Is it the same for the US? Do I want an attack against Finland to be considered an attack against the US? An attack against the US can unleash the end of humanity. I find very risky to leave this at the whims of some out of touch Russian dictator.
Btw if it's either NATO or nuclear bombs, why didn't Finland get nuclear bombs in the last 60 years?
As for Finland during the Cold War, not sure if it had a pathway to NATO, same as modern Ukraine, or if the USSR would give it time to develop a bomb. They treaded carefully and forfeited a great deal of their independence.
Finland is a small country and nukes are very expensive (and hard) to deal with all the way: development, manufacture, deployment, service. The pressure to have your own nukes is low when you consider an attack unlikely, which was the case for Finland for the last 60 years.
Countries that did not feel so safe moved much faster (considering different fates of Mr. Gaddafi and Mr. Kim). But recent Russian actions motivated a lot of its neighbors who were not worried before to spend whatever is needed to make an attack on them prohibitively expensive.
Finland's policy was one of soft appeasement. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has revealed this to be a bad idea, so Finland continuing as it was is no longer a responsible option.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_we...
> Under NATO nuclear weapons sharing, the United States has provided nuclear weapons for Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey to deploy and store
https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/history_p...
> Do I want an attack against Finland to be considered an attack against the US?
Lots of people in 1939 said that they didn't want to go to war over Czechslovakia. But of course, once a dictator has successfully annexed one territory without a fight, what does he do next? Annex another one.
The US is arming the fighting in Ukraine so it does not have to fight Russia in Poland.
The NATO (and the US actually) benefits a lot by Finland joining, and will benefit from Sweden joining too - only a matter of time.
While the Finns absolutely kicked the Soviets' asses in the Winter War, they actually did lose the war a ceded territory to the USSR.
The actual impact of that article 5 was pretty non-existent. 9/11 was not a declaration of war by a state; it was an action of a well-organized group. There are no specific actions that this article 5 could imply beyond the PR.
NATO is about deterrence, not really defense per se. NATO membership makes wars with Russia less likely, and provably so. So your answer is yes: the only way the modern global economy works is if all the players are guaranteed they won't get crushed and pillaged by rogue neighbors. A continuous land war in Europe is absolutely not safer for the USA than a decades-long cold war.
The "whims of some out of touch Russian dictator" are going to be dangerous no matter what we do. We can't control Putin and we aren't able to effect regime change in a nuclear state. The only decision left to us is how best to control it.
NATO is neither defense nor deterrence, it is about asserting US dominance over the rest of the world.
You can deploy all the anti-imperialist hyperbole you want, but the "reason" for having a mutual defense treaty among quite-clearly-non-dominated nations like Germany or the UK is pretty obviously defense.
Where do you draw the line
letting power mad dictators take over their weaker neighboors territory uncontested tends to not turn out well be it Napoleon, Hitler Stalin, or Putin.