweden had not received such a commitment from Turkey before it formally submitted its application. It is true that Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs had signaled the green light, but in authoritarian-leaning countries it is the leader’s voice that counts.
The far more important alternative, however, is that even small groups of activists can reject crucial foreign policy decisions with crude insults and street theater.
Authoritarian leaders share a degree of vanity and an unwillingness to tolerate ridicule. For example, imagine the damage activists can do to foreign policy initiatives related to China by pretending to appear in front of the Chinese embassy in Washington and pretending to hang a picture of Xi Jinping. Or if Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman seemed close to joining the Western camp in the Russia-Ukraine war, but then activists opposed to cooperation with Saudi Arabia did the same.
Such activists may have honorable intentions, or they may not. They may get help from foreign powers, or they may not. Indeed, such provocative activities offer enormous opportunities for amplification through misinformation and disinformation, and the targeted government will see the scenes and react angrily.
Unlike the old-fashioned regimes of the Cold War, which responded to protests by filing complaints with the State Department, today’s authoritarian regimes have no problem ignoring the rules of polite behavior in international diplomacy and retaliating against—admittedly tasteless—expressions of free expression. Speech.
Finally, there is also the procedural issue of permits for such protests, which are usually granted by police authorities. And even if they say yes or no on the grounds of law and order, they clearly don’t consider foreign policy implications when they do so. Given the strength of even very small protests today, perhaps governments should have some sort of say in whether protests that risk causing great harm to the country are allowed to take place.
That means: Western governments, beware.
Authoritarian-leaning countries are difficult to deal with in the first place – and sometimes you need them.