How Sweden’s NATO Accession Changes Europe’s Future

The addition of the “Nordic neutrals” has changed the geographic, military, and political balance of the continent and the transatlantic alliance.

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson speaks during a press conference in Budapest. Shortly before Hungary's expected approval of Sweden's accession to NATO, the two countries have agreed a comprehensive arms deal. Photo: Marton Monus/dpa (Photo by Marton Monus/picture alliance via Getty Images)

SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER NATO’s CREATION, with laggard, obstructionist Hungary’s ratification of Sweden’s accession, the transatlantic alliance now defends every state that was outside the Soviet Union before World War II. (Even the European states that aren’t members—Austria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Ireland, Kosovo, Serbia, and Switzerland, plus a few microstates like Andorra and Monaco—still benefit from the stability and interdependence NATO creates.) Not only has NATO demonstrated its continuing relevance in the twenty-first century, but the addition of Sweden and Finland has added to the Alliance’s capabilities and readiness. The center of gravity in NATO has moved north and east, away from the original members in Western Europe, and toward the newer members on Russia’s borders.

Symbolic as it may be, Sweden’s accession, following closely behind Finland’s accession last year, demonstrates the seriousness of the Russian threat to free, democratic Europe. Two Cold War neutrals reversed, respectively, 210 and 80 years of non-alignment policy in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Russian threat will not go away. It didn’t go away when Marxism-Leninism collapsed, as was naively believed it would at the end of the Cold War when too many in the United States and Western Europe assumed the default alternative to communism was liberal democracy. As Serbia in the 1990s and Russia from 2008 on have demonstrated, another option turns out to be bellicose nationalist imperialism. It would be equally pollyannish to assume that Putin’s eventual death will solve the Russia problem.

In strictly military terms, Swedish accession completes the transformation of the Baltic Sea into a NATO lake. Old arguments about Finland’s and the Baltic States’ defensibility and “defense depth” collapse. NATO can now fully develop its regional air, sea, and land interoperability and capabilities in its new mare nostrum.

Neither “brain dead,” as Emmanuel Macron claimed, nor obsolete (as many claimed in the 1990s and even since), NATO is revitalized. Moreover, its enlargement to encompass every democratic state on the Baltic littoral—and, by extension, most of the great peninsula of Europe, from the Arctic and Baltic in the north to the Mediterranean and Black Sea in the South—represents a tacit acknowledgment that the warnings of Central and Eastern Europe about Russian behavior, persistently and haughtily dismissed by Western European policy makers for years, turned out to be correct.

The Swedes and Finns deserve credit for the decisiveness. The North Atlantic allies—with the conspicuous exceptions of Turkey and Hungary—deserve credit for welcoming the new members quickly into the ranks. But the originator of this tectonic geopolitical shift was, of course, Vladimir Putin. His barbaric war on Ukraine destroyed—along with so much of Ukraine and so many Ukrainian and Russian lives—the last arguments that the EU, the OSCE, and the UN provided sufficient security for Europe’s neutrals. The world, it turns out, is Hobbesian, at least when the international order is upended by a brutal dictator.

More important than the geographic and military importance of a NATO lake in Northern Europe, however, is the yet unrealized political potential of this grouping. The Nordic countries—Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland—along with the Baltic States and Poland will prevent NATO from adopting the naïve view of Russian behavior historically common among Western Europeans (and occasionally Americans, as well). On a per capita basis, most of these countries have topped the list of donors of materiel to Ukraine. The combined population of these countries tops 65 million, far more difficult to dismiss within NATO than Central and Eastern countries have been hitherto. Other clear-eyed allies, the United Kingdom and the Czech Republic, will further strengthen a formidable bloc within NATO that can challenge the dithering policies of Germany, much of Southern Europe, and a hot-and-cold France led by the mercurial Macron.

For now, the perspectives and interests of Central and Eastern Europe may still be dismissed in Berlin and Paris—and for the time being, Central and Eastern Europeans may be de facto barred from leadership positions in European security. But the new NATO of the east and north is large enough and has enough political clout to reorient NATO away from its two years of self-deterrence toward a more positive, active posture on Ukraine and the Russian threat.