Finland: Leaving neutrality behind to join NATO
“Russia has driven Finland into the Western camp,” said Helsingin Sanomat (Finland) in an editorial. Finland officially joined NATO as its 31st member last week, doubling the length of the Western military alliance’s border with Russia at the stroke of a pen. It’s a massive change for our security policy and even our self-image—after all, we were neutral for decades as “a special balancing area” between NATO and Russia. A Russian grand duchy for a century, this country only became independent “in the turmoil of the fall of the tsarist government and the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.” But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year was “an international political shock” that has jolted us into a new understanding. Less than three months after the tanks began to roll, Helsinki (and Stockholm, too) applied for NATO membership. “When it’s time to act, we act.”
Vladimir Putin grossly miscalculated, said Arvid Ahlund in Dagens Nyheter (Sweden). The Russian president declared in 2021 that Russia had “the right to buffer states” like Ukraine, Finland, and Sweden to protect its sphere of influence, and now all of those countries are openly hostile. The invasion showed that nobody within range of Moscow’s tanks and rockets was safe. Not only is Finland “no longer a Russian buffer state,” it is “fully integrated into the West.” Sweden will follow suit later this year, we hope, and Ukraine is likely to join NATO after the war is over. “This is a historic victory for all who think small states have a right to control their own fate.”
There’s no sugarcoating how bad this is for Russia, said The Times (U.K.) in an editorial. “Finlandization” used to be shorthand for submission to Soviet domination, but now “the Baltic Sea has effectively become a NATO lake.” Finland adds considerable firepower to NATO, and right at Russia’s doorstep. While the country has just 5.5 million people, living next to a “vastly more populous and threatening neighbor” has forced it to build a “robust military.” Finland has “more artillery than Britain, a similar number of tanks, and more confirmed orders for the advanced F-35 stealth fighter.” And its 870,000 trained reservists are well prepared to stand their ground in a freezing, “thickly forested landscape obstructed by more than 180,000 lakes.” If Moscow tried to send troops across NATO’s new, 830mile Finnish border, it would meet fierce resistance.
Still, even after this expansion, NATO may not be as strong as it thinks, said Eric Bonse in Die Tageszeitung (Germany). A military alliance’s strength lies in its “unity” as much as its weaponry. By that metric, NATO is “shockingly weak.” Sweden asked to get in at the same time Finland did, and nearly every NATO member agreed to accept it. But Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has put the Swedish bid on hold while he makes “irrelevant demands” about Stockholm’s supposed support for Kurdish groups that he considers terrorists. If an autocrat like Erdogan can blackmail NATO and paralyze it in the middle of a war, the alliance is in trouble.