I can't imagine anybody vetoing Finland's membership. In fact, the more the merrier^Hstronger.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-05/u-s-gives...
When the war is over, it may be that the new-found unity caused by the external threat will be enough for them to reinforce their institutions significantly. This could reach a point that could ensure lasting democracy while enabling them to properly fight/eliminate most corruption. At that point, combined with a peace treaty with Russia, they should be able to Join.
More likely, Ukraine after the war will be a massively destroyed country, with widespread poverty and a constant need for western powers to pour money into - and that breeds corruption. The only way forward - should they survive as a nationstate - would be some kind of grotesquely enlarged Marshall Plan - they would become in the 21th century that what Germany was between 1946 and 1990: A military bridgehead and designated battlefield should Russia get another taste for war, with modest economic growth.
Still, most countries had rebuilt their economy to pre-war levels before 1955, and in many cases around 1950.
Given the very small size of Ukraine's economy, reaching their pre-war level will not take very much. Should they, as I predict, come out of the war as a united nation, able to get rid of most of the corruption, they may be able to massively outperform their pre-war gdp fairly quickly.
If they return to pre-war levels of corruption, no amount of economic aid will bring their economy to western levels.
Imagine diverting 50% of Russian troops from Ukraine, where they are already struggling, to another special operation in Finland. Can't see it happening.
They'd have to actually declare war to conscript the whole population and what nonsense could Putin say to sell that to his people at this point?
Umm ... wasn't that what people thought of the alliances and treaties[0] just before the First World War?
[0] https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/what-you-need-to-know-about-p...
If we could avoid its equivalent in the 21st century, that would be good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Russian_Sukhoi_Su-24_shoo...
IMHO Erdogan still owes Putin a favor for being tipped off on the 2016 Turkish coup d'état attempt.
Do you mean the war that Russia wages against Ukraine?
But they didn't. Turkey only upheld the conditions of the Montreux Convention:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreux_Convention_Regarding_...
> Around February 27–28, Turkey refused permission for 3 of 4 Russian warships to enter the Black Sea, as 3 did not have a home base in the Black Sea.
"pursuant to the terms of the agreement, Turkey cannot block Russian warships based in the Black Sea from returning to their registered base."
Turkey was under no obligation to do anything. Yet they closed the straits to Russian ships to the extent that they possibly could.
https://www.total-croatia-news.com/politics/62559-milanovic-...
Especially, the original core alliance was very aligned after WWII, politically. However as NATO expands east, the potential for issues down the road grows.
Look at the Ukraine. Let's imagine that this horrible war never happened, Russia never attacked, and that the Ukraine would join NATO in 2023.
Now fast forward to 2030. Russian political games, and influence, has caused the Ukraine to become more aligned with Russia.
What then? Now, the alliance has a detractor of its goals within!
And what of other geopolitical issues? Who will be China's best friend, in 2030?
With the alliance at its original members, it was more tightly aligned.
Now? NATO is becoming far more political.
Perhaps this is apparent to many, but I feel this is not as apparent as it should be. For as NATO becomes stronger physically, with more members, it becomes less strong politically/actively.
An example. If someone attacked Canada or the UK, the original NATO members would have responded instantly.
What about Croatia? Would the response be the same?
https://www.justsecurity.org/66574/can-turkey-be-expelled-fr...
Yes, without a doubt. Perhaps a little slow, but ultimately the response would be the “same”[1]. The US and UK have existential interest in maintaining NATO.
Croatia and Hungary would be kicked out of NATO before Sweden and Finland would be prevented from joining. At the point of Finland announcing that they will apply, all of the negotiations and box checking are done beforehand. They don’t leave things like this to chance.
Some say “but there is no mechanism for kicking out a member”. It doesn’t matter. The primary NATO members will just have a vote and say you aren’t part of NATO anymore and that would be that.
[1] I’m using “same” here because an attack on the UK or Canada could never be treated as equivalent to an attack on Croatia given the circumstances needed to be attacking those countries and the kinship of the US with those countries. A better way of phrasing would be if Croatia was legitimately attacked and invoked Article 5 of NATO (the mutual defense clause) the U.S. and others would come to Croatia’s defense. There is absolutely no doubt about this.
It only takes one of those to pay off at the right time.
Either they stop this now or it's all over anyway. This is reckless - we need to start a path of de-escalation - give Putin an offramp. Get to back to calm waters.
Then let diplomats do their little dances until there is a hopefully more reasonable people in power on both sides.
Nobody wants war.
Finland might feel safer once they're in NATO.
The rest of NATO (and non-NATO states in Western Europe), perhaps not quite so much. Surely the risk of NATO being involved in any conflict only increases as NATO grows?
No, it diminishes. NATO is a defensive alliance. The more members it has with credible military spending (which Finland has) the higher the cost for Russia to invade.
And the lines we now draw between NATO, Russia and China could well be the lines of a WW3 within a decade. Hopefully not though.
Being cut off from nearly all advanced technology and with a terrible economy doesn't sound like a recipe for improving much in that sense either.
A similar line of argument about alliances and treaties preventing war was used before the First World War. We all know how that ended.
It also doesn't appear to be a very accurate description of the things NATO has been getting up to since the end of the Cold War.
"[NATO] has been involved in military operations in the Balkans, the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa"[0]
You don't have to be a spin doctor to realise that what seems like "defence" to one person is another's war of aggression.
German defence minister Peter Struck memorably said in 2004 that "Germany was also [being] defended on the Hindu Kush".[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO [1] https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/service/bulletin/rede...
Almost like "defensive weapons". Almost, because that's even worse.
NATO was formed with that in mind. A single treaty document publicly ratified. No secret pacts. No back-alley alliances.
Let's imagine we're France.
What's the actual risk of us being directly attacked by an enemy country, starting a conflict?
Now imagine we're France, obliged to join in a conflict by NATO's "collective defence" Article 5. This conflict was already started by an enemy attacking any one of the other 29 NATO members. Particularly murky that now NATO claims cyberattacks count for article 5, and since 2001 we know terrorism can count too.
What's the risk of the latter compared to the former?
I don't see Article 5 as the providor of peace that so many appear to assume it is. Now that the Cold War is long-gone, and it's no longer as simple as "NATO vs Warsaw Pact" in which is was fairly easy to see which side you'd want to be on, I also don't think Article 5 is worth the paper it's written on.
For instance, would your country's citizens be happy to join a war over Taiwan?
What shall we give Russia this time? Then when they come for Poland or Romania, who do you suggest we offer to rape and murder?
This continued escalation can't help but lead to nuclear war, our leaders are playing an extremely dangerous game of chicken.
If anything, Russia's botched invasion of Ukraine should show other countries in the region that there isn't so much to fear from them, and that NATO can be counted for help even without having to risk triggering Article 5 against a nuclear power.
And make no mistake: a hot NATO-Russia war is the worse possible outcome for everyone involved. If it came to that, it would be objectively better to become a vassal of Russia than living through a nuclear war, for the vast majority of the population.
Interesting with all the down votes, wonder if Russian bots have reach even on HN? The fact is that this is happening, and Sweden is joining too, and I'm glad we are.
You need some very twisted Russian logic to see sovereign states joining of their own accord, with majority support in the population as a valid excuse for Russia to attack us.
> If steps are taken to establish a de facto permanent military presence, power-projection capabilities, or a military installation, the delegation noted that the United States would then have significant concerns and respond accordingly.
Note that the Solomon Islands is also a sovereign nation, and that it is > 10,000km away from the US border, and >2000km away from the border of the closest US Ally, Australia.
My point is not whataboutism, it is that sovereign nations have an interest in the military alliances of other sovereign nations, and that the security of one state doesn't stop at its borders. Joining hostile military alliances or massing troops at a shared border is logically viewed as a security threat from another nation, and sovereign nations have a right to attempt to prevent such actions.
Of course, doing it by force of arms the way Russia did is entirely illegal and immoral. Even the threat of violence is considered unacceptable by the Geneva convention, though of course that is often ignored. But complaining or seeking diplomatic and even economic ways to prevent such actions is not immoral in my view, and it is certainly not unusual.
You may not be against that, but my point was that this is mostly not how world leaders think. Note that it's not just the US - Australia, New Zealand, and I'm sure other countries in the area also came out strongly against this, and similarly explained that it affects their security.
Of course, unlike Russia, they didn't literally illegally and unacceptably invade the Solomon Islands. However, if China were to participate in a revolution-coup combo (as Victoria Nuland and the US ambassador to Ukraine were doing 2 weeks before revolutionaries forced Yanukovich out [0][1]); and then a pro-Chinese leader (even one with popular support) started being armed by the Chinese government, and holding joint military excercises defending from an Australian invasion [2]; then the situation would perhaps change.
It's important to note not just what is morally right and wrong, but also what are the established rules of the world. It's great to fight against those rules as much as you can (and US citizens have more power to change this than any other people on Earth, as the voters in the most powerful country in history which is at least partly democratic), when they are unjust, but that doesn't mean you get to ignore them while they are in place.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957 (conversation transcript published on 7 feb 2014)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Yanukovych#cite_note-2 (forced out by protesters on 21-22 feb 2014)
[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/ukraine-h...
Russia just wants Lebensraum, which would be ruined by nukes, and NATO would probably not want to seem excessively cruel to Russian civilians when their purpose is supposed to be entirely defensive.
Don't forget that there have already been numerous close calls in terms of nuclear war, without anything close to a conventional war as background.
Putin has demonstrated again and again that he will interpret any de-escalating, sensible political moves as weakness. Any attempt at appeasement or compromise will be seen by him as an invitation to dare the next aggressive step.
I wish I believed that. His credibility depends entirely on his ability to threaten (to poison his opponents, to flatten cities). He's a strong man, and he can't afford to be seen to back down.
Here's the only off-ramp I can see working:
"Mr. Putin, you can keep your yachts and your offshore wealth; you won't be pursued for warcrimes. But you must exile yourself from Russia, and never darken the world stage again."
I don't think Putin would accept that deal; he'd rather go down with his ship. He thinks he's Peter The Great.
Objectively, this is not true. Putin wanted war. Leadership around him wanted war too. They wanted war they will win fast, but even if that succeeded it would be war too.
Thing is, Putin has boxed himself in; he's said publicly that Ukraine is not a thing, that so-called Ukrainians are in fact Russians, and that he aspires to a Peter-the-Great-style Russian empire stretching from Vladivostok to the Baltic.
The only "off-ramp" I can see being halfway-acceptable to Putin would be for Ukraine to surrender their claims to Donbas and Crimea, in exchange for Russian security "assurances". Even that would make Putin look weak; he's declared that one his goals is to "demilitarise" Ukraine. To do that he would have to conquer the whole of Ukraine.
So any promise by Putin to accept a proffered "off-ramp" would be seen with a very jaundiced eye by Balkan, Central European and Baltic states. And by me, actually.
I'm no warmonger; far from it, I've been mostly a pacifist most of my life. But any "off-ramp" plans would either be unacceptable to Putin, or they would lead to a new war.
I'm afraid it looks pretty bad.
He built the Summer Palace in St. Petersburg in emulation of the European palaces he visited on his tour of Europe. But unlike European palaces, in the Summer Palace he installed a torture chamber, in which he personally tortured then murdered his own wife. He seems to have enjoyed torture and murder.
This is the model that Putin so admires.
I don't know that it's yet possible to ascribe any war-crimes to Putin personally. The crimes that I've heard tell of are of the kind that might be carried out by low-morale troops in any army.
Of course, the Russian army in Ukraine necesssarily have low morale; they've been ordered to attack and kill people that their own leader has said are their "brothers".
Low morale in the Russian armed forces is a persistent problem; in WWII Russian assaults, Russian machine guns were positioned in the rear, to kill any Russians that thought to fall back. It's not surprising that in the fall of Berlin, there was widespread looting and rape by Russian soldiers.
All soldiers behave like this, to a greater or lesser extent. But this Russian army has been engaged in city-flattening, rape and murder to a shocking extent.
Personally, I'm not inclined to forgive. But that's not my call; I'm not Ukrainian.
Anything less is appeasement.
Hungary is also a NATO member and yet its president (Mr. Orban) has been quite chummy with Putin.
https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/germany-nuclear-powe...
There is more "evidence" that Merkel is a long-term Russian intelligence asset, recruited from her youth in East Germany,[1] than that of Trump being the same. One guess on which claim is incessantly repeated by the bien-pensants of the chattering classes.
Bonus: Trump and Stoltenberg argue on camera (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpwkdmwui3k>). Who turned out to be right? Who turned out to completely, totally, 100% wrong?
[1] Something else never talked about is how her parents moved from West to East Germany when she was a baby