Speech by Michael Sahlin at the KKrVA Academy Meeting May 18, 2022
Chairman, esteemed members,
On May 9th, people celebrated, not least in Moscow, "Victory Day", the victory over Nazi Germany after almost 6 years of uniquely devastating war.
The world was wondering – what would Vladimir Putin have to say on this symbolically charged day, after two and a half months of also devastating and in many respects offensive war against and in Ukraine? Would he declare some kind of “victory”, if so over and in what? The destruction of Mariupol? Or would he, on the contrary, declare “total war”, much like Goebbels did that time, with a total military effort to crush and conquer the neighboring country to the south?
The answer was: neither, neither a declaration of victory (in the obvious absence of any credible basis for such a declaration) nor a dramatic declaration of war and A-mob (and/or nuclear weapons). Rather, "more of the same", with continued uncertainties about strategic goals and means. So this extremely worrying but also extremely strange war in its course continues.
But “Victory Day” occurred as a manifestation and reminder of everything that these days brings to mind the Second World War: And in various respects actually also WW1, its background and course. Regardless of comparisons: once again a brutal, conventional, old-fashioned war, in Europe, with massive destruction, enormous losses in military and civilian lives, refugee flows not seen on this scale since 1945. This and other things that we, most of us, did not think were possible, as a result of globalization and nuclear deterrence. Then there is the fear of a Third World War.
I will return to everything that has fundamentally changed with what – surprisingly for most but certainly not all – happened on 24 February, prepared by Putin's iron-clad list of demands from December. That the dizzying development of events this year could not really be predicted and taken into account in the SES project so far is obvious. It is and remains a challenge, both in the analytical work of an academy and in the assessment memoranda of governments, to keep up with the dizzyingly fast developments in the world in writing, in the frequent "ruptures" that everyone's Johan Tunberger once wrote. However, I would like to argue that in the security policy work(s) of the SES project, perhaps especially the sections on Nordic security policy, we have made a really serious effort to try to "take account of" the dramatic reversal that has now occurred. "Taking account of" does not mean concrete prediction, of course, but rather creating understanding and insight into different processes of change.
What we are experiencing today, in mid-May, is a serious risk of escalation in the Ukraine crisis. Much may have changed, will have changed at a later stage, when these reflections appear in yellow print. But right now it looks dangerous. And it is really, really hard to imagine how this crisis, this war, can be interrupted and channeled towards some kind of diplomatic peace agreement. We are truly moving in uncharted territory. Here are some indicators.
- General Milley's and Defense Secretary Austin's statements in connection with NATO's recent Ramstein meeting that the goal of the US and NATO's commitment to support Ukraine should be to fundamentally weaken Putin's Russia to such an extent that Russia would not be able to carry out similar acts of aggression in the long term - against the background of Biden's various statements about genocide, war criminals and "he should not stay in power", i.e. hints of "regime change" as a purpose, even if later downplayed by Blinken and others;
- Stone dead on the negotiation front, after the first tentative steps in Turkey, and after the shocking images of torture and executions of civilians in, among other places, Bucha;
- Chief Guterres' fatally failed peace mission in Moscow and Kyiv;
- Tit-for-tat in a process of diplomatic expulsions;
- Russia/Gazprom's suspension of gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria, a premonition of what will happen further on the energy war front;
- Putin's recurring hints about the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons, with reference to the Russian nuclear doctrine's talk of nuclear weapons use as "de-escalation" in an escalation phase;
- Signs of Russian military advances in the Donbas area (after the fiasco last night about Kiev); increasing focus on the Black Sea region;
- Some indications of an expansion of the war, the threat against Moldova/Transnistria, unclear indications of attacks on targets on Russian territory, and
- Continued missile threat to the entire Ukrainian territory, including Lviv, and transport routes between the border and the capital.
In other words, a process of action-reaction, one of the central analytical pairs of concepts in the SES project's security policy final report "Strategic Balance Sheet 2.0", a process that strengthens and deepens everyone's wonder about how this crisis will end, what "ending" means.
The strategic future discourse will now be largely about the now problematic concept of “deterrence”, mutual deterrence if one considers that the Russian nuclear threat can be said to have worked by de facto causing Team Biden to consistently emphasize that Western military support do not may lead to direct military confrontation with Russia, do not may contribute to an escalation towards World War III; it is understood that the advanced (“enhanced”) partner country Ukraine is important to support and defend, but nevertheless (like Sweden and Finland) not an ally for which it is up to the entire NATO according to Article 5 to go all the way and risk a new world war. The Ukraine war has made clear the crucial difference between partnership and membership.
If Putin's deterrence was and is, in both his Plan A and Plan B and beyond, about discouraging the US/NATO from actively intervening militarily to prevent Russian military-political goals from being achieved, the purpose of Western deterrence was initially, before February 24.2, about trying to dissuade Putin from triggering the announced attack: The general strategic nuclear deterrent, the generous dissemination of intelligence, the military reinforcement of the alliance's eastern flank, the military and humanitarian support for the Ukrainian resistance, the strengthening of unity within NATO (and later its expansion with Sweden and Norway), the mobilization of international support to isolate the Putin regime, and then the extensive, gradually expanded sanctions program. This failed, as a deterrent, Putin triggered the attack anyway – and as I said now raises a lot of difficult questions about the future role of and demand for a credible deterrent as a method of preserving world peace. And when deterrence fails, the measures quickly turn to “punishment”, possibly also deterrence but now regarding continued aggression, continued escalation.
And so here we are now, with a worrying trend towards escalation, while it is obvious to everyone that Putin has largely succeeded in achieving in practice the exact opposite of what he foolishly believed he could achieve with power language in words (December 2021 and earlier) and actions; the attack created a militarily strengthened and uniquely united (and enlarged) NATO, a radical reversal of German security policy, a considerably more security-policy sharpened EU, and a united and resilient Ukraine with a strengthened anti-Russian, Western identity.
So there we are now, and we can state that the world and world peace, already heavily burdened by the various security-threatening trends and megatrends that we describe in the SES project's security policy final report, most recently the pandemic crisis, are now being affected in a variety of different, stressful ways by the Ukraine crisis, a reality that will erode the cohesion of the entire West, with worrying midterm elections in the US this autumn, the longer the war lasts, and perhaps escalates. I am talking here of course about the combination of the refugee crisis, food crisis, energy crisis and financial crisis, in addition to the climate crisis and the consequences of the world's various regional crises, such as Iran and Libya. And the crisis of multilateralism. And worrying developments in the nuclear weapons area.
And, not least, extensive, long-term changes to the European/transatlantic security architecture in particular, but also to a considerable extent the global security architecture.
Finally, honourable members, a few words about the current crisis with Turkey's surprising refusal, using its veto power as an alliance member, to unconditionally accept Sweden's and Finland's entry as full members of NATO. After this long, but ultimately forced short, journey towards a fundamental change in Sweden's – and Finland's – security policy post-war and post-war journey, another rather unexpected "rupture". Things are swinging fast in today's security policy reality.
Could we, we Sweden and Finland and we NATO/"the West", have foreseen this obstacle emerging late in the process, just over a month before the summit in Madrid at the end of June when we had counted on and looked forward to a unanimously welcoming endorsement of our willingness and ability to support the collective Western response to Russian aggression and the accompanying fundamental change in the security order in Europe and the world, an order where it nevertheless remains that we as members of NATO become allies with an autocratically governed and/or crisis-stricken Turkey?
Could we perhaps have foreseen, if so even prevented or prevented, this? Perhaps, Turkey under its current leadership, just over a year before crucial presidential and parliamentary elections, is a large, strategically located and militarily strong and well-practiced country that combines on the one hand being recognized as having great strategic importance, now as in the past, at the crossroads between East/West and North/South, on the other hand as a regime and political culture that has clearly moved away from the founding values of both the EU, the Council of Europe and NATO for quite some time. This, combined with the Leader's previously demonstrated willingness and ability to use the veto power in NATO for the purposes of his own agenda, offensively and defensively, should perhaps have flashed red, or at least yellow, and prompted preventive diplomacy on a broad front.
As it is now, we, Sweden and Finland together, are forced onto the unfamiliar path of negotiating with Erdogan's Turkey on issues that are sensitive and central to both Swedish/Swedish-Finnish and Turkish politics, which are then both about arms embargo issues and about the view of what is and is not to be designated and counteracted as terrorism, certainly in the hope that the massive support shown to us by the other 29, not least Biden himself in the Rose Garden, will contribute to a relatively quick and relatively painless solution, in time. Perhaps we will say afterwards that the Turkish obstacle was a useful lesson for all that is to come before and in a full-fledged NATO membership. Erdogan's cause should not be Putin's cause, from a NATO perspective.
I will end there. The SES project was unable to foresee the drama of 2022 in its initial years, but it has been a useful learning experience in order to be able to analytically and academically manage our understanding of, and ability to manage, a likely extremely turbulent period of the next 5-10 years. It now remains to try to incorporate the current drama into the project's final document as much as possible.
Thanks