Today, Explained - Finland and Sweden have entered the chat

Episode Date: May 23, 2022

Their admission to NATO would further isolate Russia, leaving it the only Arctic country outside the alliance. This episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Mounsey, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This whole war between Russia and Ukraine got started because Ukraine wanted to join NATO. But now, very much because of Russia, two close-by countries, one it straight up shares a border with and one it shares a sea with, are trying to join NATO. Finland is the former, Sweden is the latter, and it's not just border stuff. If Finland and Sweden get into NATO, that'll make Russia the only Arctic country that isn't part of NATO. I think it's going to fundamentally allow the U.S., Europe, NATO to re-conceptualize

all of defense and security in Northern Europe, including the European portion of the Arctic. The increasingly isolated Russia, now that the Nords have entered the chat. Ahead on Today Explained. across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Today Explained, Sean Romsfirm here with Jen Kirby, who does foreign stuff at Vox. She's joined us to talk about the hottest NATO news.

Finland and Sweden announced last week that they are going to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, also known as NATO, a 30-member alliance which the United States and lots of European countries are a part of. Today the Social Democratic Party has concluded that Sweden should join NATO. We have been talking here in Finland at least 30 years about NATO membership. And they formally submitted their application last Wednesday to join. Every nation has the right to choose its own path. You have both made your choice of the thorough democratic processes. And people saw this may be coming. This wasn't a total surprise. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine, public opinion in Finland especially, but also Sweden, really shut up in terms of support for joining NATO.

And political leaders in both countries started to make pretty big hints that they might pursue membership. Both Finland and Sweden are close partners of NATO, so it wasn't a huge leap, but things really started to escalate quite quickly in the past few weeks. And that's because of the war in Ukraine? Yeah, absolutely. And of course, as these processes happen, Finland and Sweden were going around to other NATO countries, making sure that if they did want to apply to NATO, other people would let them in. And also making sure that the parliament, different political parties were willing to support it because both of these countries have famously stayed out of NATO for a very long time. Right. As you alluded to there, these two countries are sort of famously neutral, right? These Nordic states? Yeah, they are. We technically say that they are militarily non-aligned. But to give a little bit of history, Sweden has been kind of famously neutral for centuries. Our 200-year-long standing policy of military non-alignment has served Sweden well.

They've stayed out of the world wars in Europe, and this has been a long-standing policy and really part of their identity. Finland is a little bit more complicated. In 1939, they were invaded by the then Soviet Union. This is not a war, but the most ruthless aggression upon a peace-loving, hard-working, and deeply religious people. And they were able to fend them off. The Finnish nation is firm and united in the defense of her liberty and of her democratic institutions. It still created sort of this issue for them because Finland, of course, shares an 800-mile border with Russia. So quite a lot of territory. And so during the Cold War, they basically had to sort of sit on the sidelines, not so much out of choice,

but sort of out of necessity to keep the Soviet Union from having any other adventures in Finland. And so the Soviet Union meddled a lot in domestic politics. But then after the Cold War, both Sweden and Finland in the 1990s joined the European Union. And it's obviously a political and economic community, but there are defense guarantees. And in many ways, by joining Europe, they became aligned with the West. They just formally avoided any military alliances, even though at the same time they were becoming closer and closer partners with NATO itself. So what's the deal here? Do you just like fill out a form and wait to hear from the NATO bosses? How does it work? So on Wednesday, Finland and Sweden went

to Brussels. They handed in their applications. There's pictures of them, these little papers with their flags. Cute. Was it a color printer? Were the flags in color? I hope so. It looked like they whipped out the color printer for this. I'm curious if they accept NATO applications online, but not clear to me. Since it is a treaty, and of course, the founding kind of foundational principle of NATO is the mutual defense clause, which is an attack on one is an attack on all. So they have to all formally bring them into the tent. And so what they did this week was try to kind of start to accelerate the process. As we said before, Finland and Sweden are really close partners of NATO. They're basically as close as you could get to without actually being in the alliance. They exercise with NATO

troops. Troops from the Queen's Royal Hussars are embedded into a Finnish armoured brigade. They do missions together like in Afghanistan. There's much more to ISAF than just the Brits and the Americans. Dozens of countries are contributing troops to the coalition effort here in Afghanistan. And Estonia, for one, is punching well above its weight. They're already pretty closely there. And they're, you know, strong democratic countries. So there's not really any issues in terms of governance there. So they kind of meet all of the criteria.

They're like the ideal members for NATO. And so everybody thought the application process and the ascension process into NATO was going to go very smoothly. Great. And there are what? There are 30 NATO nations. Albania, off the top of my head here, just kidding. I'm looking at a list. NATO is going to go very smoothly. Great. And there are what? There are 30 NATO nations. Albania, off the top of my head here, just kidding, I'm looking at a list. Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Montenegro, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States.

Did anyone have beef with Finland and Sweden joining the club? At the lower end of the alphabet, Turkey had some objections. Turkey had beef? Turkey had some beef. Why? What did Finland and Sweden do to Turkey? It kind of came as a surprise. Erdogan has objected to Sweden's granting of asylum to members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, which he has said is a terrorist organization, but obviously is a complicated domestic political matter. And so he's indicated that if they continue to do that and support, and I'm using

air quotes here, terrorists, that he will block both Finland and Sweden's membership. Huh. Drama. He believes that they're basically too lenient on the PKK and wants them to sort of be tougher on them. But to be clear, this is Erdogan trying to appeal to his domestic political base. There isn't a lot of there there. This is Erdogan grandstanding trying to gain political points at home. Some other NATO drama way back when, you might remember, when Turkey bought some Russian military equipment.

Turkish President Recep Erdogan defied the U.S. and fellow NATO allies by purchasing a new missile system from Russia. And so they took Turkey out of this F-35 program for our fancy planes. But it also has old planes, F-16s, that need to be refurbished or need to be replaced. And so there's a lot of speculation because there's been negotiations going on about that. That Turkey's trying to win some concessions from Washington on that and doing it by holding up this NATO process. And it also has nothing to do with Russia. He's not trying to like curry favor with Putin? No.

And there was some kind of question if, you know, Turkey, which has had at one point been trying to help broker negotiations in Ukraine, and even Hungary, which is a NATO member and has been kind of close to Putin, might try to hold up the process for those reasons. But that actually does not seem to be the case, at least at present. We don't know what's going to happen down the line. But for now, Turkey is the main outlier and the issues that they're raising are more for his own political benefit than anything else. So assuming like Erdogan gets over it at some point, how long might it take for Finland and Sweden to become members of NATO? In the past, for example, I think Montenegro, it took like 18 months. You know, NATO has kind of played down Turkey's objections. Everyone kind of has been saying, yeah, we are working with Turkey.

We've registered their displeasure and don't think this is going to be detrimental to the NATO process. And many folks that I've talked to seem to agree as well, but crazier things have happened in the world. How does Putin feel about all of this? Putin, oh Putin. He's kind of distracted, I think, a little bit for this mess that he created in Ukraine, which is an understatement, of course. But Putin had been signaling for a while as there were indications that Finland and Sweden might move toward NATO membership, that it would kind of constitute as a threat. You know, they warned that there might be consequences. And Putin cares a little bit more, I think, about Finland, again, being on its border.

But ostensibly, one of the reasons why he launched this war against Ukraine was to stop the expansion of NATO. And one of the results of his war in Ukraine will be the actual literal expansion of NATO. So in many ways, it is a defeat for Putin. And what does it mean for NATO? It is a huge symbolic and political win for NATO before the war in Ukraine NATO was a little bit adrift you know particularly after the Afghanistan withdrawal which NATO had been really committed to and like the United States had to reckon with 20 years of of its involvement there and so the war in Ukraine a little bit helped clarify NATO's purpose and created this renewed unity and vigor in the

alliance. And this is going to add to that in a big way. And then there's military and strategic benefits, which is, you know, there was a big chunk on the European map that had been unaccounted for. And now when NATO does its military planning, they can think a different way about Northern Europe and the Nordic region, but most importantly, the Arctic. When we're back, we're going to talk about how this shifts the power balance in the Arctic and why the Arctic is increasingly important to all the powers involved. That was Jen Kirby from Vox. This is Today Explained, also from Vox. Thank you. at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join RAMP. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained,

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and I've got one more list for you now. All the countries whose territory makes up the Arctic. You've got Canada, obvi, Denmark via Greenland. Did you know that Greenland belongs to Denmark? Fun fact. Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the United States via Alaska, and Russia. Now, if Finland and Sweden join NATO, Russia will be the only Arctic country that isn't with NATO. And that presents its own set of geopolitical tensions because the Arctic ice is melting and militaries are moving in. To find out more, we called up Helsinki, Finland. Charlie Salonius-Pasternak. I'm a leading researcher at the Finnish Institute of

International Affairs. We asked Charlie what it would mean for the Arctic if Finland and Sweden joined NATO. I think it's going to fundamentally allow the U.S., Europe, NATO to re-conceptualize all of defense and security in northern Europe, including the European portion of the Arctic. And it turns out, apart from NATO, the Arctic's got its own club to foster cooperation. It's the Arctic Council. It was formed with the idea that this is genuinely going to be a place where you talk about climate, environment, indigenous populations, things like that, as well as practical security, search and rescue, stuff like that. That's been the one place where their thinking has been is

let's discuss broad, impactful issues here. You don't hear a lot about Arctic politics. Is that because they're thus far, you know, they've been relatively functional? Well, during the Cold War, it was, of course, one of the most militarized areas in the world because of U.S.-Soviet nuclear activities. Then there was the idea that there are a lot of natural resources and some sort of an Arctic exception was discussed. You know, there could be wars and conflicts elsewhere, but in the Arctic, there would be peace, in fact, and everyone should benefit from the economics. And this idea flourished, I think, until probably 2014 and Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea when the war originally

started in Ukraine, when cooperation was dialed down there across some of these different fora. So you could say that it's so far away in some ways from the central places of conflict in global politics that it just usually doesn't rate a mention in the news. On the other hand, you could say for some decades, it was definitely one of the places where you could get countries that view the world and how the world should operate quite differently, get them to actually cooperate. So probably a mixture of it is a little remote. And for a moment, at least, there was a lot of potential for cooperation. And how might the potential for cooperation change if two Arctic nations, Finland and Sweden, become members of NATO? One of the things that Russia has liked is that Finland and Sweden were not NATO members. But because of this limitation in the Arctic Council, security issues weren't to be discussed there, even if those were precisely the ones

that might have been good to discuss. So how will it change? I think fundamentally depends much more on what will be Russia's desire to have a relationship and what kind of a relationship with the rest of the Arctic countries, the rest of the West. And that will flow into the Arctic. So there are a lot of issues that need to be discussed, including cooperation in, again, climate change, search and rescue, stuff like that, which really needs to get done just regionally. But it is a little bit held hostage by the broader tensions.

When Finland and Sweden join NATO, there might actually be an odd silver lining here. Oh? Which is the U.S. had some time ago suggested that the security issues, which weren't to be discussed in the Arctic Council, they could be discussed in the NATO-Russia Council. But, of course, that would have left Finland and Sweden out, non-starter. But now if Finland and Sweden are becoming members in NATO, there's a chance that you actually discuss security policy defense in an established form, the NATO-Russia Council, which is one of the side reasons probably why that council hasn't been completely tossed off a cliff after this expansion of the war. So I guess that's maybe the silver lining. In the future, there could be a place where all of the Arctic countries meet to discuss the hard security stuff, as opposed to the broader, you know, environment, climate, indigenous people issues. And is Russia going to be receptive to that?

It doesn't seem like there's a great desire to engage in serious cooperation. At the same time, while they often make headlines, there are always glimpses of these are called confidence building measures, things that both sides do. Tonight, U.S.-led NATO troops and Russian forces are ramping up intense war games in the region, signaling both sides are preparing for a possible conflict. If there's going to be a large weapons test or military exercise, I'll say we, the West, NATO, tend to stick by them. Winter exercises like these are meant to counter Russia's home field advantage,

waging war against an enemy that specializes in fighting in Arctic conditions. And these may seem insignificant, but they're actually kind of important because there seems to be very little else. I mean, is there a chance here that you start to see military buildup in the Arctic the way you did back in the Cold War as a result of NATO expansion or the current conflict in Ukraine? Well, you've actually seen it for a number of years already. It depends entirely on whose story you listen to. So I wouldn't pin the expanded war in Ukraine now or Finland and Sweden's membership in NATO into that. Russia has strengthened its Arctic military capabilities over a number of years by Finland's borders

and has introduced weapon systems, hypersonic, quasi-ballistic. As you say they can travel at 20 times the speed of sound, they can be mounted on top of an ICBM and can carry nuclear weapons of up to two megatons. Three, two, one, push! Make sharp turns and take unpredictable courses on the way to its target, making it more difficult to intercept. It made the northern fleet, so now we're talking about the kind of northwest of Russia, all Arctic, its own military district.

It is such a critical part of Russia's nuclear second strike capability. Admiral James Fogel, the commander of U.S. naval forces in Europe, is particularly concerned about this submarine, the Severodvinsk, nuclear-powered and armed with land-attack cruise missiles with a range greater than 1,000 miles. So it is already militarized, but certainly if you include the northernmost parts of Finland, Sweden, Norway into the Arctic. We've seen very large NATO military exercises.

Most recently, about a month and a half ago, Cold Response 2022, which was one of the largest NATO exercises since the end of the Cold Wars. So today we're doing a mission-specific training in preparation for exercise cold response 22 and we're doing specifically on-off drills onto CH-53 super stallions. There's an increasing creeping militarization in the region and who started depends on whose story you listen to. You know, we're in this strange situation where with one hand, the United States is funding a huge portion of Ukraine's war effort. And with the other, it's in, you know, negotiations with Russia to exchange nationals and, you know, involved in this sort of quasi-harmonious situation in the Arctic.

Is it possible to, at the same time, be in conflict with and in cooperation with a country like Russia or a country like the United States with these superpowers? Is that sustainable? I think it's almost a necessity because also I have to throw in China in here, which presents itself as a near Arctic country, a designation that the Arctic countries don't agree on, but it gives some idea of China's interests, which are primarily probably economic in the region.

But as we know, economics and military security stuff is increasingly intertwined. Better to have China under the tent with all of us than not. Norway, a much smaller country. Russia, of course, cooperate on search and rescue. And it's one of the issues discussed quite broadly in an Arctic context because everyone has an interest in this. So it's just being pragmatic, which from a Finnish perspective is how politics is done. Finland's probably more interested in combating climate change than Russia is. But Finland realizes that if Finland is just yelling at Russia and not trying to coax Russia into cooperating in the Arctic on mitigating or preventing climate change, Finland's efforts won't be enough.

So I think this thinking is quite natural for most Finns. And I would suspect ultimately for a global power like the U.S., part of this may be actually relearning lessons from the Cold War. both about how you kind of interact in the Arctic, what you signal with different military exercises, how transparent you are, all of this. And then part of it is what other lessons you can draw from the world in terms of when military, economics, politics, global challenges like climate change are all in the mix. Charlie Salonius Pasternak is a researcher at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs in Helsinki, Finland.

Victoria Chamberlain produced our show with help from Matthew Collette, Laura Bullard, and Paul Mounsey. Today Explained is on Twitter at today underscore explained. Vanilla Ice is at Vanilla Ice. I'm gonna roll.