I'm curious what the main arguments against joining NATO are? A commitment to military spending? Potentially being dragged into a war?
The Ukraine war changed this calculus by showing that Russia would invade a country that wasn't even being considered for NATO membership.
Is this a way of saying, like in WW2, that since Sweden doesn't share borders with aggressive neighbors you don't want to have the burden of defending the free world?
What does the US and Turkey have to do with anything? Turkey only requires defending if it's being attacked, not if Turkey starts a war.
I mean even NATO hawks believe this so its kind of a ridiculous situation.
The cornerstone of Finnish defence strategy is to make sure, that the cost of invasion is for all sane parties obviously too high. The point is that anyone in Kremlin considering their next foreign adventure looking into FI would go "no way in hell, nope, need another strategy".
Alone the Finnish defense are not sufficient to instill this "cost-plus" model to the adversary's calculations.
Finnish defense forces would incur considerable manpower and material cost to invading army, but in a long conflict their capability would decline. Without military alliance, material transports would be questionable and attrition would soon kick in.
The cost would be high to RU, but without alliance, not blatantly obviously too high.
Before Ukrainian invasion the second part of this "cost plus" model of territorial defence was belief that international community would incur huge economic penalties on Russia, and the fear of this repercussion would be enough to make even the most courageous military gambler to reconsider their options.
Those sanctions? More or less what RU is suffering now. Their effect? Yep. Not very efficient in deterring the attacker.
The invasion of Ukraine basically demolished this second part of the defense strategy. First a single huge blow - no, RU will invade regardless of trade sanctions - and the second blow, continuing - even though sanctions have kicked in, RU still has exports and not all countries oppose it's illegal behaviour. And it still continues the war effort.
FI therefore needs something else to rebuild it's cost-plus model of deterrence. Only thing that can be used to immediately patch it, is NATO alliance.
It's that, or becoming a Kremlin/Beijing puppet.
Let's not exaggerate. There is a large middle ground where Finland bets on that the EU defence clause will deter Russia, that we can build an EU army or that the war in Ukraine will cripple Russia.
But yes, your main point is correct. The Finnish and Swedish defence strategies have been primarily based on knowning that we will lose to Russia but making the invasion too costly for a sane Russian leader to consider an invasion. And Putin's stupid invasion of Ukraine just reduced confidence in the idea that we can rely on a sane cost benefit analysis from the Russian leadership. Which does increase the appeal of a NATO membership.
It's a plausible scenario, but not a sure one.
Finland is capital poor country, it needs foreign investment or else it will stagnate.
Without NATO after Ukraine the investment environment in Finland will likely be perceived as highly unstable.
China, OTOH, is happy to continue investing vast amount of capital in it's Eurasian project / Belt&Road initiative.
Without NATO, Russia being a loyal subject of the CCP after being sanctioned out of the western sphere of trade, Beijing alliance would be irresistible by guaranteeing both capital and security.
Would that be bad? If you like free speech, then yes. If you like high quality institutions then yes.
This is of course again a bit hyperbolic - western capital flight might not happen.
I mean, something has to guarantee that we have no conflicts between now and being an actual member AFAICT. There's talk of "safety guarantees IF we start membership procession" or something, but then there's still a gap where we need to guarantee territorial integrity / "no conflict".
The point being, if we can deter them from attacking us between now and being a member (when attacking us would have higher ROI for Russia, stopping our NATO track) ... we have the deterrence to stop them from attacking us without NATO membership too (since it would be costlier for them in that case relatively speaking, the ROI would be lower).
The Russian military being bogged down in Ukraine. So the trick is having something else in place by the time it extricates itself from Ukraine and starts looking for ways to rebuild it's credibility in the aftermath.
Which is why some previously NATO hesitant places that have shifted are likely to seek to act quickly.
The impacts of those sanctions are frequently not immediate. 3-6 months from now, some of them may have a lot more impact than they're having by now.
If I were Russia, my difficulty with the Ukrainian armed forces might give me pause with the idea that Finland's - with a comparable military budget and similar conscription - would be manageable.
The problem is, 3-6 months of Russia heavy bombing of civilian targets would likely level several major cities in Finland (most smaller than Mariupol) to rubble.
As would the fact that Ukraine's military stood their ground quite successfully.
Switzerland also made concessions to stay out of the war. Germany wanted to invade, but the risk/reward wasn't worth it at that stage of the war.
Spain was in a civil war and I wouldn't call their post war situation a "success."
Ireland, I guess you could say, faired okay after the war, but during the war, their ships were attacked by both sides and often received no response to distress signals.
You can argue that this is always the case to some degree, and it's better NATO has some say rather than Putin and Russia just rolls over you.
Hawaii isn't even covered under NATO, even if someone attacked the US:
There are a lot of conceivable scenarios where the US would not make the case and even where the other members might disagree.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_Treaty#Article_...
> Article 6 states that the treaty covers only member states' territories in Europe and North America, Turkey and islands in the North Atlantic north of the Tropic of Cancer, plus French Algeria. It was the opinion in August 1965 of the US State Department, the US Defense Department and the legal division of NATO that an attack on the U.S. state of Hawaii would not trigger the treaty, but an attack on the other 49 would.
A similar scenario with Taiwan would not mean "Finland and Sweden would have to send their troops to fight and die there too" as you asserted; they'd have the option to join in if they saw fit.
I'm not saying it would be a verbal and written requirement to participate, and yet, they might have to for other political reasons, like a supply of additional defensive equipment or maintenance programs. For instance, some countries did participate in wars on the side of NATO even though they are not even a part of the alliance. All at the expense of human lives and taxpayers' money [1][2].
Before you say that the US interventions are not NATO interventions, could you name at least one instance from this list [3] where the US was not an active participant of and was actually disapproving of other members' actions? I'm asking because there's a valid growing sentiment with an element of truth in it that NATO without the US is not a potent alliance.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5th_Mechanized_Brigade_(Ukrain...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6th_Mechanized_Brigade_(Ukrain...
Well, now you're arguing something entirely different - that NATO will rope you in without being a member. Hard to say it's a downside of joining if it happens anyways.
> if NATO gets into a conflict with China over Taiwan, there's a highly chance that Finland and Sweden would have to send their troops to fight and die there too
Nothing in NATO's organization or the Treaty itself supports that assertion; in fact, it explicitly says otherwise.
Yugoslavia was not an Article 5 action, it arose out of Article 4 regional security consultations. It is important to remember that NATO is not, even in theory, a “defensive alliance” it is a regional security organization with a mutual defense commitment.
There has been a pretty strong anti-US sentiment in the left leaning parts of the political establishment. Partly due to the same reasons communism enticed global intelligenzia, and partly due to the lingering effects of Finlandization.
Finlandization still causes some psychological baggage on the older generations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finlandization
Finland was "non-aligned" during the cold war and as silly as it sounds, most people in Finland believed this. What it actually meant was that Finland was heavily leaning towards Kremlin - politically and journalistically - even thought it's civil society existed in a nordic egalitarian bliss. But the higher you went in the society, the stronger the Kremlin corruption was.
(I'm 42 and that stuff feels pretty foreign to me already).
This corruption was hidden from the Finns as a people, who most part distrusted Russia - and as Ukrainian events have proven again, for a good reason. Hence - internal policy was based on blatant obfuscation of truth. After the second world war this was a strategy for survival as Stalin could have likely wiped out the whole nation if he had detected any inch of resistance. But after decades, it became an established "way the things are".
Soviet Union was really successful in it's influence campaigns, and Soviet Russia was lauded as a paradise on earth by many prominent members of the intelligentsia up until it collapsed. Ideological hatred of capitalism is also a theme here.
I have to point out that there was enough multipolarity in the political field that Finland never became a communist state. And could have not become - such a thing would have likely caused a civil war. But the left and center heavily colluded with Russia for decades. And Finland had the same president (Kekkonen) for 25 years.
So, that's the background up to 1990's.
So, Finland had a strong culture of Kremlin appeasement starting from the end of second world war, and it left the political and journalistic tradition scarred for generations. Like the victim in an abusive relationship, the subconscious tries to avoid irritating the bully with whom you live. The first time there was even a hint of honest journalism about Soviet Union was during the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
The political and journalistic establishment started only heal after the fall of the soviet union.
For a while, though, it looked like Russia might grow up into a democratic liberal economy. There was therefore no reason for the pro-Russia sentiment to die. And no reason for the anti-US sentiment to die either.
This left the political field with lots of people, who in their subconscious viewed US as "the enemy" and Russia as "the great enlightened people".
I for myself cannot fathom this anti-americanism, and have not met it in my daily life as an engineer, but it seems to be a thing in the older corrupt generation of politicians, as well as among the more naive younger types.
I think my generation (42 like I said) and younger recognize US as an innovative, cultural and scientific superpower and Russia as the degrading husk of a state it is.
I think these "we can stand alone" and "make piece not war" sentiments are remnants of the Finlandization period.
As horrible as the Ukrainian war is, I think this enables Finnish society to finally get rid of the 80 years of dishonest kowtowing to a totalitarian state and enables it to become the truly western state it needs to be and finally unleash it's full potential (even though small) in the western world.