NATO now ‘goes beyond’ the Atlantic, starting with the Arctic – 07/11/2023 – Nelson de Sá

Turkey’s acceptance of Sweden into NATO, “historic” in the first statements, was later explained by the back-and-forth between Joe Biden and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in headlines from the Financial Times to the Washington Post.

It came earlier from Reuters, who heard from Democratic Senator Bob Menendez that the Senate was negotiating to release the F-16 fighter for Turkey. Thus, as the NATO secretary general published in Foreign Affairs this Monday (10), “with Finland and Sweden”, the military bloc now “goes further”.

In another passage of the text signed by the Norwegian Jens Stoltenberg, “NATO is a regional alliance of Europe and North America, but the challenges we face are global”, hence the invitation to four countries in the Pacific Ocean, neighbors of China.

Not only in Asia, as evidenced by another article in the Washington Post and another report by Reuters, highlighting the “growing rivalry in the Arctic”, with a pun on the real cold war, and “how Sweden and Finland can help NATO to contain Russia” in the region.

The “realist” John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago has been warning for some time, including in Foreign Affairs, that the extension of the conflict to the Arctic is what explains Finland and Sweden in NATO.

In the future “Arctic crisis”, he added two weeks ago on Substack, Russia, with its conventional forces focused on Ukraine, may finally launch a nuclear bombing. Exercises in the region, already with Finland and US B-1 bombers, according to WaPo, have been carried out since the beginning of the year.

“Unsurprisingly, the Russians are now talking to the Chinese to help them deal with crises in the Arctic,” says Mearsheimer.

MORALLY JUSTIFIABLE

European reaction via the press against the shipment of cluster bombs from the US government to the Ukrainian was contained. On the contrary, there was no lack of defense for them, as in the Financial Times, with the headline at the top, “Cluster bombs offer Ukraine a quicker end to the war.”

And in German Die Welt, “Why cluster munitions are morally justifiable for Ukraine” (image below). Among the “good reasons” for their use, “anything that weakens the Russian ranks also saves the lives of Ukrainian soldiers”.

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