Sweden to Join NATO
politico.eu
politico.eu
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.
Are there plans to boost this to the requisite 2%? Did that already happen and I missed it?
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?end=2...
[1]https://www.regeringen.se/artiklar/2023/09/regeringens-budge...
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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).
He feared wealthy, comparable countries nearby, exposing him as the incompetent chief of thieves he is.
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.
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.
This series was written 8 years ago and predicted another invasion of Ukraine.
The tldr is it was a strategy for Putin to remain in power.
Putin be damned.
And we gotta vote out the MAGA (Make America Garbage Again) crowd from senate and congress.
Can't believe Mike Johnson is solo holding out aid even though majority congress passed it.
Republican logic - The world is only worth saving if we are the ones in power.
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.
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.
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.
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…
It’s hilarious how you can be condescending and wrong.
“Isolationism” is completely different from not wanting the US to get entangled in Europe’s BS.