STRATEGERY: How Putin saved NATO.

When Finland cleared the last hurdle for NATO membership last week, major Western newspapers buried the story. Yet Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto justly celebrated ‘these historic days’—the end of 75 years of neutrality. As of this week, Finland is formally in, and Sweden, another eternal neutral, will soon follow, once Turkey stops blocking its membership.

Why would these two countries throng into an alliance that French President Emmanuel Macron diagnosed as being ‘brain dead’ only four years ago, and which former US President Donald Trump saw as ‘obsolete’ in 2017? The wisdom of the 18th-century British wit Samuel Johnson offers a broad answer here: ‘When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’

But there is an even pithier answer to this question: Vladimir Putin. The man who would be king of Europe has given NATO a new brain and a new lease on life.

What an irony! One of Putin’s many pretexts for subduing Ukraine was to stop NATO enlargement once and for all. Instead, by pushing two neutral Nordic countries into the alliance, he has achieved the opposite. NATO, now, has not been in better health for decades.

It isn’t just membership increasing. Poland is on track to have the largest (outside of Russia and Ukraine) and most modern military in Europe.