The US welcomes Finland into NATO. What about Ukraine?

WASHINGTON – Upon receiving Finland, and soon Sweden, move to join NATO, President Joe Biden and its Western allies doubled their bet that Russia would make a strategic mistakes over the past three months now is the time for President Vladimir Putin to pay a big price:

bear with me expansion from the most western alliance it sought to break.

But the decision leaves some important questions unanswered.

why not let Ukrainethe flawed, corrupt but also heroic democracy in the midst of the current conflict, also united, that reinforces the West’s commitment to its security?

And by expanding NATO to 32 memberssoon with hundreds more miles of border with Russia, does the military alliance help to ensure that Russia can no longer commit a brutal, unprovoked aggression?

or just strengthen the divide with an isolated, angry, nuclear armed opponent who is paranoid about the Western “siege”?

The White House welcomed the announcement on Thursday by Finnish leaders that their country should “apply for NATO membership without delay,” while Swedish leaders are expected to do so within How many days. Russia, not surprisingly, has said it will take “retaliatory measures”, including a “military-technical” response, which many experts interpret as a threat to deploy tactical nuclear weapons nearby. on the Russia-Finnish border.

For weeks, U.S. officials have been quietly meeting with Finnish and Swedish officials, planning how to tighten security guarantees for the two countries while their applications to join the alliance are pending.

For Biden and his aides, the argument for admission to Finland and Sweden and to Ukraine is fairly straightforward.

The two Nordic states are model democracies and modern armies where the United States and other NATO countries regularly conduct exercises, work together to monitor Russian submarines, protect underwater communications cables and conduct air patrols in the Baltic Sea.

In other words, they became NATO allies in every way but formally, and the invasion of Ukraine almost ended all debate about whether the two countries would be safer to keep their distance from the alliance.

“We’ve stayed outside NATO for 30 years, we could have joined in the early 1990s,” Mikko Hautala, Finland’s ambassador to the United States, said Thursday as he walked through U.S. halls. Senate, rallied support for his country’s sudden change of course.

Give it a try avoid getting angry to Putin, he said, “has not changed in all of Russia’s actions.”

Ukraine, on the other hand, is at the heart of the former Soviet Union that Putin is trying to rebuild, at least in part.

And while it amended its constitution three years ago to make NATO membership a national goal, it was deemed too full of corruption and too devoid of democratic institutions for membership likely for years, if not decades, to come.

Key NATO members, led by France and Germany, have clarified that they are in conflict with Ukraine.

This is an opinion that has hardened now that the President’s government Volodymyr Zelensky is engaged in an active hunting war that the United States and the other 29 members of the alliance will be subject to an agreement to enter into directly if Ukraine is a full member, covered by its main promise that attacking a member will an attack on everyone. .

Zelensky understood this dynamic, and a few weeks after the conflict, he stopped insisting that Ukraine join NATO.

In late March, a month after Russia’s invasion and at a time when there still seemed to be hope of a diplomatic solution, he clarified that if he could achieve a permanent end to the war, he was ready to declare Ukraine “neutral. . ” . “.

“Security guarantees and neutrality, non-nuclear state of our state, we are ready to do this,” he told Russian journalists, a line he has repeatedly repeated since then.

Those statements were a relief for Biden, whose first goal was to bring the Russians out of Ukraine, irrevocably, but the second was to prevent World War III.

By this, he means avoiding direct conflict with Putin’s forces and avoiding doing anything that increases the risks of going nuclear fast.

If Ukraine enters NATO, it will reinforce Putin’s view that the former Soviet state is conspiring with the West to destroy the Russian state, and may be shortly before that direct confrontation erupts, with all the its risk.

Under that logic, Biden refused to send MiG fighters to Ukraine that could be used to bomb Moscow.

He rejected a no-fly zone in Ukraine because of the risk that U.S. pilots could engage in dogfights with Russian pilots.

But his previously clear line has become more blurred in recent weeks.

As Russia’s military weaknesses and incompetence emerged, Biden approved the sending of heavy Ukrainian artillery to thwart Russia’s latest push into the Donbas, sending missiles and drones. switch blade used to hit Russian tanks.

When the administration denounced reports last week that the United States was giving Ukraine intelligence to help with its sinking in Moscow, Putin’s naval fleet boasted, and targeted Russia’s mobile command posts and generals of Russia sitting within them, clearly the cause of the discomfort. .

The revelations showed how close to the line Washington had drawn in arousing Putin.

The question now is whether NATO expansion threatens to cement a new Cold War, and perhaps even worse.

This is a debate similar to the one that took place during the Clinton administration with warnings about the dangers of NATO expansion.

George F. Kennan, the architect of the “containment” strategy after World War II to isolate the Soviet Union, expanding that “the deadliest mistake of American politics throughout the period after the Cold War.

Last week, Anne-Marie Slaughter, executive director of the New America think tank, warned that “all stakeholders should take a deep breath and slow down.”

“The threat of Russia’s invasion of Finland or Sweden is far away,” he wrote in The Financial Times.

“But entering them into the military alliance will rebuild and deepen the divisions of 20th century Europe in a way that is likely to hinder a bolder and more courageous thinking of how to achieve peace and prosperity in the 21st. century. “

That’s a long -term concern.

In the short term, NATO and US officials are concerned about how to ensure that Russia does not threaten Finland or Sweden before they become a formal member of the alliance.

It is assumed that no current member of the alliance objects; many believe Putin will lean on Hungary and its prime minister, Viktor Orban, to reject the requests.

Only Britain is clear on the issue, having signed a separate security agreement with the two countries.

The United States has not said what security guarantees it is willing to provide.

But he blamed Putin for bringing about NATO expansion by attacking a neighbor.

Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, vaguely quoted the Finnish president, Sauli Niinistowho clarified that Ukraine forced the Finns to think differently about their security.

“You are the cause of it,” he said of Putin.

“You look in the mirror.”

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