The End of Nordic Neutrality

If Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ambition in invading Ukraine was to rein in NATO, it had precisely the opposite effect. In April 2023, Finland joined the alliance, more than doubling the length of NATO’s border with Russia, and in March 2024, Sweden became a member as well. As U.S. President Joe Biden has said of Putin: “He thought he’d get the Finlandization of NATO; instead, he got the NATO-ization of Finland—and Sweden.”

Russia’s brutal war on Ukraine hastened the admissions process, but it was only a matter of time before the two Nordic nations shed their neutrality. Finland’s Cold War policy of nonalignment was always rooted less in principle than in the exigencies of survival; the country was coerced into neutrality by its domineering Soviet neighbor. Sweden’s neutrality was more entrenched and more ideological, grounded in the country’s self-image as the conscience of the world, but the country has also long identified with the West. At the earliest opportunity, in 1994, just a few years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, both Sweden and Finland joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace, a forum for security cooperation between members and non-members. And now, the two countries are protected by the alliance’s Article 5 mutual defense clause.

The end of Nordic neutrality signifies the end of the post–Cold War era in the high north. As the third and fifth largest countries in the EU, Sweden and Finland have dramatically extended NATO’s reach and brought significant capabilities to the organization. Their membership represents a major setback for Moscow—but heightened risks of escalation, too.

A PASSIVE NEUTRALITY

Finnish neutrality emerged as a survival strategy after World War II. Between 1939 and 1945, Finland fought in three separate conflicts as its alliances shifted: a defensive war against the Soviet Union, an invasion of the Soviet Union with help from Nazi Germany, and then a war to drive out German troops, mostly from Finland’s north. Afterward, Finland was made to surrender ten percent of its territory to the Soviet Union, as well as pay substantial war reparations. In 1948, as part of the Finno-Soviet Treaty, the Finns formally relinquished their right to join any military alliance. Defeated and afraid, the leadership in Helsinki settled into a long period of uncritical neutrality toward, if not subservience to, the Kremlin.

As the Cold War divided Europe, Finnish leaders used diplomatic acrobatics to position themselves between East and West. Without formally joining the process of European integration, Finland managed to build and retain strong economic links to Europe. In 1975, Helsinki even hosted the first meeting of what would become the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The summit symbolized Finland’s standing as a neutral meeting place where East and West could come together to craft a new security architecture for Europe.

Even so, the Finns’ freedom to engage with the West was necessarily constrained by the demands of self-preservation; “Finlandization” became a byword for coercive neutralization. The Kremlin did not exactly direct Finnish foreign policy, but lawmakers in Helsinki were careful not to antagonize Moscow. The Finnish government did not protest Soviet misdeeds, such as the invasion of Hungary in 1956 or Afghanistan in 1979. Nor did Helsinki speak up for the victims of political repression inside the Soviet Union. To mollify the Russians, the Finns also practiced self-censorship on a sweeping scale. The Finnish Board of Film Classification, for example, banned scores of movies deemed anti-Soviet.

Finland and Sweden’s accession to NATO represents a major setback for Moscow—but heightened risks of escalation, too.

The end of the Cold War presented Finland with an opportunity to reimagine its foreign and domestic policy. The 1948 Finno-Soviet Treaty was replaced by the 1992 Finno-Russian Treaty, which was based on “sovereign equality.” Henceforth, Helsinki would not require Moscow’s tacit approval before entering treaties.

But neither Finnish leaders nor the public were clamoring for NATO membership. For all its limitations, a posture of neutrality had kept the nation safe in a dangerous world. The Finns no longer feared Moscow, and they saw little need to join a defensive alliance; participation in NATO’s Partnership for Peace network sufficed. Even after Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and annexed Crimea in 2014, only a minority of Finns warned against complacency. The country’s armed forces regularly took part in NATO exercises, but there was little political will to expedite membership. 

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine changed all that. Just weeks into the war, Finland’s president at the time, Sauli Niinisto, met with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg as well as with U.S., British, and French officials. Public support for joining NATO skyrocketed, from 42 percent before the war to 80 percent by September 2022. By the time Finland officially joined the alliance, a new foreign policy consensus had emerged. In January of this year, when Finns went to the polls to pick a new president, not one of the eight candidates criticized the decision to join NATO.

VIRTUE SIGNALER

Neutrality took a much different form in Sweden. If the Finns tended to be passive, reluctant to criticize either side in the Cold War, the Swedes prided themselves on their righteousness. In 1972, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme compared the United States’ bombardment of Hanoi to the Fascists’ bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War and to the Nazis’ mass shooting of Jews at Babi Yar in Ukraine during World War II. “We should call things by their proper names,” he said in a fiery speech. “What is going on in Vietnam today is a form of torture.” And when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the Swedes criticized that war as well—just as they had condemned the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the Red Army’s incursion into Hungary in 1956.

On top of its devotion to peace, Sweden earned a reputation for generosity on the world stage. For more than half a century, it has been one of the few high-income countries to meet or exceed the UN target of donating 0.7 percent of gross national income to development aid. In the 1960s and 1970s, Sweden was sometimes referred to as the “darling of the Third World.” And the country’s model social democracy offered a “middle way” for other nonaligned countries hoping to avoid the extremes of capitalism and socialism.

The end of the Cold War dulled some of that shine. What was the point of neutrality if there was no more Warsaw Pact? What was the middle way in a world where one socioeconomic model had triumphed? What had Swedish development aid really delivered? By 1995, when Sweden joined the European Union, it was merely one country among many, shorn of its unequaled status as a blameless paragon of virtue.

In some ways, Sweden’s abandonment of neutrality has been even more dramatic than Finland’s. Until last year, Sweden had practiced nonalignment for over two centuries, since the Kingdom of Sweden ceded Finland to the Russian Empire in 1809. Even now, the Swedish public’s enthusiasm for NATO membership is muted relative to that of the Finns. In January, a national poll found that only 63 percent of Swedes approved of their government’s decision to join the alliance. Still, most Swedes believe that the security environment fundamentally changed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. A policy of nonalignment no longer offered sufficient assurance of future security; Article 5 did.

TROUBLE AHEAD

Leaders in Helsinki and Stockholm appreciate the threat that a revanchist Moscow poses to Europe, but they will no longer sit on the sidelines. Last year, Viktor Tatarintsev, Russia’s ambassador to Sweden, announced that new NATO members would become “a legitimate target for Russian retaliatory measures, including military ones.” Sweden’s foreign minister, Tobias Billstrom, fired back defiantly: “Sweden’s security policy is determined by Sweden—no one else.”

The new members are not mere recipients of NATO protection; they also contribute greatly to the alliance. Both Finland and Sweden have raised their defense spending above the two percent of GDP that members have agreed on as a minimum. “You have to prepare for the worst in order to avoid it,” Finnish President Alexander Stubb told the Financial Times in April. Among the considerable capabilities that the Nordic countries bring to NATO are opportunities for aerial reconnaissance on Russia’s border, enhancing the alliance’s early warning capabilities. The Finnish and Swedish militaries also have obvious expertise in maneuvering in extreme cold.

Finland and Sweden may be large European countries, but they are sparsely populated and will not add massive numbers to NATO’s military personnel. Sweden, which reintroduced selective conscription in 2018, has about 25,000 active-duty troops, 22,000 home guards, and 12,000 reservists. Finland, “the Arctic Sparta,” as it is sometimes called, has an active, well-trained military force of some 30,000. Because the country has never abandoned conscription, the Finnish military can swell up to 280,000 (twice the number of active-duty military personnel fielded by the United Kingdom) if war breaks out and the reserves are activated. Finland also boasts the largest and best-equipped artillery force in western Europe, a major asset in a potential conventional war.

Far more important than the number of troops each country can contribute is its geography. The strategic shift that their membership is likely to prompt in NATO cannot be understated. Going forward, the alliance will be leaning north and northeast. Take Lapland, the sparsely populated northern territory divided mainly between Finland and Sweden. The area will inevitably become significant for NATO’s Arctic strategy. Not only has Lapland now become territory to be defended against potential attacks; it is also a convenient host of alliance aircraft. In a few years, Lapland will host a large fleet of Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets. Finland is also the world’s leading manufacturer of icebreakers and able to contribute a fleet of nine to support NATO’s evolving Arctic strategy, which is aimed, in part, at keeping maritime trading routes open and guarding against potential Russian military activity.

Further south, the Finnish and Swedish islands in the Baltic Sea can now be counted among NATO’s assets, constraining the operations of Russia’s Baltic fleet. Meanwhile, Sweden’s diesel-electric submarines (four of which have been made and two of which are under construction) are tailor-made for the Baltic, which is too shallow for nuclear-powered submarines. Although Russia controls Kaliningrad, the enclave surrounded by Poland and Lithuania, the Baltic has now effectively become a “NATO lake.”

The addition of two new members does present challenges to NATO’s internal cohesion, of course. More members in a club of hard-to-please democracies is hardly a recipe for consensus. Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump’s possible return to the U.S. presidency may well make things more difficult still. At the same time, the addition of two militarily adept and geopolitically significant European nations to its ranks makes the alliance less dependent on the whims of the American electorate.

But the gravest trouble ahead is an inevitable corollary of Finland and Sweden’s accession to the alliance. NATO’s border with Russia now extends nearly 1,600 miles, presenting more openings for small-scale military incidents that could trigger a broader conflict. Russia has already issued warnings about the consequences of an increased NATO presence in the Arctic region. In the future, the organization will likely host more exercises and military simulations in Finland. Moscow will almost certainly view these as provocations necessitating upgrades in Russia’s own military, such as the buildup of troops on its side of the border. That, in turn, will prompt Finland to strengthen its border defenses.

Tensions are also on the rise in the Baltic. The sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022 demonstrated the vulnerability of infrastructure in the Baltic Sea. Nine countries border the Baltic Sea; among them, only Russia is now outside NATO, and the balance has tilted clearly against Moscow. But Russian ports in St. Petersburg, Primorsk, and elsewhere remain important for exports and imports. The Kaliningrad enclave remains a major strategic asset, and Moscow is unlikely to let go of what it considers a historic right of navigation in the Baltic Sea.

NATO is history’s most successful military alliance because it has kept peace, not because it has conquered territory and defeated enemies. This was the alliance’s main attraction to Helsinki and Stockholm. But in the coming months and years, Russian propaganda will challenge the wisdom of Finland and Sweden’s entry into the alliance. Putin will continue to hammer on about the existential threat that Western imperialism poses to Russia, and Russian disinformation will present the Nordic countries’ entry into the alliance as needless aggression.

Leaders in Helsinki and Stockholm must push back on these distortions. Finland and Sweden did not join NATO to be part of a U.S.-led plot to encircle Russia; they were reacting to cumulative evidence of aggressive Russian imperialism. Russian military aggression is what killed off Finnish and Swedish neutrality, with the invasion of Ukraine delivering the final blow.