Biden reportedly just spoke with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan about selling that country F-16s and removing his objections to having Sweden join NATO. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in Scandinavia this week.
JAN OBERG, tff@transnational.org, @janoberg
Oberg is co-founder of the Swedish-based Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research.
He just wrote the piece “Provocative NATO undermines security of the Nordic region,” which states that Finland and Sweden joining NATO would mean abandoning what “served them well for so long.” Meanwhile, “Old-time members, Denmark and Norway, have changed to accept foreign troops and pre-positioning of weapons on their territory. Iceland remains an unarmed member providing the Keflavik Base.
“These policy changes imply that the Baltic Sea is no longer a neutral buffer zone. It’s now a NATO sea. And that means that the adversaries — US/NATO and Russia — are coming much closer in confrontation, animosity, and hate, and that again means much shorter time available to react in a crisis situation, particularly if military equipment and infrastructure is in place and perhaps foreign troops also have been deployed already in peace time. …
“The days when Sweden and Finland can — in principle, at least — work for alternatives are numbered. That is, for the UN Treaty on nuclear abolition and the UN goals of general and complete disarmament, any alternative policy concepts like common security, human security, a strong UN etc. They won’t be able to serve as mediators, and no NATO member can pay anything but lip service to such noble goals. NATO is not a liberal institution that promotes alternatives; it’s a juggernaut that eradicates them.”