Gordon F. Sander in NY Review of Books:
While I was in Stockholm I met with Swedish defense minister Pål Jonson, who belongs to the Moderate Party, the largest member of the rickety center-right coalition—which also includes the Liberals and the Christian Democrats—that took office after the September 2022 elections. The week before, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the mercurial Turkish president, had dropped his long-standing objection to Sweden’s entry into NATO—in his view Stockholm had failed to take sufficiently aggressive action against alleged Kurdish “terrorists” living in Sweden. In March 2023, following an overwhelming vote by the Riksdag, the Swedish parliament, Stockholm had formally submitted its application to join the defensive alliance, on the same day as neighboring Finland, its closest ally. Then Erdoğan equivocated. And equivocated.
Sweden’s decision to finish shedding its two-century-old neutral status—something it had been doing gradually since the mid-1990s when it joined the EU as well as NATO’s associate program, the Partnership for Peace—required an even greater psychological leap than Finland’s. For Helsinki neutrality was never more than an expedient forced on it after its defeat by the Soviet Union during World War II. The bellicose Finns, who fought Soviet or Soviet-backed forces three times in the last century, were never neutral at heart. Swedes for the most part are—or at least were before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The last time Sweden engaged in a major war was in 1809, when it lost the Finnish War against Russia. Since then it had steadfastly adhered to its neutral status, including during World War II, which still rankles the conscience of many Swedes.
More here.
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