ote
defenceone -jutusta, koskien viimeisintä Ruotsin hallituksen luottamusäänestystä ja sen seurauksia, boldaukset omia
Sweden’s NATO Bid Is in Trouble
Andersson saved Johansson—even though it meant jeopardizing Sweden’s NATO bid. Erdogan is a difficult man, and Turkey has always been a tricky member of NATO, but as a member it has the right to reject applicants it doesn’t like. Had Andersson signaled willingness to compromise, it’s likely that Erdogan would have softened his opposition to Sweden. Now, with Andersson and her government at the mercy of Kakabaveh, he’s extremely unlikely to do so.
Sweden’s NATO bid is close to derailing.
That puts Finland in in a difficult spot. The two countries have long remained outside NATO together and it was always clear that if they were going to join, they’d join together. In May, after a closely coordinated discernment process, they submitted their applications together. And now? It would hardly be surprising if Finland gets annoyed with the wait. But it doesn’t matter whether Finland is annoyed, because the only country that can cut the wait is Turkey—and Turkey might decide to let Finland in and keep Sweden out. There go the two perfect applicants’ perfectly managed NATO applications submitted at the perfect moment.
Sweden, of course, remains an extremely attractive NATO applicant, and there’s no doubt that it will be a considerable asset to NATO when it joins. That, though, won’t be this summer, and it may not be at the same time as Finland. The culprit is clearly Turkey, but Andersson—a rookie prime minister without foreign or security policy experience—clearly mismanaged the no-confidence vote against Johansson. As a result, Swedish national security will suffer at an extremely sensitive moment. It doesn’t matter that the Pentagon sent the amphibious assault ship
USS Kearsarge as well as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, to Stockholm earlier this month. It also doesn’t matter that the U.S. and the UK (and other NATO member states including Germany) have in the past few weeks given Sweden and Finland security guarantees.
NATO membership is different—and now it sadly looks more distant. At least for Sweden.