With Sweden joining NATO, Vladimir Putin will finally be able to say: Here is proof that NATO is encircling Russia. His Italian sympathizers will repeat the propaganda: the West is guilty of fomenting the siege syndrome in Moscow. This is a classic example of a self-fulfilling prophecy: Putin has done so much that he has managed to truly surround himself.
Up until 500 days ago, on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, NATO expansion to include Finland and Sweden was not on the agenda. It was precisely this aggression that aroused so much fear in Russia’s bordering states – on land or sea – that it urged two nations with ancient pacifist and neutralist traditions to seek protection in the Atlantic Alliance.
Putin confirms the opposite of what his many admirers have always said: he is not a geopolitical genius, but a statesman without clarity who, in the name of pathological nationalism-imperialism, is wreaking enormous damage on his own country. First, he severed economic ties with the West and destroyed a legacy of relations with Europe by squandering the energy link that his Soviet predecessors had patiently built. In so doing, it has pushed its own fragile economy into a dependency on China that will increasingly resemble colonization. To China’s advantage, it is also losing some of its influence in Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Finally, he “gifted” to NATO a very long land and sea border manned by two first-class armies: even when they were neutral, the Swedes and Finns had never made the mistake of other Europeans, that is, they had never left themselves completely Beware of the Russian threat. It goes without saying that Putin must find a compromise with Prigozhin. Now is not the time to lose Wagner too.
On the issue of Ukraine joining NATO, there are various explanations for Joe Biden’s half-step. Just one thing would suffice: when we speak of NATO, we should always remember that the vast majority of combat capability is American. It has always been like this. This is all the more true when Europeans were mired in geopolitical lethargy and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, entertained the illusion that they could be the first herbivorous superpower in human history. If one day NATO were forced to fight for the defense of Ukraine on the basis of Article 5 of the Statute, America would first have to send in its soldiers. Biden condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine from the outset, but made the following point: America will not deploy troops and America will not engage in direct conflict with Russia. With a year and a half to go before the US presidential election, and with a strong isolationist current in the Republican Party, now is not the time to break those promises.
A dilemma is well summed up in this line from The Economist: “How can you deny Ukraine accession to NATO while it is at war, without giving Putin a reason to prolong the war?” Vladimir Zelenskyy has this Dilemma perfectly understood and his anger justified: if joining NATO is made conditional on the end of the fighting, the best way for Putin to keep Ukraine out of NATO is to keep bombing it and massacring its civilians.
Yesterday I recalled the precedent of Bucharest 2008: even then, a NATO summit gave Putin a dangerously ambiguous signal. On the one hand, he made vague hints about the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO in the future; on the other hand he refused to fix times and methods. This ambiguity accelerated Putin’s advance into his wars, from Georgia to Crimea to Ukraine, because NATO had not provided him with an adequate deterrent. He hadn’t entirely alleviated his pre-encirclement paranoia either. “Paranoia” will sound like an exaggeration to some of you. It is worth remembering that in 2008 he attended the NATO summit in Bucharest. Yes, NATO was so aggressive that the Russian President was the guest of honor.