Will NATO defy Putin and allow Finland and Sweden to join?

The United States and NATO, history’s greatest security powers, are being taught lessons in moral courage and strategic vision by smaller, non-NATO countries highly vulnerable to Russian retaliation. Similarly, the European Union economic powerhouse is slow-walking Ukraine’s application to join. 

Ukraine’s epic resistance to Vladimir Putin’s sadistic onslaught has come at tremendous human, material and economic costs. The Ukrainian people persevere, belatedly fortified by substantial but still insufficient Western arms. U.S. and NATO equipment capabilities seem limited to holding off a total occupation by Russian forces, but not driving them entirely from Ukraine and inflicting a potentially regime-ending defeat on Putin.

Now, two of Russia’s neighbors, Finland and Sweden, neutral throughout the Cold War and post-Cold War periods, are aroused by Putin’s criminality in Ukraine and openly seek NATO membership. 

Putin has responded with his typically brutish threats. His acolyte, Dmitry Medvedev, said, “It will no longer be possible to talk about any non-nuclear status of the Baltic.” Neither Nordic democracy appears to be intimidated. Whether the Biden administration, NATO and the EU will be as steadfast remains to be seen.

The development comes at a critical time of strategic rethinking by both Washington, completing its long-delayed National Defense Strategy, and Brussels, where NATO will announce its new Strategic Concept in June. It takes on added significance in the existential competition between democracy and autocracy, highlighted by President Biden’s Summit for Democracy. 

In recent decades, two concepts of strategic deterrence against aggression have emerged from the practices and policies of the United States as leader of the free world. For countries considered critical to U.S. national security, Washington has longstanding treaty commitments it will defend.  That includes all NATO countries — “every inch,” Biden says — and America’s five Asia-Oceania allies: Japan, South Korea, Australia, Philippines and Thailand.

Other democracies deemed important to U.S. interests, but which lack a formal military commitment, may or may not be directly defended. Taiwan endures under a U.S. policy of strategic ambiguity. For more than two decades, Ukraine was in that company, wondering whether the world’s leading democracy would help defend it against its powerful autocratic neighbor, beyond providing essential training and limited self-defense weapons. 

Ukraine’s heroic president, Volodymyr Zelensky, soon learned the bad news as Russia’s invasion loomed. Biden effectively announced a new category of democratic countries threatened by a hostile nuclear power. Since U.S. intervention could lead to a direct conflict that might “mean World War III,” America and NATO will stay out of the fight, Biden has said, and even the quality and delivery rate of additional defensive arms must be severely constrained to avoid “provoking” the aggressor. Taiwan, in a roughly parallel situation, has reason to worry about Biden’s newly declared standard. China likely assumes that Washington will follow the “Ukraine option” with Taiwan.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has indicated receptivity to the inclusion of Finland and Sweden and promised an expedited accession process. “All NATO allies will welcome them,” he said. “… [T]hey can easily join this alliance if they decide to apply.” But the next NATO meeting when membership would be considered is not until June 29 and Putin has shown he can move quickly when he considers his ambitions threatened and sees an opportunity for a preemptive move.

Putin may well be contemplating a lightning strike into Finland and/or Sweden, not necessarily to seize Helsinki or Stockholm or topple the governments, but just to hold enough of a piece of their territories to ignite a conflict and effectively disqualify them from NATO membership. The unwritten catch-22 NATO rule that trapped Ukraine in a legal limbo for 20 years could do the same for the two Scandinavian aspirants now. No country in a conflict situation can expect to be admitted as long as the conflict exists, because it automatically would bring the fighting to NATO under Article 5’s collective defense mandate.

Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin, in a news conference with Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, said her country’s desire to join NATO is precisely to gain allies should Russia attack. “[I]f Finland were a NATO member country and became a target of military force, it would defend itself with the support of the Alliance.”

But Stoltenberg sees NATO’s primary goal as not to defend countries aspiring to join NATO, such as Ukraine, but to avoid getting into the conflict. Mirroring Biden’s comment, he said: “NATO’s main responsibility is to protect and defend all allies, and to prevent this conflict from escalating to full-fledged war between NATO and Russia. … NATO will not be directly involved in the conflict. NATO allies will not send troops or capabilities into Ukraine.”

That is NATO’s Achilles’ heel that Putin has exploited successfully to seize Georgian and Ukrainian territory. Washington, London and Moscow all guaranteed Ukraine’s security when it gave up its nuclear weapons in 1997. In 2008, at Washington’s insistence, NATO declared that Georgia and Ukraine were certain to join, but within months, Putin suddenly invaded Georgia, effectively dooming its NATO accession.

Seeing Western passivity, Putin next fomented violence among Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine, souring Kiev’s NATO prospects. In 2014, Russia invaded Eastern Ukraine and Crimea, foreclosing Ukraine’s NATO prospects despite ongoing lip service to its “open door” policy.

Now, Finland and Sweden are testing NATO’s convictions. Putin knows from experience that precipitating conflict with the new aspirants would be the surest way to dissuade NATO from letting them in.  

Reflecting NATO’s position, Biden has stated two apparently fixed intentions: First, he will not send a single U.S. soldier or pilot to defend Ukraine even against genocide — as he sees it, that would be risking World War III. Second, America will not yield “a single inch” of NATO territory to Putin’s aggression, despite the same danger of potential escalation to nuclear war. 

Regarding the Finland-Sweden situation, U.S. Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith said last week, “I can’t imagine a situation where there would be tremendous resistance to this idea.” But the White House has not commented, undoubtedly because the administration is mulling the same choice its three predecessors avoided over Georgia and Ukraine: whether to confront Putin.  

If Biden delays the U.S. decision until Putin attacks Finland and Sweden, he can then rely on NATO’s policy of offering countries an open door to apply but a closed door to admission. Once again, the overly cautious U.S. and NATO approach will invite, not deter, Russian aggression — as well as China’s on Taiwan.

Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He served in the Pentagon when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and was involved in Department of Defense discussions about the U.S. response. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.