Turkey Just Did The World A Huge Favor. It May Have Prevented Two Wars.

Both the cause of the War in Ukraine and the future course of that war can be understood in terms of NATO membership. NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) was established in 1949 as a defensive alliance intended to deter Soviet aggression in Europe in the aftermath of World War II.

The original membership consisted of 12 countries but that has since expanded to 30 countries. Over one-third of these members joined after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the rise of Vladimir Putin in 2000. These new members include Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004, Albania and Croatia in 2009, Montenegro in 2017, and North Macedonia in 2020.

Ukraine has long been considered a candidate for membership, but Russia made it clear that Ukraine would not be allowed to join NATO. Ukraine’s failure to remain neutral and the U.S. insistence that Ukraine might join were the immediate causes of Russia’s invasion.

Now the drive to expand NATO, which has morphed from a defensive alliance to an offensive effort to destabilize Russia has moved north to Finland and Sweden. Both countries have applied for membership. Sweden’s membership is the less important of the two (although it would end a 200-year position of neutrality by Sweden), but Finland is another matter. It has an 830-mile border with Russia and has been party to a treaty with Russia guaranteeing Finnish neutrality for over seventy years.

Although Putin has reacted mildly to the announcement of possible Finnish membership, experts don’t rule out an invasion of Finland by Russia if Finland proceeds with membership and plans to place NATO troops and missiles on Finnish soil. This would presage a European-wide war much worse than what is happening in Ukraine today.

Fortunately, the NATO treaty requires that all members agree to the accession of new members. Turkey is a full member of NATO and has objected to Swedish and Finnish membership, as explained in this article.

Turkey’s objections relate to Swedish and Finnish support for Kurdish groups that Turkey regards as terrorists. The White House does not take the Turkish objection seriously and expects it can be overcome in the near future. That’s unlikely.

The Turks consider this matter to be of the utmost importance and will persist in their objections indefinitely, possibly until the War in Ukraine is over and public opinion in Sweden and Finland cools off on the idea. In any case, Turkey may have saved the world from wars in Sweden and Finland and possibly from World War III by standing in the way of the abandonment of the delicate state of neutrality in Scandinavia.

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