Immediate consequences of Sweden and Finland joining NATO

On the recent developments

The kids in charge of Finland announced today that their government will apply for NATO membership, bringing the alliance to yet another part of Russia’s borders, and further exacerbating tensions.

The Social Democrats, leading Sweden’s coalition government, and by their number of seats deciding the vote, will likewise announce their decision later today, which certainly will be in support of an application. It’s basically a formality. Both nations will be received through a fast-tracked process.

Update: Yeah.

In light of these developments, an important questions to raise regards the consequences of such an accession. For some reason, this hasn’t really been addressed in detail in legacy media, whose focus rather is on the purported risks of Russian aggression, especially in the time gap between NATO application and formal accession.

Comments in legacy media mainly focuses on Russia through the enemy image filter and how NATO-membership will reduce tension through “clarifying alignments” or possibly increase tensions through insulting our eastern neighbor.

The following points have been more or less absent in the debate:

1. Sweden and Finland will become pushed into hosting NATO bases and assets. These will become targets in an escalated conflict.

2. Accession by Sweden and Finland has the capacity to uniquely aggravate tensions by threatening Russian shipping lanes and force projection capabilities through the Baltic. This is an important step towards debilitating and cutting Russia to pieces, and will likely face a proportionate response.

3. If the conflict further escalates, Sweden and Finland’s political agency will be severely diminished. Our territories will in practice become assets for a foreign military force, rendering us de facto if not de jure suzerains.

4. Sweden and Finland will be much more likely to send our kids away to die in foreign wars of imperial aggression. Sure, it’s not a hard obligation, but consent manufacturing, various sorts of political and institutional pressure and backdoor deals towards that end will be almost inexorable. The institutional relations will be solid, and the necessary mechanisms fully established.

5. Finally, our countries will more explicitly become parties in a broader geopolitical conflict involving a decaying West set against the the BRIC states in a context of economic instability and resource depletion. This is probably not a favourable long-term position.

Cooler heads will not prevail, unfortunately. There’s no real anti-war position represented in the West, nor any tangible support for deescalation or détente. Anyone who questions open warfare against Russia is increasingly labelled a traitor and a brainwashed Putin stooge (whereas we used to be conspiracy theorists if we pointed out that there was an agenda of aggression towards Russia).

Speeding with flat tires in the exact opposite direction of peace.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

+++

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

W. H. Auden, 1939