There is no two ways about it - this is great news. Even if the US bails on NATO (sadly very much in the realm of possibility), having both Sweden and Finland as members will help protect the Baltic.
The next step has to be the development of nuclear deterrence, and this isn't much of a signal to Russia but to the US.
These past months has shown the US as a volatile and unreliable partner. While it may sound dramatic it's about time Europe has it's own defense systems and deterrence capabilities.
I guess it should've been since 2016. The US lost shedloads of leadership and credibility, how can friends or foes do any deal with a nation when in 4 years someone can come along and shred it apart (the big example here is the Iran deal), until then at least the country was a sane and reliable actor, for 4 years it became an unhinged country...
The really big deal with all of this is that the island of Gotland will now be available for NATO activity without a lot of red tape. Between Gotland (Sweden) and Bornholm (Denmark) that's like having permanent warships in the Baltic.
Not quite "full access to all bases". More like "meaningful access to many bases".
It would be rather silly to join an alliance and not at all allow your allies to store/access/manage equipment and house troops/suppliers at your bases.
With US troops it's always a concern what they're going to get up to on their off time. The US generally will not let its troops be prosecuted under local jurisdictions which sometimes creates very messy situations.
Even if the troops on base are under American jurisdiction, it's not like America is an entirely lawless country.
Put thousands of young people anywhere and stuff will happen. Some people will behave badly sometimes. Given enough time and people someone will eventually murder someone.
People sometimes get upset over the outcome in criminal cases, also within fully Swedish jurisdiction. Rightly or wrongly.
On balance it seems like a reasonable trade-off to me. The Americans gets, to a certain degree, to do things their way and Sweden gets a certain degree of extra protection against Russia.
Part of Putin's strategic defeat. He was worried about Ukraine joining NATO? Well, Russia now shares a much longer border with NATO than it did before the invasion. The Baltic sea is a NATO lake.
Sure, Putin has been able to throw enough troops into the meat grinder to advance a few miles here and there. But it's a tiny percentage of the country. For perspective, they just captured Avdivka. It had a prewar population of 35,000. Russia lost 40,000 casualties to take it.
Yeah, I really don’t get what the plan was. Unless they are expecting to be able to completely annex Ukraine, I don’t know what Russia hopes to gain that it didn’t already get with the annexation of Crimea and continuing the War in Donbas stalemate conflict.
Just maintaining those conflicts indefinitely would prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and would have attracted a lot less international attention to Ukraine. It also would have been a lot cheaper in terms of economic sanctions and military losses.
I think the plan was to capture Kyiv with paratroopers in the first 24 hours and install a puppet government. After that, plan B was to do it by encircling the capital with armored units. That got bogged down and repelled. Ukraine wouldn't accept a peace deal without recovering Crimea and Donbas, which they are very far from taking by force. So both sides are going to grind it out until one of them has a political rupture a la 1917 or 1991.
I doubt it will happen. They have a ton of natural resources. The oil and gas corps alone can hold the entire economy afloat (Gazprom, Lukoil, Rosneft) and fund their tanks and missiles.
It was about creating a land bridge connecting Russia to Crimea and securing Crimea's access to water from the Dnipro river.
One of Ukraine's goals with last year's offensive was to sever the land bridge. That objective failed. Ironically, Russia (likely) blew up the Kakhovka dam to slow down that Ukrainian offensive and thus severely restrained water access to Crimea (which they had fully reestablished in the early days of the war).
Putin isn't worried about NATO, any more than he is concerned about Nazis. That was just the usual Russian smoke-and-mirror act, largely for internal consumption.
As you note above, he was motivated by the thought of an easy win. That would thumb his nose at NATO and be popular at home. It didn't actually need to accomplish anything strategic -- though Ukraine is a bunch of land that's valuable both economically and historically.
Having failed to accomplish the easy win, there's no way to back down and say, "Well, never mind". He still desires the emotional goals of owning that land, and having sold it as an existential risk against NATO, he can continue to get support at home.
Which will last as long as he can continue to staff it with prisoners and disfavored ethnic groups, and various countries continue to fund it by skirting sanctions.
Simple: expansion. Seems like he can get to that goal since western support for Ukraine is shriveling up pathetically.
There will be no peace with Putin but a military defeat may be enough to get rid of him. So I don’t really understand at all why Europe and the US are so hesitant when this is a way to obviously damage Putin.
What's your point? Russia started a war. NATO feels threatened and this is NATO responding. How is Sweden joining NATO in any way relevant to war "being a racket"?
Yet another small country given the power to cause the destruction of US cities.
If the US gets enmeshed in a conflict because of Sweden, which US cities do you want to have destroyed?
Britain as the world's top superpower of the era was destroyed by having to come to the aid of Belgium in August 1914. Unintended consequences are a bitch.
> Britain as the world's top superpower of the era was destroyed by having to come to the aid of Belgium in August 1914. Unintended consequences are a bitch.
Interesting viewpoint. So if Britain wouldn't have to come to the aid of Belgium in August 1914 it would still be the world's top superpower... Interesting.
it would still be the world's top superpower... Interesting.
Extremely unlikely, but possible. The great impetus to the US being 'top dog' was the huge profits the US made from World War 1 where all of the British and French money went.
Without WW1, WW2 might not have happened the way it did either. That leaves a slowly growing US that might have been less 'exceptional' and more long-lived. More like the much longer British rise and fall over several centuries than a short-lived one-century-long rise and fall.
the US' primary export is security. you realise this yes? its why it has a massive expeditionary force and why NATO exists in the first place. isolationism would very rapidly have the effect of tanking US relevance on the global stage
China is definitely starting to do this as part of its wider geopolitical ambitions under Xi.
Australia has started to dip its toes into providing security to small pacific island countries, it’s an interesting case too since while they can promise their own security resources, due to Australia’s deep ties with the USA via multiple defence and military related treaties, Australia is to extend the “selling security” business metaphor, starting to sell security as a “Value Added Reseller”… effectively they offer the immediate response time of a smaller business partner, with the added benefit of having having an even larger supplier that can be turned to if things are too big for your direct supplier to deal with… the catch is the same in business as in geopolitics however… to what degree your reseller is able to supply their own resources and call on upstream vendors for support, can vary greatly depending on what you need and when you need it…
