NATO’s Northward Expansion: Would Finland and Sweden Join NATO to Europe Safer or More Dangerous? – BBC News in Chinese

Both Finland and Sweden are modern democracies that meet NATO membership criteria. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said he would welcome the two countries into the alliance with open arms and would minimize delays in reviewing their membership.

Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, commander of U.S. Army Forces in Europe, believes that there is no doubt that this prospect will be good for the West:

“Sweden and Finland joining NATO means a lot – it’s a very positive development. These are two very strong democracies with very good, capable and very modern militaries and excellent mobilization systems.”

In the case of Finland, some form of military integration is already underway. As part of NATO’s Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF), British tank troops recently conducted exercises with an armoured brigade in Finland and the US, Latvian and Estonian armies. The UK Ministry of Defence said the aim was to “prevent Russian aggression against Scandinavia and the Baltic states”.

So what would be the problem if one or both of Finland and Sweden wanted to join NATO?

Russia, especially President Vladimir Putin, does not see NATO as a defensive alliance. On the contrary, he sees NATO as a threat to Russia’s security. Putin was dismayed to watch NATO steadily expand eastward after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991—closer and closer to Moscow.

When Putin was a young intelligence officer at the KGB, the Soviet state security agency, Moscow controlled all of Eastern Europe, most of which housed Soviet troops. Today, almost all of these countries have opted to move closer to the West and join NATO. Even the Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – once reluctantly part of the Soviet Union, now join NATO.

Only 6 percent of Russia’s long borders border NATO countries, yet the Kremlin feels besieged and threatened. Shortly before President Putin sent troops to invade Ukraine on February 24, he demanded a redrawing of the European security map. He insisted that NATO troops should be withdrawn from all these Eastern European countries and that NATO should not allow any new countries to join.

Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine has had the opposite result.

For decades, Finland and Sweden have been careful to remain neutral. Culturally, the two countries are firmly in the Western camp. But until now, the two countries have been wary of their huge nuclear-armed neighbor, Russia.

The invasion of Ukraine has prompted a radical rethinking of the situation in the two Nordic countries, with governments and peoples wondering if they would feel safer “in a tent”, collectively protected by Article 5 of NATO .

This clause means that when a member of NATO is attacked, it is equivalent to an attack on all members, and the joint self-defense mechanism, including the use of force, must be activated immediately. A recent poll in Finland showed that 62 percent of Finns favor joining NATO.

From a purely military point of view, the addition of a large number of troops from Finland and/or Sweden would greatly enhance NATO’s defenses in northern Europe, where troops would far outnumber Russian troops.

Hodges said Finland brought F35 fighter jets, Sweden brought Patriot missile systems and re-enforced security on Gotland, a large Baltic island that Russia has been spying on recently. Both the Finnish and Swedish armed forces are specialized in polar warfare, intensively trained to fight and survive in the frozen forests of Scandinavia. When the Soviet Union invaded Finland in World War II, the Finns fought fiercely with the invaders, and the Soviet army suffered heavy losses.

Geographically, Finland’s membership in NATO would fill a huge gap in NATO’s defenses, doubling the size of its border with Russia. Security and stability in the Baltic Sea are now much improved, Hodges said.

Politically, it would increase the cohesion of the Western common defense, sending a signal to Putin that nearly all of Europe is united against his invasion of sovereign Ukraine.

In short, the risk here is that NATO’s expansion on Russia’s doorstep is so massive that the Kremlin is shocked and outraged that it will respond with some form of onslaught.

When Putin threatened to take “military-technical measures” in response to the problem, it was widely believed that there were two possibilities – one is that Russian troops and missiles will be deployed close to the West to strengthen their borders, and the other is that there are Potential intensification of cyber attacks on Scandinavia.

Neutrality has served Sweden well over the years. Abandoning this neutrality must be done with caution. If Sweden had to buy NATO weapons instead of its own, there would also be an economic cost to Sweden’s arms industry.

In a warning, Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov stressed that Finland and Sweden joining NATO “would not lead to greater security for Europe”.

Putin likes to remind people that when he was young, he once cornered a rat and the rat started attacking him. Putin and his advisers have found some reason to accuse NATO of thwarting Russia’s plans to seize Ukraine. If they baselessly believe that the sudden expansion of NATO’s northern flank poses an existential threat to Russia’s security, no one knows how Moscow will react.

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