Only Hungary remains. We are approaching the end of a 20-month application process to NATO, and opinions regarding Sweden’s future in the defense alliance continue to diverge.
Mikael Odenberg, former moderate defense minister, thinks it’s good that the process will soon be over.
– It has been a long journey. I dare say that Sweden is a member of NATO during the month of February, says Odenberg in Nyhetsmorgon.
Fuck Erdogan
Pierre Schori, former social democratic aid and migration minister and UN ambassador, is of the opposite opinion. He remains opposed to Swedish NATO membership
Schori believes that Sweden has changed its face internationally, that we have abandoned our previous foreign policy and given in too much to Turkish demands.
– It is terrible that we are going to start selling weapons to Turkey for them to fight Kurds, who have fought IS. It’s absolutely insane. And there is nothing that obliges us to do this in order to join NATO, he says.
– They have given in to pressure from Erdogan and flogged him. In general, it has been a humiliating process that we have gone through here, continues the former UN ambassador.
Broad political support
Mikael Odenberg regards the trilateral negotiations between Finland, Turkey and Sweden as history. He also points out that the settlement had broad political support.
– I think the settlement is reasonable. My criticism is more about the way the trip was handled afterwards. They should have focused on the implementation of the trilateral agreement, but politics became very needy and nervous. We made something that was basically NATO’s problem our problem, he says.
Will Russia invade Sweden?
Sweden’s security has been the basis for the debate about membership being or not being. Schori claims that we already had security guarantees from the US – and that the whole discussion of the Russian threat has been exaggerated:
– You can also ask yourself; do we think that Putin wants to invade Sweden? Is Sweden also needed in NATO for there to be peace? Not at all. Putin has gone on a Poltava in Ukraine and he has no intentions of invading Sweden, nobody really believes that, he says and continues:
– But we hear from the military-political complex in Sälen that we may be invaded. It scares children and makes adults hoard. That is completely wrong.