The Arc of Alliance

TURKISH PRESIDENT Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s abrupt decision to ‘unblock’ Sweden’s bid to join NATO was not a sideshow at the Vilnius summit. While all eyes were on Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky had criticised the “absurd” lack of clarity on a timeline for Kyiv to join the treaty organisation even before the summit began, it was the ghost of Olof Palme, and an old, lingering Cold War legacy, that was laid to rest in Lithuania.

There was nothing absurd about NATO’s position on Ukraine’s membership. Zelensky’s impatience is understand­able but there was no way NATO could have accepted a new member state that happens to be at war. Nor would the 31 member states have given a timeline for Ukraine to join, since such a timeline naturally depends on the cessation of hostili­ties on the ground which perhaps even the perpetrator in Moscow doesn’t have a date for. On the other hand, getting the waiver on the Membership Action Plan (MAP), which makes Ukraine’s eventual entry a simple, one-step process, will turn out to be more than symbolic when the day comes.

So, let’s return to Sweden for the moment. It’s immaterial whether Erdogan was impressed by Sweden’s recent crack­down on Kurdish militants or the F-16s changed his mind. Al­though he had given way on Finland earlier this year, Erdogan had been adamant about Sweden. The problem was the legacy of Palme. Sweden, more than other Scandinavian states, had long given shelter to all the persecuted peoples of the world it could accommodate. The Kurds, vic­tims of history and the instruments of history called conflict and its resultant disputed borders, were denied the independent state they were promised but only in a truncated version by the Treaty of Sèvres (1920). They had carried on the good fight wherever they were. Sweden was a haven for them but soon, much of the good fight had turned bad, as militant Kurds, whom Erdogan, not without reason, calls terrorists, extended their reach. Thus, there would have been little irony if Sweden’s bid to join NATO, begun under Social Demo­crat Magdalena Andersson who was in office when the war in Ukraine began, had failed.

But Sweden will soon join NATO and that means a substantial change on the map. Two Nordic states, Norway and Denmark, were founding members of NATO. Sweden and Finland had been neutral through the Cold War. Now, along with the three Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, as well as Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and, of course, Turkey, they will form an S in reverse, barricading Europe from the Black Sea coast to the Baltic region against Russia. The map would have meant little when it came to aerial bombing and missiles or cyber warfare. But Russia’s demonstrated weakness for land wars, as in Ukraine, keeps it relevant, especially for the Baltic states and Finland. Most importantly, since an attack on one member state of NATO is deemed an attack on all, Russia can waste words in issuing threats but do little on the ground except transport more missiles and nukes. Vladimir Putin’s actions to constrict NATO have resulted in the exact opposite of his objective. Add Ukraine to that map, and the new iron curtain is complete.

After the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of commu­nism in Europe, NATO had plunged into an existential crisis. Its relevance and continuance were questioned. With hindsight, the rapid extension eastwards, taking in the newly liberated states of the Soviet East Bloc, not least at the urging of those states themselves, saved the organisation. Each country in question, even Hungary, had specific and similar reasons to be wary of Moscow. The Baltics were the most vulnerable. Poland could never outgrow the threat to its existence on the map of Europe. The Czechs always considered themselves Central European. But it was Finland, the newest member of NATO, which was guaranteed its independence by Moscow only on condition of its neutrality through the Cold War. That made the Finnish case very different from Sweden’s where neutrality was more a matter of ideology. The ghost of the unfortunate Palme again, although it was really a Social Democratic worldview that still goes deep into the Scandinavian soul. Palme had believed Swedish neutrality was a force for good in a divided world. He may even have been right. But that was the price for Sweden becoming mediator-in-chief. And neutral­ity is still an article of faith for a lot of Swedes although, as Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson would affirm, geopolitics, going beyond the reality and rumours of Russian submarines near the Swedish coast, had left Stockholm with no choice.

At a glance, Europe, and on cue the world, is a frightfully divided place again. But the view from New Delhi advises calm. NATO’s expansion is a twofold boon for India which, in recent years, has understood well the benefits of purpose-specific groupings, such as the Quad when it comes to geopolitics, or, say, I2U2 when it comes to technological and cross-sector coopera­tion. India holds most of its joint military exercises with the US. It increasingly participates in multilateral exercises, as it did with France and the UAE in the Gulf of Oman last month. NATO has not looked so purposeful and formidable in a long time. Since it wants to engage more with India as a bloc, as pointed out by Julianne Smith, the US permanent representative to NATO, at the Raisina Dialogue earlier this year, there is an added opportunity opening up here. On the other hand, the Vilnius summit was the first time since the Soviet collapse that the leaders of NATO member states put their political stamp on new and detailed plans for collective defence against a military attack by a major power, meaning Russia. An isolated Russia, pushed into a suffocating dependence on China, would look at India all the more for breathing space and room for manoeuvre. And while in theory, there can be equivalence between China and India for NATO, that very Russia-China embrace, to say nothing of the West’s increasingly difficult relations with Beijing, means such equivalence is non-existent in practice. India will have an opportunity in each hand for the foreseeable future.

The Biden administration disappointed Zelensky by pouring cold water on his hopes for at least a timeline for Ukraine’s entry. But in doing so, the US showed why it’s the leader of the alliance, its chief military contributor and strategist. That cautious Ameri­can pragmatism, especially against the backdrop of the much-criticised provision of cluster bombs to Ukraine, carried the day over and above disagreements among NATO members and left Ukrainian membership to a future, hopefully not too distant, “when allies agree and conditions are met”. Zelensky’s claim that “uncertainty is weakness” was perhaps merely an exercise in rhetoric, aimed at the desperate population back home. How­ever, the waiver on the MAP immediately raised Russia’s hackles even though NATO could rightfully count Moscow’s anger as a small victory. There was a strong message from Vilnius, after all.

If US pragmatism and a Turkish turnaround were the key takeaways, a little-noticed statement of Polish Prime Minister Andrzej Duda summed it up best: “We raised this Ukrainian expectation that a formal invitation to an alliance be issued for Ukraine… Such a far-reaching decision has not been made, but a whole series of decisions have been made regarding Ukraine, undoubtedly bringing Ukraine closer to NATO.”

ChinaNATOquadRussiaUkraine crisisVolodymyr Zelensky