Category Archives: Sweden, Finland, NATO & Nukes

A Shadow on the Daffodils: Preaching from the Big Book of Nobody

Daffs, going wild again.

 

This past First Day (Quaker talk for Sunday) I Zoomed into worship in my Friends meeting, the one out in the farmland of Flyover County, North By-God Carolina, where I missed one of my favorite annual scenes there: the appearance in the back 40 of a big unruly spread of wild daffodils. But I did hear a stirring message.

No one among the elders knows when or by whom the daffodils came. Their location, out behind the community building we fondly call The Hut, isn’t visible from the road, so passersby mostly miss the spread, too bad for them. Continue reading A Shadow on the Daffodils: Preaching from the Big Book of Nobody

NATO from “Brain-Dead” to Bigger & Back On A Roll?

Gwynne Dyer — July 10, 2023

When NATO held its annual summit in Brussels two years ago, all 31 presidents and prime ministers of the alliance’s member states dutifully showed up, but their hearts weren’t really in it. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, had publicly declared NATO “brain dead” in 2019, and nobody could find a good reason to disagree.

This week the annual meeting is in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania (July 11-12), and the cast of characters has not changed all that much, but everything else has. This is an alliance transformed, with a clear enemy, specific goals and a real sense of purpose — all thanks to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his foolish invasion of Ukraine.

Continue reading NATO from “Brain-Dead” to Bigger & Back On A Roll?

Sweden, Turkey & NATO: No, Yes, Or Still MAYBE

Turkey Continues To Challenge Sweden’s NATO Membership

By RFE/RL staffPosted on June 28, 2023

Sweden’s NATO accession has been delayed due to Turkey’s demands concerning fighting terrorism, lifting an arms embargo on Ankara, and fulfilling extradition requests; these issues still remain a year later.

Finland, which initially applied for NATO membership alongside Sweden, decided to decouple and entered NATO as the 31st member in April.

Continue reading Sweden, Turkey & NATO: No, Yes, Or Still MAYBE

Sweden, Finland, NATO, Neutrals & Nukes: A Concise Analysis

[NOTE: These two short columns offer an admirable review of two key moments in the impact of Putin’s Ukraine invasion  on my own thinking.

When I imagined these countries as actual places (which, I admit, wasn’t often), my speculation was that they held to a “plague-on-both-your-houses” stance vis-a-vis the USSR/Russia on one side, and the West, which meant the US-NATO war machine on the other.

In a nuclear “exchange” between these two behemoths, northern Scandinavians, whatever their political notions, would likely go up in the planetary puff of smoke.

That idea was crude, tho probably not entirely wrong. But what about a big, but not-(yet)apocalyptic war, in which one behemoth invaded a nearby country, in a retro-style imperial power grab?

Such a scheme seemed unlikely, outlandish: it was so twentieth (or even nineteenth) century, totally antique.

But then, that’s the big war the Swedes and Finns suddenly faced.  

Even many experts weren’t expecting it. Gwynne Dyer wasn’t, and his doctorate is in military studies, and he’s been observing/reporting on militaries and wars for decades.

Nor were Dyer and Co. expecting what happened next: the powerful Ukrainian resistance — and the radical response in northern Scandinavia.

Not being any kind of expert, I wasn’t expecting any of this either.  But of the two, the leap out of 275 years of neutrality into NATO was the bigger shock to my thinking (doubtless this reflects my safe “social location”; it would have felt very different if I was in a Kyiv or Mariupol cellar, with Russian artillery shells falling all around).

Dyer reacted quickly. These two columns, from late last spring make all sort of sense of the Sweden/Finland move. They’re not “news” now, but they show how, almost overnight, both the rulers and citizens there woke up, with their world shaking, and realized they weren’t neutral anymore. It also explains much of why I woke up late last February, and found I wasn’t neutral either. I join with those who want Ukraine to be free.]Two Columns by Gwynne Dyer
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Farewell Neutrality: Sweden and Finland

By Gwynne Dyer
16 May 2022

It’s easy to imagine Vladimir Putin coming into the shop marked ‘Sweden’, breaking some fine china accidentally on purpose, and growling: ‘Nice little shop you’ve got here. It would be a pity if something happened to it.’

But Sweden is not a pottery shop, Putin is not a Mafia capo, and what’s going on in the Baltic now is not a protection racket. Continue reading Sweden, Finland, NATO, Neutrals & Nukes: A Concise Analysis