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.  

Putin Expands NATO?

Finland has always had an uneasy relationship with Russia.  It was part of the old Czarist Russian empire until Russia's capitulation in World War I gave the Finns the opportunity to gain its independence, but when the Soviet Union sought to reclaim land from the old empire's western frontier and fortify it against a possible German invasion at the start of World War II, Joseph Stalin made demands of the Finns, who refused to accept them.  The Soviet Union invaded Finland in November 1939, and the Finns held out throughout the winter of 1939-40 in the so-called Winter War before bowing to the Red Army's superiority.  (Finns foolishly cast their lot with the Nazis when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, only to be on the losing side again.)  Finland had to promise to remain a neutral nation after World War II to maintain its independence, which meant not joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Now, however, the people who invented the Molotov cocktail in the Winter War are on the verge of joining NATO thanks to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where the the locals are mixing Molotov cocktails up in every kitchen sink they can find.  Finland is afraid of Putin possibly threatening its 800-mile border with Russia, and the Finns have begun a process to enter NATO membership.  Sweden - always hostile to Russian expansion and being the only country on Europe's far northern land mass that doesn't border Russia (yes, Norway borders Russia, check the map) - is even looking into the idea.

If Vladimir Putin thought he could intimidate NATO, he really screwed up big time.

But it's not all bad news for Putin.  French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has proposed that NATO enter an alliance with Russia once the war in Ukraine - a war President Biden is helping Ukraine fight by giving it $800 million in additional military aid - is over.

Le Pen wants France and Britain to enter into an alliance with Russia?  What is this, 1914?

For more about Russo-Finnish relations, watch this video.