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.