Thread by @minna_alander

In Finland, a “post mortem” process has begun re: Finland’s long road to NATO. Several people have been unusually outspoken in their criticism of President Niinistö for “keeping Finland out of NATO” after 2014.

Some thoughts about whether Finland could & should’ve joined before:

First off: there is a deep sense of gratitude towards Ukraine. It was absolutely decisive that Kyiv didn’t fall in the first days of the Russian invasion.

Finland’s NATO process would likely have been much less smooth or potentially even impossible without Ukraine’s resistance

As always in these kind of reflection processes, many people in Finland say now that deep inside they’ve actually been pro-NATO since the 1990s but just didn’t tell anyone… 🌚🌝

I think it’s ok to admit that a great majority changed their minds very recently.

Then to the question whether Finland should, and realistically could have joined NATO earlier. There were several windows of opportunity before last year but none of them were completely straightforward.

In the 90’s, pro-NATO President Ahtisaari figured that it would overwhelm Finland’s limited resources to integrate into both NATO and EU at the same time. He was probably right, as the 🇫🇮 defence forces were nowhere near as interoperable with NATO as now. The EU was prioritised.

In the 2000’s, 🇺🇸 war in Iraq plunged support for NATO membership in Finland and strengthened the idea that membership would only get 🇫🇮 involved in “foreign wars”. Arguably that could have been true, territorial defence was certainly not on NATO’s agenda then.

Up until Russia’s annexation of Crimea, NATO was quite a different organisation than today. Focus was on out of area crisis management operations and smaller, mobile expeditionary force model. Not really in Finland’s interest, as territorial defence has always been priority.

I have been asked many times why Finland didn’t join NATO in 2014. While it probably was quite a bad decision by Niinistö to “kill” the NATO debate then, there was also nothing like the societal and political consensus on the issue that we saw last year.

At the time, Finland had also quite extensive trade relations with Russia, as the 2008 financial crisis had prompted much western FDI to withdraw. The 2014 EU sanctions on Russia hit Finland relatively hard but it started a decoupling process that was an advantage last year

Then, there was Trump. In the Trump years it’s very questionable whether Finland could’ve just cashed in the so-called “NATO option”.

NATO was also going through some stuff internally, with differing threat perceptions (never forget Macron’s “brain dead” comment from 2019).

So, in many ways Finland got incredibly lucky last year: thanks to Ukraine’s resistance against the Russian invasion, there was both the urgency and support to get Finland into NATO asap - and Russia was not able to do much about it as it was so bogged down in Ukraine.

Finally, the most important thing about how Finland joined was that contrary to expectations, it was a bottom-up process. The Finnish people changed their minds first and the political leadership had to hurry to catch up.

Finland finally got into NATO in a very speedy and smooth manner and the much-criticised “NATO option” worked in the end just as it was supposed to. Ukraine has been much less lucky. As a result, strong support for Ukraine’s NATO bid should be expected from Finland.