Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Sweden joining NATO is not only about Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The timing has a lot to do with it, but there's been a strong but deep current within some parts of the Swedish establishment for joining NATO for a long time. Part of it might have been a desire to align more closely and openly with the USA, part of it a desire to stick a knife in the activist and reasonably anti-imperialistic and humanist foreign policy that characterised Sweden especially of the 70s and 80s.

Then back in 2020–2021 we suddenly got a huge increase in both Russian scaremongering (especially related to a Russian invasion of Gotland) and a little later that Sweden was "defence-less" without NATO. This was seen in nearly every major mass media here.

Frankly, there has been very little political discussion regarding NATO or actual security politics and policy here. There was some discussion that the Social Democritic Andersson government sent in a NATO application in order to defuse the question in the 2022 election, but it was made with a rather railroaded internal discussion within the social democratic party. Personally, I doubt that was the goal. With the victory of the right-wing parties with fascist support in the election, the question became moot anyway.

At least with Andersson as a prime minister, there was some hope for a principled Swedish stance against Turkey's demands. With Kristensson we have what is probably the most incompetent and corrupt Swedish government since the start of the Second World War.