Investor's Business Daily, May 7th, 2007
Geopolitics: A strategic shift on Europe's northern tier is shaping up fast. With Russia trying to halt a missile shield and intimidating Estonia, Sweden and Finland are starting to rethink neutrality. It shows seriousness.
For about a decade, conventional wisdom held that the end of the Cold War made NATO irrelevant. But out on the frontier of Western civilization, in the farthest Nordic states of Sweden and Finland, a different picture is emerging as an old predator rises from the East. Russia's recent moves in the region have forced them to take a new look at defense alliances they once shunned.
There are two flash points: Russia's simmering fury over Europe's bid to build a missile shield with U.S. help in Poland and the Czech Republic, and Russia's moves to rein in old Soviet empire colonies such as Estonia.
Russia can't convince itself that a shield would be harmless. From Moscow, the head of Russia's armed forces general staff, Gen. Yuri Baluyevski, warned Monday that if Russia saw Europe's shield as a "threat" it would take "countermeasures" to destroy it.
Russia also can't stand a growing and prosperous Estonia, the small Baltic state that drew Moscow's ire by moving a 1947 Soviet memorial from its capital center. For that symbolic act, Russia put Estonia's embassy under an orchestrated mob siege and roughed up its diplomats.
It also cut energy shipments for what it calls "rail maintenance," and directed Kremlin-orchestrated cyberattacks not just to shut down Estonian government Web sites, but also to call for the overthrow of Estonian democracy. The latter is ominous, given Russia's history of invasions after similar warnings.
These are acts of belligerence, if not war. Having seen signs of growing trouble for a long time, Finland and officially neutral Sweden are forging closer ties with NATO.
Their first step came in 1994, when both countries (and Russia) joined NATO's Partnership for Peace. They moved further this April 15 when both took a first step toward joining NATO by taking part in its Response Force this year.
The force, set up by Donald Rumsfeld in 2002, was a farsighted back door into the alliance, National Review reports, and shows that Sweden and Finland recognize the growing menace from the East.
Finnish media reported on Monday that NATO will hold a huge military exercise in the Baltic Sea this month, with 17 navies, over 80 ships and 10,000 people. Sweden and Finland are among them.
Finland's defense minister on Thursday will fly to Stockholm to confer with his Swedish counterpart and discuss Nordic defense cooperation, according to news reports.
Such acts are provocative, some foreign policy analysts say. But that ignores Russia's original aggressions. What's significant is that the Nordic countries, this time, are ignoring the complaints.
It says something about post-communist Russia that two nations that once felt safe enough to avoid NATO membership during the Cold War no longer feel safe from today's Russia.
Something menacing is on the horizon.
