“We can no longer talk about any nuclear-free regime in the Baltic – the balance must be restored. “To date, Russia has not taken such measures and was not going to take them.” Sweden and Finland have recently expressed interest in joining NATO as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin has said that her country, which shares an 800-mile border with Russia, will decide whether to join in “weeks, not months”. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine restores security environment in Europe. Both Sweden and Finland remained unbound for almost half a century of the Cold War. But in less than a month, their radical security policy changes reflect similar changes across Europe – including the massive increase in defense spending proposed by Germany. This shift to the west by the two neutral powers, together with the renewed appetite in Germany to abandon its traditional military focus, marks a new era. But the move to join NATO poses risks to both countries, which have struck a delicate balance with the West while not competing with their strong neighbor. Indeed, the two Nordic countries that join NATO offer more of a security dilemma than a security solution. The idea of a “security dilemma” was coined by American Cold War scholar John Hertz in 1951. When weaker states seek to increase their power to balance a stronger state, as the Scandinavians plan with stronger NATO membership. State (Russia in this case) will probably consider it a threat and then respond accordingly. No wonder the Kremlin reacted the way it did. In addition to Medvedev’s warning, Dmitry Peshkov, Vladimir Putin’s press secretary, recently described NATO as a “confrontation-oriented tool”, warning that Finland and Sweden’s accession to the EU “would not bring stability or stability”.
More than the world
As for the theory of political power, this dilemma gives Russia two choices. It may seek to increase its own power through an arms race or reduce the threat through its military – including the possibility of launching a pre-emptive strike on NATO. During the Cold War, peace was maintained by the nuclear arsenals of the two sides, which were a sufficient deterrent to prevent a direct confrontation. The result was an arms race – particularly on nuclear weapons – between two well-matched alliances, neither of which allowed the other a significant advantage, and involved placing missiles closer to the other’s territory before taking corrective action. The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, which brought the two sides to the brink of a nuclear confrontation, demonstrated the importance of avoiding any significant disruption of this balance. US President John F. Kennedy addressing Congress in 1961. The United States and the Soviets were on the brink of a nuclear war a year later in the Cuban Missile Crisis (Photo: NASA, CC BY-NC) NATO expansion and Russia’s inability to balance power through a conventional arms race or an alternative alliance have led, at least in part, to the war against Ukraine. Given the time and money required to respond to NATO’s superiority over non-nuclear forces and the perceived additional threat of a significantly enlarged NATO on its doorstep, the Russian president may still consider a pre-emptive nuclear strike to be his only option. . Putin has made it clear that the nuclear option is what he will use if he is faced with a threat that he cannot meet by other means. The recent development of supersonic cruise missiles by Russia could be a major change in the game in this regard. Experts believe that NATO has not yet developed a system for reliably detecting the trajectories and velocities of supersonic cruise missiles. Undoubtedly, then, Putin could believe that a pre-emptive strike on the Western administration and control systems is possible before they can launch a counterattack. That would give Russia a chance to survive a nuclear war – at least better than the West.
A world more dangerous
While the world has changed a lot in the last 70 years, the strategic thinking brought to life by NATO in 1949 is not in line and some important voices have warned against NATO enlargement, including Henry Kissinger in 2014, after the annexation of Crimea by Russia, and prominent US foreign policy expert John Mearsheimer, who recently warned that it helped spark an ongoing war in Ukraine. The case for NATO expansion into Scandinavia can only clash with the current Western strategy against Russia. If tough Western sanctions against Putin’s Russia succeed, they could well pose an existential threat to his regime. And if that happens, the Russian president may well turn to his often-threatened nuclear capability – this is made clear in the country’s nuclear policy, which was updated in 2020. This increases the threat to any NATO country. The debate over NATO membership in both Finland and Sweden should go beyond the obvious need to respond to an immediate perceived Russian threat and explore the consequences of the security dilemma they face – especially the possibility of a nuclear war – inherently with NATO membership. Misalignment has historically meant the ability to put aside any such controversy and protect specific national interests away from a wider global game. This regime has allowed Sweden and Finland, as well as countries such as Austria, to remain strongly independent. The resignation of this regime will transform Scandinavia and bring NATO even closer to the confrontation with Russia. Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, Professor of War Studies at Loughborough University and Azal Ashraf, Lecturer in the School of Political & International Relations at Loughborough University. This article is republished by The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
