NATO to add Sweden at last

  

NATO to add Sweden at last

Hungarian lawmakers approved Sweden’s bid to join the Russia-focused NATO alliance in a 188-6 parliamentary vote Monday in Budapest, which will raise the collective defense pact’s membership to 32 nations once approved in Brussels. Swedish officials submitted their application in May 2022, along with their Finnish neighbors in the weeks immediately after Russia’s full-scale Ukraine invasion almost exactly two years ago.

Finland formally joined the alliance last April. But Sweden’s bid was stalled by dogged resistance in Turkey and Hungary. After months of negotiations regarding extremism and defense agreements, Turkey’s parliament finally approved Sweden’s accession five weeks ago, which then focused attention on the reluctance of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his conservative parliamentary majority in Budapest. Hungary’s reticence was never as overtly intelligible as Turkey’s; and the New York Times reported Tuesday from Budapest that it’s still not terribly clear why Orbán and company waited as long as they did.

“Sweden stands ready to shoulder its responsibility for Euro-Atlantic security,” Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson wrote on social media Monday after the news from Budapest, which he personally visited for talks with officials last Friday.

Why it matters: “With Sweden following Finland into NATO, Russian President Vladimir Putin has in effect achieved the very thing he sought to avert when he launched his war in Ukraine—an expansion of the alliance,” Reuters reported after the Monday vote in Budapest.

But perhaps more notably, “The decision to become part of the Alliance overturns a position of neutrality and military non-alignment that stretches back to the Napoleonic period and culminated in association with the global non-aligned movement at the height of the Cold War, as the country sought to navigate between NATO and the Soviet bloc,” Neil Melvin of the London-based Royal United Services Institute said Monday. “Sweden notably brings to NATO a well-equipped army, over a hundred advanced fighters, a modern navy including five submarines, as well as a technologically advanced defense industrial base,” he added.

“Russia’s actions have thus set in motion security shifts, including now Swedish NATO membership, that mean Moscow faces being militarily excluded from the Baltic Sea and its airspace, while NATO can project force more effectively across Scandinavia and into the High North and Arctic,” said Melvin.

“Sweden is a strong democracy with a highly capable military that shares our values and vision for the world,” White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said in a statement Monday. “NATO is the most powerful defensive alliance in the history of the world, and it is as critical today to ensuring the security of our citizens as it was 75 years ago when our Alliance was founded out of the wreckage of World War II,” he added.

 This morning in Washington, nearly a half dozen former ambassadors are discussing two years of Russia’s Ukraine invasion at the U.S. Institute of Peace.