Welcome To the Club

It's official: The once-neutral countries of Sweden and Finland have been invited to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and will be fully initiated in a few months. President Biden was able to get Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to agree to the expansion of NATO despite Erdoğan's misgivings about letting them join over concerns of Kurdish terrorists (or freedom fighters, depending on your perspective) living in exile in both countries.  And the Turkish leader gets new American fighter jets in the deal.

Leaving that aside, this is what President Biden would call a big f**king deal.  Sweden, historically neutral, has not been in war since 1814, meaning that none of its veterans are alive today.  There are also dead soldiers in Finland; they're all Russian, causalities of the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union in 1939 and 1940.  Their abandonment of neutrality changes things dramatically.  Their proximity to the Baltic Sea will make Russian naval exercises there much more difficult, and now a NATO member - that would be Finland - shares a border with Russia that is 810 miles long, longer than the borders Russia shares with the Baltic States and Poland, all NATO members, put together.  This is precisely what Vladimir Putin did not want.

Oh, yeah, with St. Petersburg at the end of the Gulf of Finland, a body of water situated between Finland itself to the north and Estonia to the south, could make the city's maritime access, umm, complicated. Putin, who calls the city formerly known as Leningrad home, must be glad that the Russian capital has long since been moved to Moscow.

The only wrinkle is that Ukraine - the Russian invasion of which was the catalyst for NATO expansion in Scandinavia - has wanted to join NATO and has been held back, being told that it must go through a process.  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky believes that the Ukrainian people have paid for NATO membership with four months of war with Russia.  But, despite more American shipments of weapons to Ukraine, the country will not likely join NATO until after the war is over,  Because an attack on one NATO member is an attack on all, and if Ukraine joined NATO tomorrow, the alliance would be obliged to send troops their to face the Russians.

And you know what would happen after that?  World War III.  

War in Syria

Now that Turkish forces are going into Syria to fight the Kurds whom they consider to be terrorists - i.e., all of them - the Kurds are now aligning themselves with their old enemy Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which will give Iran and Russia even more influence in the Middle East.

But that's all right, because Trump is going to approve of sanctions against Turkey for invading Syria despite having given Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan a green light to go ahead with the invasion, even as Islamic State fighters are now being released in the fog of war. Besides, if Biden were President, his son would be making money off his name somewhere and foster more international corruption!  (Sarcasm.)

Islamic State fighters are probably going to work their way to Europe.  Europeans don't trust us.  (I'd better forget about traveling abroad any time soon or any time later.)  The Kurds don't trust us either.  Even Israel's Netanyahu doesn't like what's happening   Both parties in Congress are angry at Trump and want to undo the chaos he's caused.

Too late.

Turkey Sandwich

Trump may have finally done it.  Even as he is stonewalling the House impeachment inquiry with full Republican support, he somehow managed to come up with a policy that even Republicans can't stomach.

In an effort to get along with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, above (his last name is pronounced "er-du-won") Trump, in a move that I'm sure he would have pursued even if he didn't have financial interest in a real-estate project in Istanbul, decided to withdraw U.S. troops from northern Syria, who were working with the Kurds in the area to contain Islamic State fighters so Erdoğan, so the story goes, could deal with Kurdish terrorist forces wrecking havoc in Turkey - except that Erdoğan considers all Kurds to be terrorists.   Turkish forces are on standby to enter northern Syria and annihilate Kurds we promised to protect in our fight against the Islamic State, which could enjoy a resurgence as a result of Trump's policy change.  Oh yeah, and Iran will have more influence in Syria as well and get its path to the Mediterranean, which Mitt Romney and Jonathan Alter warned about.      

Republicans, like Democrats and Western governments, are solidly against this.  Even Pat Robertson is against this policy, saying it will harm Syrian Christians and affect the security of Israel (although he seems to have no regard for Muslims in the area).  When you depend on votes from evangelicals and you lose Pat Robertson, you're in trouble.

Trump's move to placate Erdoğan could (will?) send the entire Middle East in turmoil.  The upside?  Higher oil prices, which means that you'll be seeing less of these on the highway . . .

. . . and more of them at the bottom of the ocean for use as part of artificial reefs.

I try to see the bright side in everything.  Really.