When the Warsaw summit started last week, the heads of NATO’s 28 member states were joined by their colleagues from two of the alliance’s closest partner countries, Sweden and Finland. This would have been impossible 20 years ago, but much has happened since. As the region around the Baltic Sea has become a focal point of geopolitical conflict, Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven and Finnish president Sauli Niinistö will continue walking a fine line of deepening cooperation with NATO without overly aggravating Moscow.
In the middle of the 1990s, Sweden and Finland joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace (PfP) together with Russia and several other countries who are now NATO members. The objective of PfP was to offer countries a way to develop their individual relations to NATO. However, as James Goldgeier touched in yesterday at War on the Rocks, most of the countries that joined, arguably used PfP as a route toward future NATO membership. Sweden, Finland, and Russia have, however, just used PfP as a vehicle for cooperation. The 2008 war in Georgia and Russia’s more recent invasion of Ukraine have changed this dynamic. The two Nordic countries are now doing whatever they can to improve their security and their relations with NATO short of actually applying for membership.
