WASHINGTON – By accepting Finland’s, and soon Sweden’s, NATO accession bid, President Biden and his Western allies have doubled their bet that Russia has made such a huge strategic mistake in the last three months that now is the time to get President Vladimir V. Putin is paying a heavy price: resisting the expansion of the Western Union itself, which he was trying to break.
But the decision leaves a few key questions. Why not allow Ukraine – the corrupt, corrupt but also heroic democracy at the root of the current conflict – to join in, reaffirming the West’s commitment to its security?
And with NATO’s expansion to 32 members, soon with hundreds of additional miles of border with Russia, is the military alliance helping to ensure that Russia can never again undertake a vicious, unprovoked invasion? Or does this only reinforce the division with an isolated, angry, nuclear-armed adversary who is already paranoid about the Western “environment”?
The White House welcomed a statement Thursday by Finnish leaders that their country should “apply for NATO membership without delay”, while Swedish leaders were expected to do so within days. Unsurprisingly, Russia has said it will take “retaliatory steps”, including a “military-technical” response, which many experts interpret as a threat to the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons near the Russian-Finnish border.
For weeks, US officials have been quietly meeting with both Finnish and Swedish officials, planning how to boost security guarantees for both sides while their applications to join the alliance are pending.
For Mr Biden and his aides, the argument for admitting Finland and Sweden and keeping Ukraine out is quite clear. The two Scandinavian countries are exemplary democracies and modern militaries, with which the United States and other NATO countries regularly conduct exercises, working together to track Russian submarines, protect submarine communication cables and conduct air patrols across the Baltic Sea.
In short, they have been NATO allies in every way except the official one – and the invasion of Ukraine has put an end to almost the entire debate over whether the two countries will be safer, keeping some distance from the alliance.
“We stayed out of NATO for 30 years – we could have joined in the early 1990s,” said Miko Hautala, Finland’s ambassador to the United States, on Thursday as he walked the halls of the US Senate, gaining support for the sudden change. on the course of his country. Trying to avoid provoking Putin, he said, “did not change Russia’s actions at all.”
Ukraine, by contrast, was at the heart of the old Soviet Union, which Putin is trying to rebuild, at least in part. Although it changed its constitution three years ago to make NATO membership a national goal, it is thought to be too full of corruption and too devoid of democratic institutions to make membership likely for years, if not decades.
Key NATO members – led by France and Germany – have made it clear that they oppose Ukraine’s inclusion. This is an opinion that has been confirmed now that the government of President Vladimir Zelensky is embroiled in an active shooting war in which the United States and the other 29 members of the alliance would be bound by the treaty to enter directly if Ukraine were a full member. your promise that an attack on one member is an attack on all.
Mr Zelenski understood this dynamic, and weeks after the conflict began, he rejected his call for Ukraine to join NATO. At the end of March, a month after the Russian invasion and at a time when there seemed to be some prospect of a diplomatic solution, he made it clear that if this would lead to a lasting end to the war, he was ready to declare Ukraine a “neutral” state. .
“Guarantees of security and neutrality, non-nuclear status of our country – we are ready to achieve it,” he told Russian journalists, a remark he has repeated several times since.
These statements were a relief to Mr Biden, whose first goal was to permanently pull the Russians out of Ukraine, but whose second goal was to avoid World War III.
By this he means staying away from direct conflict with Mr Putin’s forces and avoiding doing something that risks escalating, which could quickly turn into nuclear. If Ukraine joins NATO, it will reinforce Mr Putin’s assertion that the former Soviet state has conspired with the West to destroy the Russian state – and it may only be a matter of time before this direct confrontation with all its dangers erupts.
By that logic, Mr Biden refused to send LAG fighters to Ukraine, which could be used to bomb Moscow. He rejected the no-fly zone over Ukraine because of the risk of US pilots engaging in air battles with Russian pilots.
The war between Russia and Ukraine: Key developments
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Murders of civilians. The UN chief of human rights said the bodies of more than 1,000 civilians, including several hundred executed by court, had been found in areas near Kyiv that had been occupied by Russian forces in the early stages of the invasion.
American aid. The House of Representatives voted 368 to 57 in favor of a $ 39.8 billion aid package for Ukraine, which will lead to a total US financial commitment of approximately $ 53 billion over two months. The Senate has yet to vote on the proposal.
But his once clear line has become more blurred in recent weeks.
As Russia’s military weaknesses and incompetence became clear, Mr Biden approved the sending of heavy artillery to the Ukrainians to thwart the last Russian attack on Donbass, and he sent Switchblade missiles and drones, which were used to destroy Russian tanks.
When the administration condemned reports last week that the United States was providing Ukraine with intelligence that helped it sink Moscow, the pride of Mr. Putin’s navy, and target mobile Russian command posts and Russian generals seated in them, the cause of the disorder was clear. The revelations showed how close Washington is to the line in provoking Mr Putin.
The question now is whether NATO enlargement risks cementing a new Cold War – and perhaps worse. This is a debate similar to the one that took place during the Clinton administration, when there were warnings about the dangers of NATO enlargement. George F. Kennan, the architect of the post-World War II containment strategy to isolate the Soviet Union, called enlargement “the most fatal mistake of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”
Last week, Anne-Marie Slaughter, chief executive of the New America think tank, warned that “all stakeholders need to take a deep breath and slow down.”
“The threat of Russia’s invasion of Finland or Sweden is remote,” she wrote in The Financial Times. “But their admission to the military alliance will redraw and deepen the division of 20th-century Europe in ways that are likely to prevent much bolder and bolder thoughts on how to achieve peace and prosperity in the 21st.
This is long-term care. In short, NATO and US officials are concerned about how to ensure that Russia does not threaten either Finland or Sweden before they become full members of the alliance. (This suggests that no current member of the alliance objects; many believe Mr Putin will rely on Hungary and its Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, to reject the requests.) Only Britain has been explicit on the issue by signing a separate security pact. with two countries. The United States has not said what security guarantees it is willing to give.
But he accused Mr Putin of forcing NATO enlargement by invading a neighbor. Jen Psaki, the White House spokeswoman, freely quoted Finnish President Sauli Niinisto as saying that Ukraine had forced Finns to think differently about their security.
“You did it,” she told Mr Putin. “Look in the mirror.”
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