Just over a month away from the NATO summit in Madrid, which will open the doors to Sweden and Finland and unveil the new Strategic Concept. But the path is full of obstacles: from the southern flank to the fury of the Baltics to the Chinese challenge, a map of the currents
The path that will take Sweden and Finland through the NATO door is not without obstacles. The red carpet has already been rolled out: after the almost unanimous vote of the Helsinki and Stockholm parliaments, the Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg received their respective ambassadors with formal membership applications. Le jeux soint fait? Not so fast.
There’s the Turkish Wall to climb and it won’t be a walk in the park. Reduce resistance to a cynical negotiation calculation Recep Tayyip Erdogan risk of making mistakes. The message has reached Washington: If the American Congress clears the F-16 fighter jets for Ankara, which has been frozen for months, Erdogan’s wall could start to crack.
The proximity of the two Scandinavian countries to the Kurdish “terrorists”, as the Turkish president complains, is a fact. Firstly, last Saturday the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC) met in Stockholm with the blessing of the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and intervention in relation to Syrian representatives of the YPG, the group Erdogan is pursuing. Something must be sacrificed: And with NATO unwilling to break away from its Turkish bastion in the eastern Mediterranean, Sweden and Finland will have to review the Kurdish link with some caution.
The mediators are at work, diplomacy speaks behind the scenes. Italy can also play its part and certainly the two candidate countries expect it, Finnish sources confirmed to Formiche.net on the eve of the Rome meeting Mario Draghi and the prime minister Sanna Marin. The times when Prime Minister Erdogan called a “dictator” seem to be long gone: The Rome-Ankara agreement is strong, and this is shown by the first bilateral summit in Turkey in ten years, the Draghi in parliament next July had announced.
But Turkish stomachaches are just the tip of the iceberg. Behind the apparent symphony of the NATO orchestra in view of the two new members, there is in fact a colorful puzzle of national positions that are difficult to reconcile. The date that all spotlights are turning is just over a month away: the Allianz Summit in Madrid, scheduled for June 29-30. This is where the new Strategic Concept is unveiled, the document that every ten years outlines NATO’s roadmap for the next ten years. The latter bears the signature of a giant of international diplomacy: Madeleine Albert, the legendary former US Secretary of State who passed away this year. But ten years is a geological era in foreign policy.
The new document should first confirm an identity trend of the alliance: Russia is the main systemic rival and the most immediate threat to the security of member states. A fact since then Wladimir Putin tried to rewrite history in 2014 by invading Donbass and Crimea. It is a pity that the invasion of Ukraine on February 24 changed the cards: Moscow is not only a rival, but officially an opponent. Hence the feverish rewrite activity that has been going on for weeks and is far from over. The same one that simultaneously forced Pentagon strategists to delay the release of the expected American National Defense Strategy: it was supposed to focus entirely on the Chinese challenge in the Indo-Pacific, is being revised in light of Russian aggression in Eastern Europe.
The 30 member states sing in unison about the basics of war: Putinian Russia has to pay a high price. But as always, the devil is in the details. On the “how” we need to find a square. The dossier robs the hosts of their sleep: in Madrid, Spanish diplomatic sources admit, they are already imagining a watered-down final statement, generic enough. The positions are different, sometimes contradictory.
The Baltics and some Eastern European countries, most notably Poland, are hailing an uninterrupted war. Thanks to historic revenge on Soviet rule, they are pushing for the supply of heavy weapons to the Ukrainian resistance and will not hear of a ceasefire until the last Russian boot leaves the occupied country. A position that will gain strength as Sweden and Finland join NATO.
Hence the worries of the southern flank: Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal have not accidentally made contacts again in the past few months: A NATO with a too north-oriented focus threatens to lose interest in the Mediterranean. With all due respect to the terrorist threat, the military implications of the migration flows and instability in North Africa and the Sahel, and the tensions (also between allies, for example between Greece and Turkey) in the eastern Mediterranean. A powder keg poised to explode in the face of the African food crisis sparked by Ukraine’s and Russia’s grain blockades and the geopolitical instability that will inevitably follow hunger.
Europe counts in the middle, France and Germany are in the lead, and the one in the middle wants to stay: off Olaf Scholz to Emmanuel Macron Except for Draghi himself, no one envisions a future with a Russia completely cut off from the international community and treated as a pariah state.
A fourth fault line can already be seen in Madrid. The Biden administration, backed by a bipartisan front in American politics, has made it clear: the war in Europe must not distract from the first strategic and military challenge, China Xi Jinping. American pressure has been mounting for some time to envision a NATO that also looks to the Pacific and speaks to key allies in the region, from Australia to Japan. The Baltics like the idea – Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia still have open deals with Beijing – and some Eastern European countries. Especially not in the chancellery of Rome, Paris and Berlin, where the scenario of a cold war on two fronts and anti-Chinese reshoring makes very few proselytes.