The open door policy seems to have succumbed to the will of Turkey and Hungary. Is the credibility of either the military union or its general secretary being tested?
From the NATO Secretary General who visited Turkey from Jens Stoltenberg no news was heard on Thursday either.
It’s starting to look like NATO’s open door policy isn’t working. In addition, Turkey and Hungary seem to have walked over both the Secretary General and the other member states by blocking the membership of Finland and Sweden for the time being.
Even the United States has not been able to advance the ratification process.
Is the credibility of either the Secretary General or NATO starting to suffer?
– The Secretary-General’s mandate is limited, 30 nation-states watch that the Secretary-General does not speak his own words. The Secretary General leads the civil service, the member states lead the politics. Movement space is limited, explains the professor and head of the University of Helsinki’s research college Tuomas Forsberg.
Not yet, also says the director of the Foreign Policy Institute Mika Aaltola. He sees the situation as almost the opposite.
– There was a break for many months, but now things are moving.
However, he understands if the process is frustrating.
– We went to give an unusually optimistic assessment. As I recall, we talked about four months. Anything beyond that is disappointing. It should have been fair to say that this takes time and there are usually a few obstacles.
Aaltola reminds that the NATO membership processes have lasted from about a year to even more than ten years, so “we are still well on schedule”.
Forsberg, on the other hand, considers the situation to be a small crisis.
– Objectively, this is a very fundamental question in terms of the organization’s credibility. But you don’t want to inflate this already in a difficult situation.
However, Forsberg considers it likely that something will move before the NATO meeting in Vilnius in July.
But, what if nothing happens by the time of the NATO summit?
– If we go far into autumn, we can talk about a big foreign policy failure, Aaltola formulates.
So this is also possible.
If joining NATO becomes difficult, Forsberg considers “option B” possible.
– Let’s then form a separate system that is connected to NATO, but only takes care of the defense of the North Baltic Sea region and the Northern region.
– This could be a more desirable option for Finland, if it is curryed. It would be an alliance whose number one issue is Russia and not the Middle East, terrorism or crisis management.
What about the security guarantees of such an alliance, would they be as impressive as in NATO?
– Security guarantees would come from the United States. If the United States considers that such an arrangement can be entered into, then that would be a sufficient deterrent.