The Swedish NATO debate has no place for realists ในสวีเดนไม่มีพื้นที่ในการถกเถียงหาความจริงเกี่ยวกับ NATO

The Swedish NATO debate has no place for realists

When the idealists push on, no one is allowed to talk about the risks

Of:

Eric Rosén

PUBLISHED: TODAY 05.00

This is a cultural article that is part of Aftonbladet's opinion journalism.

There are many indications that Sweden will soon apply for membership in NATO - but not everyone is on the notes. Picture from bridge over road 73, south of Stockholm.

There are many indications that Sweden will soon apply for membership in NATO - but not everyone is on the notes. Picture from bridge over road 73, south of Stockholm.

Photo: Pontus Orre

CULTURE

"If Sweden were to choose to submit a NATO application in this situation, we would further destabilize the situation in Europe."

This is what Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson (S) said at the beginning of March. It was pure factual information.

We can no longer stand such and she was keel-tailed. As if her statement was in support of Russia. The example is illustrative of the public conversation right now.

Everyone has become idealists. A crass realist is described as a traitor, or worse.

Shortly after Putin's order for invasion, an expert from the Swedish National Defense College appeared, I think it was, on SVT. He questioned Zelensky's choice to stay in the country and said that it would probably be better to have a functioning government in exile outside Ukraine than for the president to remain in Kyiv until he is imprisoned or murdered.

That sounded reasonable. Realistic. Perhaps Zelensky's strategy turns out to be smarter, he has received enormous support by pointing out that he is not leaving the country. But here and there I perceived it as logical. The United States reasoned the same way and offered evacuation, but Zelensky said "no thank you". Perhaps that was the beginning of the war idealism that now characterizes all conversations.

At the end of February, all the media spread pictures of Ukrainian architects and nurses, of young guys in band shirts - civilians simply - who took up arms to go into battle and defend their Ukraine. The heroes.

I myself was sad, thinking that the pictures only showed unlucky victims. Soon dead people.

Then came the pictures from mass graves, the reports of rapes and the testimonies of torture. And I think it's the same people, it's the nurse and the 18-year-old, they're lying there, devastated. Is it cynicism or realism to wish they had fled instead? That it feels like the only human. While the idealist sees martyrs and pays homage to their sacrificial will.

When (almost) all those in power and opinion leaders now want Sweden to join NATO at record speed, it is also, strangely enough, driven by idealism.

Minister of Defense Peter Hultqvist (S) said in an interview that Sweden, if we join NATO, can count on "a whole catalog" of targeted Russian measures against Sweden. "Cyber ​​threats, hybrid threats, sabotage, undermining our state organization, all different types of attacks imaginable."

Nobody cares about this. Hardly even the newsrooms, they are drumming on with an increasingly activist enthusiasm for the big decision. Writes about a resilient comeback line to the Russian rather than about the risks.

For now, Sweden will join NATO, because we are cruel to Russia. We'll take revenge on Putin, show that bastard. The realist in me does not believe that this moral extension of the dictator will neither frighten Putin nor make Sweden safer. On the contrary. I hear Sergei Lavrov talk about a third world war and I do not dare to dismiss the threat as empty.

If NATO were a real force for peace, all countries around the world should join

NATO membership increases the risks for Sweden, makes our lives more dangerous and affects Russia in a way we are probably not prepared to live with once it happens. This does not mean that I like it that way, just as little as Magdalena Andersson liked the risk of destabilization.

Time and time again, politicians have been ridiculed for subsequently describing how they "were naive".

Now every person who is not naive is skinned.

The idealist refuses to believe that a war alliance with Erdogan's Turkish dictatorship will be a problem for Sweden. Hen refuses to see the problems of a United States where democracy is being phased out rather than being developed, where the next leader may very well be a wandering danger to life and where even the best of presidents have oceans of blood on their hands.

When we are cursed at the invasion, appalled by the murder and desperate in our will to contribute to change, we must also remember what NATO is not. It is not a general force for good. Nor is there in any way a solution to Russia's ongoing war.

If NATO were a real force for peace, all countries around the world should join. All with nuclear weapons as protection. All with full focus on military rearmament. Then there would never be another war. But that's not how it works. NATO is an exclusively exclusive alliance that does not act when civilians are slaughtered in other countries. They definitely do not stand for idealism, it is instead found in their fast growing fan club in Sweden.

Being part of that club does not in any way mean that we contribute to more peace on earth, not even in Ukraine.