The Kremlin has issued a sinister warning to NATO about the consequences for the Baltic Sea if it allows Sweden and Finland to join the alliance, as has been widely reported. Dmitry Medvedev, a former president and close ally of Vladimir Putin, said:
“We can no longer talk about the status of the Baltic Sea without nuclear energy – the balance must be restored. To date, Russia has not taken such measures and will not do so.
Sweden and Finland have recently shown interest in joining NATO as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin said her country, which shares an 800-mile border with Russia, would decide whether to join in “weeks, not months”.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is adjusting the security environment in Europe. Both Sweden and Finland remained unattached during almost half a century of the Cold War.
But in less than a month, their radical changes in security policy reflect similar changes across Europe – including the huge increase in defense spending proposed by Germany. This turn to the west by the two neutral forces, together with Germany’s renewed appetite to reject its traditional military caution, signals a new era.
But the move to join NATO poses risks to both countries, which maintain a delicate balance by sitting with the West without opposing their powerful neighbor. In fact, the accession of the two Scandinavian countries to NATO is more of a security dilemma than a security solution.
The idea of a “security dilemma” was identified by American Cold War scientist John Hertz in 1951. As weaker nations seek to increase their power to balance a stronger state, as Scandinavians plan to join NATO, the stronger state (Russia in this case) will probably consider this a threat and then react accordingly.
It is no wonder, then, that the Kremlin is reacting the way it has. In addition to Medvedev’s warning, Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, recently described NATO as a “confrontational tool”, warning that the accession of Finland and Sweden “will not bring stability to the European continent.”
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From the point of view of power policy theory, this dilemma gives Russia two choices. It could seek to increase its own power through an arms race or reduce the threat through its military – including the possibility of a preemptive strike on NATO.
During the Cold War, peace was maintained by the nuclear arsenals of the two countries, which were a deterrent enough to prevent direct confrontation. The result was an arms race – especially in nuclear weapons – between two broadly overlapping alliances, neither of which gave the other a significant advantage and involved each launching missiles closer to each other’s territory before taking corrective action.
The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, which brought the two sides to the brink of a nuclear confrontation, demonstrated the importance of avoiding any significant imbalance.
US President John F. Kennedy addresses Congress in 1961. The United States and the Soviets will come to the brink of nuclear war a year later in the Cuban Missile Crisis (Photo: NASA, CC BY-NC)
NATO enlargement and Russia’s inability to balance power through a conventional arms race or an alternative alliance have led, at least in part, to war against Ukraine. Given the time and money involved in trying to match NATO’s superiority in non-nuclear forces, and the perceived additional threat of a significantly expanded NATO on its doorstep, the Russian president may still see a preemptive nuclear strike as his only option. .
Putin has made it clear that the nuclear option is the one he will use if faced with a threat he cannot face in any other way. Russia’s recent development of hypersonic cruise missiles could be an important change in the game in this regard.
Experts believe that NATO has not yet developed a system for reliable detection of the trajectories and velocities of hypersonic cruise missiles. Therefore, Putin may believe that a preemptive strike on Western command and control systems is possible before they can counterattack. That would give Russia a chance to survive a nuclear war – at least in a better position than the West.
A more dangerous world
As the world has changed significantly over the past 70 years, the strategic thinking that led to NATO in 1949 has not kept pace and some important voices have warned against NATO enlargement, including Henry Kissinger in 2014, following the annexation of Crimea by Russia and prominent US foreign policy expert John Mirsheimer, who recently warned that this has helped provoke the current war in Ukraine.
The case of NATO enlargement in Scandinavia cannot but contradict the current Western strategy against Russia. If harsh Western sanctions against Putin succeed, they could pose an existential threat to his regime. And if that is the case, the Russian president could turn to his often-threatened nuclear capability, as clearly stated in the country’s nuclear policy, which was updated in 2020. This increases the threat to any NATO country.
The debate on NATO accession in both Finland and Sweden must go beyond the obvious need to respond to the immediate perceived Russian threat and explore the end results of the security dilemma they will face – especially the possibility of nuclear war – which is inextricably linked to NATO membership.
Non-alignment has historically meant the ability to stay out of any such confrontation and to defend specific national interests away from the wider global game. This status has allowed Sweden and Finland, as well as countries such as Austria, to remain firmly independent. Renunciation of this status will transform Scandinavia and bring NATO even closer to confrontation with Russia.
Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, Professor of Military Studies at Loughborough University, and Azal Ashraf, Professor at the School of Politics and International Relations, Loughborough University. This article was republished by The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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