NYT: Finland raced to join NATO, now comes the hard part

Barely a year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Finland cast aside decades of military nonalignment and self-reliance and joined the NATO alliance.

That happened with breathtaking speed, as these matters go, but gaining membership may have been the easy part.

Now comes the complicated process of integrating itself into the alliance and its requirement of collective defense — with all of its financial, legal, and strategic hurdles.

“Joining NATO is an expensive business, and supporting Ukraine is an expensive business, and there’s no end to that in sight,” said Janne Kuusela, director-general for defense policy at Finland’s Ministry of Defense, according to the New York Times.

Membership in NATO has long been considered a cheap benefit, given the American nuclear umbrella and the principle of collective defense. But NATO also has extensive requirements of its members — not just spending goals for the military, but specific demands from each country for certain capabilities, armaments, troop strengths and infrastructure as defined by the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe.

Achieving that will demand some difficult and costly decisions from the government and military officials as they learn to think strategically outside Finland’s borders and adapt its forces and their capabilities to the alliance’s needs.

At the same time, Finnish officials and analysts say, Finland will not alter its intention of defending every inch of its own territory, given its 830-mile border with Russia, a doctrine considered old-fashioned in the age of modern warfare. It sees itself as remaining capable of self-defense for now, so unlike many of the NATO countries that border Russia, Finland is considered unlikely to ask for a rotating presence of allied troops.

“The whole security and foreign-policy establishment believes that no such troops are needed now, but it’s not a categorical no,” said Matti Pesu of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, a research institution.

Joining NATO will require significant cultural, political, legal and military changes, Mr. Kuusela, the defense official said, and it will take years. But of all the countries of Europe, he said, Finland would be the last to underestimate the long-term Russian threat.