NATO: Final great push to North Analysis by Serhey Bohdan

The Swedish government made an official decision on NATO membership on May 16. It will be followed by Finland. The Russian government has promised to respond, clearly indicating that it intends to bet on nuclear weapons and lower the bar for their use. This is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of future changes that will impact the entire world. NATO unites Western countries and openly discusses plans for nearly global interventions.

Neutrality has no place here

First of all, what stands out is the effort to finish off the "islands" of neutrality in Europe. If Sweden, Finland and Belarus remained even relatively neutral, at least at the level of the 2010s, this [fact] would seriously prevent any war between NATO and Russia. Moreover, it is not for nothing that both the First and Second World Wars at the very beginning included the cleansing of neutrals who "got in the way". So, the Third one unfolds according to a familiar scenario.

The fact that neutrality can now be eliminated so elegantly, and not through military invasions, as in 1914 and 1940, is quite understandable. Now the neutrals have been weakened by the policies of the last decades. It began with the fact that neutral countries began to comply with the sanctions adopted by leading Western structures (not the UN!). Further, despite their neutrality, Sweden and Finland joined the NATO Partnership for Peace program, and their leaders already openly met at alliance summits. The Swedish and Finnish armies have long been involved in NATO exercises. And in 2014, Helsinki and Stockholm signed an agreement with NATO on military assistance, according to which the alliance was able to transfer its troops to the territory of these countries.

Therefore, German Foreign Minister [Annalena] Baerbock correctly noted on Sunday [May 15] that "neutral" Finland and Sweden, in fact, are already members of NATO, they only lack an official party card.

Something similar was also happening on the Russian side of the front, only much faster. In 2020, as a result of a strange political campaign in Belarus, when the Western-backed media suddenly began campaigning with one voice for two candidates with clear ties to Moscow, the Belarusian state was destabilised and the neutrality of Belarus was destroyed. Having thus gained access to the territory of Belarus, Russian troops advanced hundreds of kilometres to the west, and Putin was finally able to crush Minsk and use the territory of a neighbouring country to invade Ukraine.

Before they change mind

In general, troops remove engineering barriers prior to the offensive, and neutrals are eliminated before the war. An official invitation to Finland and Sweden to join NATO may be issued already at the alliance summit in Madrid in late June. This was reported on May 12 by TASS with reference to a diplomatic source in Brussels. Moreover, Finland and Sweden will join NATO under an accelerated procedure, without a preliminary multi-year stage of obtaining and implementing an Action Plan for membership. Moreover, "the process of negotiations on admission to the alliance will be extremely accelerated due to the high interest of the alliance in receiving these partner countries and the high degree of readiness of their armies for integration into NATO military structures". For example, on Sunday, the leader of the Republican minority in the US Senate, Mitch McConnell, said that the US parliament could ratify Sweden's NATO membership application by August.

The reasons for such very remarkable haste are clear. After all, it is necessary to have time to take advantage of the public opinion that seems to have swung towards NATO in these countries with long-standing traditions of neutrality, which have taken deep roots in society and the state. Both Helsinki and Stockholm emphasize that they are not going to hold a referendum to find out the opinion of citizens about joining NATO, they say, polls conducted by newspapers have already testified to the opinion of the people.

But let's not exaggerate. Only five out of 30 NATO member countries asked the opinion of their citizens before joining the alliance - they try not to talk about such things in the Western mainstream. However, it is not surprising, that even these referendums were on the verge of failure more than once or were declared invalid. In general, such an important matter as joining a military bloc that invades North Africa and Central Asia for purely defensive purposes is not accepted to trust citizens in liberal democratic countries. [Finland’s] President Suomi Sauli Niinisto started to say something about the need for such an event, but quickly took his words back, referring to the fact that everything was clear, and quoted a poll by the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat on March 31, according to which 61 per cent of respondents supported NATO membership.

According to the results of a survey published by the Finnish publication YLE on May 9, 76 per cent of Finns want to join NATO. As for Sweden, the Aftonbladet newspaper reported on May 11 that its poll showed that 61 per cent of Swedes support such a move. It is reported that these figures have risen sharply in both countries in recent months, after the start of the Russian-Ukrainian war. According to January polls, only 28 per cent of those polled in Finland (a survey commissioned by the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat) and 37 per cent in Sweden (a survey commissioned by the TV channel SVT) were in favour of NATO membership.

It is clear that such a sharp change in sentiment (although recorded by rather limited surveys and commissioned by publications with clear Euro-Atlantic sympathies, i.e. “for NATO”) may be replaced by a new wave in favour of maintaining neutrality. Moreover, we are talking about significant economic losses. For example, for Sweden, joining NATO is fraught with a blow to the country's well-developed defence industry, which has repeatedly competed with the United States. The precedents of degradation are well known - the Polish defence industry, which is now forced to fight only for the opportunity to produce components for American equipment, repair and maintain it.

For Finland, losses also have a tangible material dimension associated with economic sanctions and counter-sanctions. However, the case has already been heading towards a breakup in recent months. On May 16, Russian Ambassador to Finland Pavel Kuznetsov said that trade and economic relations between Moscow and Helsinki "practically collapsed". Finland, for example, has already cut off postal (!) communications with Russia and Belarus, broke the contract with Rosatom for the construction of the Hanhikivi-1 Nuclear Power Plant, and refused to pay for Russian gas supplies in roubles. Russia has suspended electricity supplies to Finland since May 14 due to non-payments.

Battle for the Baltic and the Arctic...

As for the military consequences of the two Nordic countries’ entry into NATO, Russian Security Council Deputy Head Dmitry Medvedev said that in response, Russia will strengthen its western borders by increasing the presence of all branches of the armed forces there, including the Navy, moreover, "there will be no nuclear-free status of the Baltic States". Russia withdrew troops from the northern borders back in the 1990s and now only two Russian motorized rifle brigades are stationed there - in Pechenga, Murmansk region and in the village of Kamenka, Leningrad region. The military observer of TASS, Viktor Litovkin, apparently, was authorized to say: "Now, apparently, we will have to at least find a place for the brigade of the Iskander-M tactical complex, whose range is 500 km (it will reach both Helsinki and Stockholm). Two capitals, and two countries that our missiles were never aimed at in the post-war years, will now find themselves under the sights of the domestic sword of Damocles. And he, as hinted in the Foreign Ministry, may be special, nuclear."

In any case, while Russia is at war with Ukraine, it is unlikely that it will be able to take some steps in other directions. It is characteristic that in the current situation, even the Kremlin is ready to withdraw troops from Syria, in fact, agreeing to an even greater presence of Iran there (that's why Assad flew to Tehran in a hurry just a week ago).

Therefore, the words of Putin, who on May 16 began to say that, yes, Russia has no problems with Finland or Sweden because of the accession of these countries to NATO, they say, there will be no threat to the security of the Russian Federation, should be perceived in this way. The Kremlin does not want a second front. Although we are talking about the fact that the collective West not only covers Russia's "window to Europe", but also restricts access to the rest of the world - through the Baltic, and in the future even via the Barents Sea.

In other words, all this is fraught with enormous changes in global politics. In particular, from the point of view of geopolitics and geo-economics, the accession of Sweden and Finland seriously shifts NATO to the north, which means in the direction of a) Arctic resources and b) the Northern Sea Route, which significantly reduces the communication routes between Europe and East Asia. The possibilities of exploiting the riches and roads of the Arctic have increased due to technological progress and the processes of climate change. The collective West is not inclined to agree that all this remains in the hands of Russia.

...and for global hegemony

But that's not all. The game that Russia is playing is a struggle for spheres of influence in Europe and a desire not to expand the scale of the confrontation. Therefore, the Taliban are knocking on the Kremlin's doors in vain, and the Iranians are asking to supply them with at least spare parts for equipment purchased in Yeltsin's time, Cuba and Venezuela are waiting in vain for Russian help, and even Russia's alliance with China is rather a figment of the inflamed Western imagination. All this is beyond the strategic thinking of the current Russian leadership.

But the game that the collective West is playing is a struggle for global domination - certainly under plausible pretexts and slogans. German Foreign Minister Baerbock said the other day that NATO will always be a "defensive alliance". Against the background of NATO's "big push" to the north, the topic of planning global interventions of the North Atlantic Alliance has also arisen. At a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Berlin on May 15, British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss called for the creation of a global NATO in order to be able to operate in the Indo-Pacific region. She said: "It is important that we focus on global NATO. While protecting Euro-Atlantic security, we also need to pay attention to security in the Indo-Pacific region."

The United States also insists on this, which, in fact, determines the main line in the alliance. Back in April, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US Armed Forces, Mark Milley, called for the expansion of the traditional NATO zone of operations at congressional hearings, calling on the allies to collectively confront Beijing. And at the same time, at a two-day meeting of NATO foreign ministers, the topic of the Ukrainian crisis and the confrontation with Russia was supplemented with a discussion of the "alliance's area of responsibility" - as it is now customary to call spheres of influence. The changes concerning the expansion of the alliance's sphere of operations should be fixed in the new strategic concept of the organization, which will be adopted at the June NATO summit in Madrid.

NATO already unites 28 European states, Canada and the United States, and another 20 states participate in the Partnership for Peace program. The total military expenditures of NATO members in 2020 amounted to more than 57 per cent of the global total. Now, this figure has increased even more, as the alliance states are constantly increasing military spending in connection with plans to allocate at least 2 per cent of their GDP to defence by 2024. In this regard, the accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO means the consolidation of the collective West before further efforts to knock out the remaining large and small opponents.

Without a world war, which we are heading towards, global hegemony cannot be established. It would seem that times are changing. The Bismarcks and Palmerstons have long since died in Bose, Churchills and Stalins have gone down in history, and even Brzezinski died. It would seem that people of a completely different mindset came to power - saying something about peace, ecology, sustainable development for all, etc., women appeared at the top of power. But amazingly, under the new rhetoric, the same logic of global politics is again noticeable - whoever is strong (both military and "soft" force) will tell everyone that he and only he (now, maybe she) is right.

After the West's victory in the Cold War, the space in the world began to noticeably decrease even for the very discussion of seriously alternative visions of global problems. The only legitimate logic in the mainstream of the global media and the "global public" was Euro-Atlantic logic, which, of course, was facilitated by the Kremlin's attempts to "mirror" both ideologically (through "traditional values" and "the Russian world"), and practically - through wars and invasions.

Of course, many European countries have good reasons to be concerned about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and they are looking for solutions by joining the Euro-Atlantic bloc. But this is a dubious choice between the global forces of the United States/NATO and the Russian Federation, etc., who are fighting among themselves, but, in fact, for the same thing - the opportunity to impose their will on other countries and peoples uninvited. No one asks the latter at all, they are "liberated", killing thousands in the process of "liberation" and imposing poverty, corruption and hopelessness on the survivors. This is how the US and NATO "liberated" Afghans and Iraqis, and the Russian Federation - Ukrainians. However, the rulers of these countries, who consider themselves entitled to dictate the will of the world, as we know, often do not ask their people.