Sweden became NATO’s newest member on Thursday (7 March 2024), upon depositing its instrument of accession to the North Atlantic Treaty with the Government of the United States in Washington DC. With Sweden’s accession, NATO now counts 32 countries among its members.
I don’t like the expansion of NATO, but due to Russia’s recent imperialism, Sweden’s and Finland’s reactions are completely reasonable. A much healthier alternative would have been actually advancing towards an integrated European defense system involving EU members, with a door open to certain neighbours such as Norway, but it’s pretty hard to do that when the political groups that could actually promote that alternative are schizophrenically tolerating positions such as “I’m a pacifist, so I’m advocating for my own country’s disarmament despite my neighbours starting wars very recently” and “if Ukraine didn’t want to get invaded, they shouldn’t have sought guarantees against Russian aggression from third countries”.
I think Europeans in general psychologically still feel themselves weak without NATO, unable to fill the needs of their own defense.
I’ve been reading about 1st Indochina war yesterday, so - emotionally biased.
EU’s population: 448 million
EU GDP: 19 trillion dollars
Russia’s population: 143 million
Russia’s GDP: 1,78 trillion dollars
Simplifying a bit here (I’m obviously taking Morocco and Belarus for granted, assuming that Turkey wouldn’t attack Greece, and so on), but it’s pretty much a “gotta get our shit together” situation, because there’s no reason why we should depend on the US for defense, or anything else.
I assume you meant trillion and not million for those gdp figures? Even then, they’re low.
Fixed, good catch
That’s about architecture more than resources. “Gotta get our shit together” doesn’t negate the fact that shit isn’t together yet.
It’s good to have resources, but such a situation is still weakness. Only I think NATO in some sense is a contributing factor, and EU frankly too, both not in the least because of all those veto and consensus rules.
I think it’s also been a case of “it’s nice to spend money on nice things instead of things designed to kill people”. Which it is! It’s not a non-significant part of why EU’s GDP per capita is so much higher than Russia’s.
Which is also why fuck Russia. Governments like that make everything worse.
Completely agreed. The ideal defense spending is 0. The problem is that this is only possible if everyone agrees that military action is not the proper method to solve international conflicts.
Why don’t you like the expansion of NATO?
Because it includes countries that are routinely looking for trouble, such as the US and Turkey. One of these days Turkey is going to try and drag us into a conflict with Syria or Iran like the US did with Afghanistan.
Maybe it’s just me, but it felt like the US fought Afghanistan without much help from NATO.
Plenty of NATO countries had troops in Afghanistan since 2001 onwards as part of the US-led campaign:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participants_in_Operation_Enduring_Freedom
that is, it was not NATO that staged two coups in Ukraine, put its puppet government there and began to push the country into NATO, build bases and create threats to Russia’s security, but this Russia, for no reason, attacked poor Ukraine, which did not exist at all not so long ago, and it was part of Russia
Lol