"If you want a sensible strategic border for our defensive alliance you must secretly love progressivism!"
Rarely have I heard such a dumb take. You know better than this. It is precisely because NATO guarantees the common security that adding key nations to the alliance is a sensible idea. It deters attacks, because to attack one is to attack all. By adding Sweden and Finland, you definitively close off a potential salient into Europe. You close a gap in your armour. Your focus on "but Swedes BAD!" misses the point. Just because your ass may be a stinking shithole, doesn't mean you don't want it covered in armour when you go into battle.
The alternative, after all, is pretty obvious-- and pretty obviously undesirable.
I don’t know if I’d have put it quite so colorfully, but basically this. Sure, a conservative may have some concerns about European progressivism and whatnot*, but a friendly country that occupies a strategic position in the Baltics and actually has maintained a capable military because they
haven’t been able to do any sort of free-riding to maintain a deterrent. Plus they (and the Finns) actually contribute to NATO operations already; they basically put in the effort without really getting anything in return in terms of a defensive guarantee.
*-Side note, we aren’t talking Bernie Sanders-style socialism here; in fact Bernie has been called out for being a dumbass repeatedly by the Nordic countries. And Sweden currently has a conservative government
The other alternative is to just remove Erdogan; he and his Islamist pals are a cancer on NATO and their aggression towards Greece is ignored by most everyone.
The Kurds are not the only ones with beef with the wannabe-Sultan.
As exasperating as Erdogan is, we need Turkey. Not just for control of the Bosporous, but also because they are basically the gateway to the Middle East, the Caucasus, and the eastern Mediterranean (yes, I know Israel and Egypt are there in the case of the latter, but there are issues with both of them as well). Plus there is no actual mechanism for booting out an existing member.
I would imagine behind the scenes there is a lot of back and forth between the Americans, the British, and the French on the one hand and the Turks on the other. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a sale of some advanced F-16s or something in exchange.
I'm honestly just kind of Annoyed with the sweeds.
I understand why Finland was neutral for so long, that was a part of the deal for their national survival, but the Finns did put in the hard work of fighting the soviets. The Sweeds haven't been in a war since 1814, they sat on the fence for the entirety of the cold war. After the fall of the soviet union they remained on the fence, same thing with vietnam and the war on terror. Only now that their threatened do they decide to ask to join our little alliance.
Its like why couldn't you have done that 20 years ago?
If we could have Finland with out Sweden Id be fine with that.
Because Sweden was afraid that if they joined NATO, the Soviets would respond by invading Finland (again) to ensure that NATO would not be on their doorstep. The Swedes and Finns have historically been very close diplomatically. Like Canada-United States close. Keep in mind that they didn’t join the EU until
1995, the same time as Finland and Austria (who
also had a diplomatic agreement with the Soviets on their neutrality during the Cold War).
However, just because the Swedes were largely neutral doesn’t mean they didn’t lean to the West either. For example, it came out in late 2018 that the Swedish Air Force kept a disabled SR-71 from falling into Soviet hands (the plane developed engine trouble during a recon flight and had to drop altitude and speed to where the Soviets could intercept it. The Swedes saw it (well,
something) on radar and got their first thanks to a couple fighters doing training. They escorted it while the Soviets showed up and then stayed with it until the Blackbird hit Danish airspace and the USAF took over. Plus they were part of ISAF in Afghanistan.
So it’s not like they didn’t necessarily stay out of it, just that they didn’t really want to get into a position they wouldn’t be able to back out of unless 1) it was alongside Finland and 2) whatever caused it was enough of a shitstorm to make them reconsider a longstanding policy that served them well enough for a couple hundred years.
Ok tell me why NATO with its border past Sweden is more strategically valuable than NATO with its borders past turkey? Here is the thing we have Norway so we can still bottle the Russians away from the greater Atlantic, Sweden is not that valuable just pushing them in the Baltics a bit more, but turkey can keep the Russians out of the Mediterranean
It’s not
just Sweden, nor is it just about keeping the Russians out of the North Atlantic. It’s also about the fact that, as I mentioned above, the Swedes and Finns cooperate very closely and they’re essentially a package deal,
and that a force stationed in southern Sweden could reinforce the Baltics very quickly, without having the same level of shit-stirring that posting a formation in Finland would bring (plus, the terrain in that part of Finland is
not conductive to mechanized warfare, and any crossing from there would be too close to St. Petersburg and Kronstadt for comfort).
Sweden also has the island of Gotland, which is not only crucial to monitoring and control of the eastern Baltic but also can be used to block any Russian attempts to reinforce Kaliningrad by sea.
It’s not that one is more important than the other, it’s that both countries (as well as Finland) provide significant strategic benefits to NATO and help keep Russia contained.
