As you are reading this on the East Coast Monday morning, five hours ahead, at noon in Brussels, the flag of Sweden will be raised to join the banners of 31 other allies at NATO headquarters in the Belgian capital.
In its 75 years, NATO has expanded from its initial dozen members that signed the treaty (Harry Truman among them) in Washington on April 4, 1949, with 20 more joining over the decades.
The pledge of all members is contained in the North Atlantic Treaty’s Article 5: “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all” and that each of them “will assist the Party or Parties so attacked.”
While Soviet tanks never rolled, Article 5 has been invoked only once, on 9/11, as our allies came to our aid in fighting Al Qaeda. Collective defense has worked remarkably well, keeping the peace in Western Europe ever since. Equally remarkable is how much a change it is for Sweden, now led by Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, to join the club.
In the days before elected governments, Sweden was led by King Charles XIII in what would be the Nordic nation’s last foreign war, in 1814, arrayed against Napoleon (along with the rest of Europe) to finally defeat the French emperor, causing his abdication and exile to Elba.
Since then Europe has seen many wars that Sweden avoided. Sweden stayed out of the Crimean War and the wars of German unification. Sweden sat out the first World War, which engulfed the continent and toppled the Kaiser and the Czar, and then the Swedes remained neutral in the war of their successors, Hitler and Stalin, during World War II, as all their Scandinavian neighbors were invaded (Denmark and Norway by Hitler and Finland by Stalin.)
Stockholm stayed neutral as the U.S. and the Soviets faced off for decades across the Iron Curtain and then, when communism and the Berlin Wall fell, even as every one of the former Soviet satellites in the Warsaw Pact joined NATO, Sweden remained outside. It took the new czar and the new Stalin, Vladimir Putin, moving his tanks unprovoked into Ukraine for the Swedes to abandon their centuries of history.
Sweden’s formal accession process began within weeks of Putin’s invasion two years ago, but Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan blocked it and then when he finally relented in January, it was Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s turn to play extortionist.
As of Thursday morning, when the government of Hungary presented its formal ratification to the depositary at the U.S. State Department, Sweden became bound to the Atlantic alliance and vice versa. Fittingly, while Kristersson was a guest of President Biden that night at the State of the Union address, Orbán turned up the next day to pay homage at Donald Trump’s own Elba, Mar-a-Lago, as Trump plots his return to power.
Today’s flag-raising will be at NATO HQs, which opened in May 2017. Trump, our new president at the time, was there, giving a horrible speech that the allies weren’t paying enough. He’s kept at it, saying that he’d invite Putin to have his way with any ally who doesn’t pay more. Not quite Harry Truman.
