Swed House

WASHINGTON DC. Eleiko, som tillverkar träningsutrustning, prisas av Svensk-amerikanska handelskammaren som årets svenska bolag i USA. ”Det är en ära och betyder mycket för oss och mitt team. Det är många som inte känner till oss, så att få pris hjälper oss enormt mycket”, säger Magnus Nyberg,  Eleikos chef i Nordamerika, i samband med prisutdelningen på House of Sweden i USA:s huvudstad.

När Ryssland invaderade Ukraina kom uppropen: Internationella företag borde lämna landet och sluta göda den ryska ekonomin och krigskassan genom deras verksamheter. En rad internationella företag, som Starbucks, Toyota och McDonalds lyssnade och inledde processen att lämna landet. Ryska presidenten Vladimir Putin har sedan dess sjösatt en plan som tvingat företagen att sälja sina ryska tillgångar till vrakpris, rapporterar New York Times. Ikea-kopian Swed House I början av ryska aggressionen 2022 var den ryska motstrategin inte formaliserad. Men bitvis har nya dekret kommit från Putin som gör att Ryssland kan beskatta och pressa företagen till att rea ut sina tillgångar om de vill lämna Ryssland. I flera fall har varuhus, fabriker och annan infrastruktur sålts av internationella företag till 50 procents rabatt för att sedan stöpas om till en rysk kopia. Ett exempel är Ikea, vars varuhus och fabriker hamnade i händerna på ett ryskt bolag och återuppstod som Swed House. Köpeskillingen har inte offentliggjorts. Andra bolag, som Kinross Gold, sålde sin gruvverksamhet i Ryssland till halva priset. Enligt mer nyliga regler är utförsäljning till 50 procents rabatt något utländska företag får räkna med om de ska lämna, rapporterar New York Times. Ryssland blir mindre attraktivt När kriget i Ukraina var inne på det andra året blev hanteringen av utländska företag än mer ingripande. Förutom att Putin måste godkänna affärerna så har verksamheter konfiskerats. Det var fallet för Carlsberg och Danone, vars ryska verksamheter konfiskerades i somras och fördes över till två Putinallierade, rapporterar CNBC. Bara de nya skatterna har lett till motsvarande 13 miljarder kronor i intäkter till ryska staten, enligt sammanställningen från New York Times. Ryssland har blivit ett oberäkneligt land för utländska investeringar efter aggressionen i Ukraina och hantering av företagen. Hur mycket Ryssland förlorat i skatteintäkter när företag lämnat landet är oklart.

Samtidigt som de stora utsläpparna börjar ställa om för klimatet syns en annan trend. En anti-klimatrörelse, skriver The Economist. Människor har börjat oroa sig för att omställningen kommer att bli dyr, obekväm och en liten andel ifrågasätter till och med om klimatförändringarna ens existerar. Som exempel på backlashen skriver tidningen om svenska Bensinupproret, Donald Trump och populistiska politiker runt om planeten. Cost, convenience and conspiracy-mongering undercut support for greenery By The Economist 11 October 2023 ”We need to be good stewards of our planet. But that doesn’t mean I need to do away with my gas vehicle and drive an electric vehicle with a battery from China,” said Kristina Karamo, the chair of the Republican Party in Michigan, on September 22nd. America’s Democrats, she warned, are trying to “convince us that if we don’t centralise power in the government, the planet is gonna die. That seems like one of the biggest scams [since] Darwinian evolution.” It would be tempting to dismiss Ms Karamo as an irrelevant crank, but she is not irrelevant. She represents an extreme wing of a movement that is gathering pace around the world: a backlash against pro-climate policies. One of its more familiar cheerleaders could be America’s next president. On September 27th Donald Trump said: “You can be loyal to American labour or you can be loyal to the environmental lunatics but you can’t really be loyal to both…Crooked Joe [Biden] is siding with the left-wing crazies who will destroy automobile manufacturing and will destroy our country itself.” On September 20th Rishi Sunak, Britain’s prime minister, announced a weakening of net-zero targets, including a five-year delay of a ban on the sale of new petrol cars. Two weeks earlier, Germany kicked a mandate to install green heating in new homes years into the future. France has seen huge protests against high fuel prices, and could one day elect as president Marine Le Pen, who deplores wind farms and thinks the energy transition should be “much slower”. In America climate change has become a culture-war battleground: at a recent debate for Republican presidential candidates, only one admitted that man-made climate change is real. How serious an obstacle is all this to curbing global carbon emissions? Michael Jacobs of the University of Sheffield in Britain sees reasons for cautious optimism. The world’s biggest emitter, China, understands the need to decarbonise and is investing massively in solar and wind. The second-biggest emitter, America, has taken a green turn under Mr Biden. Brazil has sacked a rainforest-slashing president; Australia has ditched a coal-coddling prime minister. Nearly a quarter of emissions are now subject to carbon pricing. And the pace of innovation is impressive. Two years ago the International Energy Agency, a global body, estimated that nearly 50% of the emissions reductions needed to reach net zero by 2050 would come from technologies that were not yet commercially available. In September it said that number had fallen to 35%. The political undercurrents are less reassuring. Voters are realising that remaking the entire global economy will be disruptive. Some—a minority—dispute that man-made climate change is under way. Others object to certain policies deployed to tackle it, because they impose costs on ordinary citizens, or add hassles to their overstretched daily lives. Some, particularly the elderly, do not like change at all, especially when it means fuss today in return for benefits they may not live to see. Even among those who accept that action is needed, views differ as to who should shoulder the burden. Many would prefer it to fall on someone else. Awareness of the dangers of climate change seems to have risen over the past wildfire-charred decade. In polls of 12 rich countries by Pew, an American think-tank, the share of respondents who said it was a “major threat” rose in every country except South Korea, where it was already high (see chart 1). Clear majorities everywhere bar Israel agreed with this description. Yet this does not mean they are willing to pay more taxes to help prevent climate change (see chart 2). In a survey of 29 countries by Ipsos, a pollster, only 30% of respondents said they would be willing to cough up. Perhaps most alarmingly, a partisan gap has opened even on scientific questions. In all of the 14 rich countries surveyed by Pew in 2022, people on the political right were less likely to see climate change as a major threat than those on the left (see chart 3). In Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden the gap was very large: between 22 and 44 percentage points. In America it was a gobsmacking 63 points. And a new poll by YouGov for The Economist found that whereas 87% of Biden voters believed that climate change was caused by human activity, only 21% of Trump voters agreed. In democracies such divisions have consequences. (Public opinion matters in dictatorships, too, but that is beyond the scope of this article.) In rich democracies, especially, divisions over climate are aggravated by populist politicians, who take real problems (such as cost and disruption) and exaggerate them, while claiming that the elite who impose green policies don’t care about ordinary motorists because they cycle to work. Populism tends to undermine effective climate policy in several ways. First, populists are often sceptical of experts. When people say “trust the experts”, suggests Ms Karamo, they really mean: “You are too stupid to make decisions about your life.” Second, populists are suspicious of global institutions and foreigners. “Every subsidy we award to an electric-vehicle manufacturer is really a subsidy to the [Chinese Communist Party], because we depend on them, like a noose around our neck, for the batteries,” says Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican presidential candidate. Such attitudes are bad for climate mitigation, argues Dan Fiorino of the American University in Washington, dc, because “climate policy is as much a matter of foreign relations as it is of economic policy.” Third, populists encourage people to believe that the elite are plotting against them, thus adding paranoia to public life and making compromise harder. Mr Trump frames policies to promote electric cars as a threat to the American way of life, and does so in ways that make his fans bristle with rage and laugh out loud. “They say the happiest day when you buy an electric car is the first ten minutes you’re driving it, and then, after that, panic sets in because you’re worried. Where the hell am I gonna get a charge to keep this thing going? Panic!” he told workers in Michigan. “If you want to buy an electric car that’s absolutely fine...But we should not be forcing consumers to buy electric vehicles…There’s no such thing as a fair transition to the end of your way of life.” If Mr Trump is re-elected in 2024, he would once again pull out of the Paris Agreement on climate change. He would also roll back executive orders on such things as methane emissions. He would probably not be able to repeal Mr Biden’s big climate law (misleadingly called the Inflation Reduction Act), which involves huge subsidies that are popular with recipients in red states as well as blue ones. But he would appoint bureaucrats who could obstruct its implementation. At a minimum, America would cease to offer leadership on climate change at a crucial moment, says Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat. “You cannot preach temperance from a barstool. You cannot tell other countries to do the right thing if you as a country are not.” Similar arguments against greenery have taken root in Europe, too. Even where populist parties are not in government, they can influence it. In Sweden, where only 4% of people say climate change is “not a threat”, the centre-right ruling coalition has nonetheless cut taxes on fossil fuels several times in the past year. One reason is that it cannot pass a budget without support from the populist Sweden Democrats, who have 20% of parliamentary seats. The populists want cheaper fuel. So do lots of Swedish voters. “Fuel Rebellion”, a Swedish Facebook group, boasts 600,000 members. Peder Blohm Bokenhielm, one of its leaders, says cars “have always been a big part” of his life. His father imported American Mustangs and Corvettes to Sweden. His first word as a child was “car”. And he has practical reasons for objecting to high fuel taxes, too. In a small Swedish village “there are no shops, and just two buses a day,” he says. “If you want to buy groceries, you need a car.” Charging points are not yet everywhere, and a car’s range matters in a country where journeys are long and getting stranded in the snow is hazardous. And don’t get people started on the cost of home-heating. Politicians who keep high fuel prices in place are “making it harder for people to live where they want to live”, Mr Bokenhielm says. In Germany this year the hard-right Alternative for Germany (afd) has risen in the polls—and did well in state elections on October 8th—by lambasting the energy policies of the ruling coalition, which includes the Green Party. It says they will “impoverish” the country. The AfD is ostracised by mainstream parties, but the centre-right borrows its talking-points. The Greens hurt their own cause with a plan to make green home-heating almost mandatory before there were enough skilled installers to install heat pumps. Householders struggled to book tradesmen. The government backed down in September and extended the deadline—but the political damage had been done. Now in Germany it is not just the hard right that bashes the Greens. Their rallies have been pelted with stones, eggs and insults. Martin Huber of the Christian Social Union (csu), the main centre-right party in Bavaria, told The Economist that all the Greens do is make Verbotsgesetze (laws that forbid things). At a rally in Andechs, a pretty village 40km from Munich, the head of the csu, Markus Söder, drew guffaws from a beered-up Oktoberfest crowd with a series of jabs. When the lights suddenly brightened he quipped: “So at least they are still sending us electricity from Berlin.” An elderly supporter said: “I heat my house with wood. How can I afford to change this, and why should I in my old age?” In Britain, the Conservative prime minister has adopted the main populist themes. In a speech last month, Mr Sunak stressed that he favours curbing emissions, but decried the way Britain’s climate goals had been set “without any meaningful democratic debate about how we get there”. (His party has been in power since 2010.) He also lamented that green policies “will impose unacceptable costs”. He named specific, frightening sums. “For a family living in a terraced house in Darlington, the upfront cost [of a heat pump] could be around £10,000 ($12,200).” He vowed to scrap plans that have never seriously been considered: “taxes on eating meat…compulsory car-sharing [and] a government diktat to sort your rubbish into seven different bins”. And he played the nationalist card. “When our share of global emissions is less than 1%, how can it be right that British citizens are...told to sacrifice even more than others?” (Brits are less than 1% of the global population.) “Rishi is playing with fire,” says Michael Grubb of University College London. Businesses crave predictable policies in order to plan for the long term. “Making climate change part of a culture war will undermine investor confidence.” James Patterson of Utrecht University in the Netherlands argues that anti-green backlashes sometimes occur when environmentalists overreach; for example, by enacting policies so coercive that many people deem them illegitimate. This has happened in the Netherlands. A new populist party, the BoerBurgerBeweging (Farmer-Citizen Movement), shot to prominence when the government began to penalise farms emitting too much nitrogen. Nitrogen is not a greenhouse gas; the problem is that big intensive Dutch farms produce enough of it (from fertiliser and cowpats) to threaten important nature reserves. The government wants to buy out farmers, leading to a reduction in the number of livestock of between a fifth and a half. Such bossiness has provoked rustic rage, with tractor protests and farms across the country flying the national flag upside down. The Farmer-Citizen Movement took 20% of the vote in provincial elections this year—in a country where only 2.2% of people farm. At a general election on November 22nd the more eco-friendly parties are expecting a thumping. For the most part in developing countries, climate change is a less divisive topic in domestic politics than it is in rich ones. The elite discuss it—governments want to be compensated for the industrialised world’s past emissions and to attract investment for the energy transition. But during elections in India or Africa the topic is barely mentioned. However, voters in developing countries are even more sensitive to rises in the cost of living than those in rich countries. So they often resist policies that they think will batter their budgets. Hence the difficulty of cutting fossil-fuel subsidies, which were a staggering $1.3trn (1.3% of global gdp) in 2022, according to the imf. Such handouts are so popular that the harm they do to the environment is seldom motive enough for governments to get rid of them. Nigeria’s new president, Bola Tinubu, scrapped a fuel subsidy this year not because it encouraged people to burn carbon, but because selling petrol at below-market prices was bankrupting the treasury. In 2022 it cost $10bn, leaving the state oil firm with nothing left for the federal government, of which it is usually the biggest bankroller. Abolishing the subsidy frees up billions for public services, with the happy side-effect of reducing emissions. However, there is pressure to reinstate it. As oil prices rise, some fear a subsidy will be quietly reintroduced. Several middle-income countries, such as Indonesia and India, are burning more fossil fuels even as they try to reinvent themselves as green powers. India’s government plans to triple renewable-electricity-generation capacity by the end of the decade. It has also declared a moratorium on new coal plants and aims to become a big producer of green hydrogen. This is good news, but seems to be driven at least as much by worries about energy security as climate change: last year’s green-hydrogen strategy mentions a plan to be “energy independent” by 2047 before the target to achieve “net zero” by 2070. And despite the moratorium on new coal plants, Indian coal production grew by 14.8% last year. National-security arguments can be a spur to green investment. Building wind farms can reduce dependence on energy imports, which is a point that many politicians emphasise. But if such arguments also spur governments to erect barriers to foreign inputs, it will make the energy transition more costly. From a green perspective, the big middle-income country that has improved the most in the past year is probably Brazil. Yet it, too, is complicated. Under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who took office in January, deforestation in the Amazon in the first eight months of the year fell by a cumulative 48% compared with the same period in 2022, when his logger-loving predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, was in charge. However, Lula also supports a push by Petrobras, the state oil firm, to increase output from 2.9m barrels a day to 5.2m by 2030. And his green plans have met resistance. In Congress 347 out of 594 lawmakers belong to the agri-business caucus, whose members fret that greens block development. Congress has curbed the powers of the environment ministry. In most developing countries, net-zero targets are far in the future and voters have not yet been asked to make big sacrifices to reach them. For many, the harm wrought by climate change itself is a bigger worry. A massive 74% of Indians, for example, say they have experienced the effects of global warming, up from 50% in 2011, according to a survey by Yale University. “We’ve lost crops because of extreme heat and rains and it has got worse in the past few years,” says Shiv Kumari, a farm labourer in Delhi whose fields were flooded this summer. Such trauma translates into greater support for green policies: 55% of Indians say India should reduce its emissions immediately without waiting for other countries to act, up from 36% in 2011. Globally, innovation will eventually ease the grumbles that drive so much of the anti-climate backlash. “The clean is already cheaper than the dirty in many parts of the economy, and those parts will just get bigger and bigger,” says Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics. But it matters immensely how fast this happens. Many green technologies require hefty upfront investment, which is harder when interest rates are high. This particularly affects the poor world. “Look at Africa. If you pay 15% interest, wind and solar are not cheaper than fossil fuels for generating electricity, though they are cheaper at 7% or 8%,” says Professor Stern. He suggests supercharging multilateral lenders to crowd in other sources of finance. “The most unrealistic and dangerous thing of all would be to go slow,” he says. © 2023 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.

Den svenska startupen Modvion är banbrytande inom konstruktionen av vindkraftstorn av trä. Målet är att kraftigt minska koldioxidavtrycket från vindenergi, skriver Bloomberg. Företaget, som är baserat i Göteborg, bygger för närvarande världens högsta vindkraftstorn i trä. Man använder gran som lamineras för att öka styrkan och skyddet mot bränder och oväder. Bolaget har redan väckt intresse från europeiska energijättar, som Vestas och Vattenfall. – Vindkraft är en av de mest effektiva och attraktiva energikällorna vi har. Vi ser till att värdet ökar ytterligare, säger Modvions vd Otto Lundman. In the forests of western Sweden, a turbine of the future is taking cues from windmills of the past in a quest to be greener. By Lars Paulsson, with assistance from Alberto Brambilla.

Bloomberg, 29 September 2023 A giant crane hoists a 40-ton chunk of turbine tower almost 200 feet (60 meters) in the air and then places it atop a half-finished structure. What’s different about this project is that it isn’t made from the usual ingredient: steel. Rather, startup Modvion AB is building the tower out of wood, a material it says will reduce the carbon footprint by more than 90%. This will be the world’s tallest turbine of timber when completed in the coming weeks, and then it will be sold to a utility supplying clean energy to local homes and factories. Sweden has a rich heritage of using wood in everything from windmills to centuries-old churches, clogs, decorative Dala horses and even a skyscraper. Modvion is drawing on that craftsmanship to disrupt a forecasted $40 billion tower industry, where the use of heavily polluting steel and cement hasn’t changed much in the past few decades, undermining the turbines’ environmental benefits. “The world is facing a climate crisis, and we need to switch energy sources,” Chief Executive Officer Otto Lundman said after watching the lift. “Wind power is one of the most efficient and attractive that we have. We increase that value further.” While the blades and the machinery are industry standard equipment, the approach has attracted interest from some of Europe’s biggest energy companies. Vestas Wind Systems A/S bought 15% of the firm after seeing a smaller demonstration model, and Italy’s Enel Green Power SpA reached a cooperation agreement. Sweden’s Vattenfall AB is a partner, and Germany’s RWE AG signed a letter of intent in March to use Modvion’s wooden towers in future projects. The planet’s original building material is making a comeback in the net zero age, with timber high-rises, corporate campuses and Olympic Village housing all in the works. A 20-story “plyscraper” opened in Skelleftea, Sweden, in 2021. Even as the wind industry is suffering from cost increases, supply-chain bottlenecks and financing problems due to higher interest rates, forecasts for growth are still huge as nations rush to meet ambitious plans for reducing carbon-dioxide emissions. Annual European onshore installations are predicted to surge by almost a quarter by 2030, according to BloombergNEF. Wind additions will exceed 16 gigawatts for the first time this year, with Germany, France, Spain, Sweden and Finland propping up the estimate. “We expect our collaboration to increase,” said Todd O’Neill, chief executive officer of Vestas Ventures. “Many of our customers have proactively inquired to learn how they can be a part of Modvion’s journey.” That connection comes in handy. The generator atop the timber tower will be a recycled Vestas V90 2-megawatt machine. The Danish wind giant also will supply blades to crown the structure, which will be 150 meters (492 feet) tall when finished. Modvion’s project outside Skara, Sweden, is made from Finnish spruce that’s laminated for strength and protection against the elements and fire, and then curved into four pieces about 30 centimeters (12 inches) thick. The tower walls may get thinner in the future as Modvion refines the technology. The modules are stacked on trucks at a factory in Gothenburg and then glued together on site. The assembly process saves on future maintenance costs since the typical steel tower contains as many as 50,000 bolts requiring manual checks by workers. Modvion’s towers can be inspected by sending up a drone instead. Yet it’s the numbers surrounding carbon-dioxide emissions – both in manufacturing and operation -- that give wood a significant edge over steel. Steelmaking is responsible for about 8% of the energy industry’s CO2 emissions, and decarbonizing will require trillions of dollars in investments. By comparison, wood is a carbon sink – and renewable. Parts of Modvion’s factory are automated, with robots sawing notches into the ends of the modules so they can be slotted together like a jigsaw puzzle. Still, there’s also some old-style carpentry going on. During a recent visit, workers used a measuring tape, nail gun and hand saw to get the pieces just right. To scale up in the future, even more of the work would probably need to be done with machines.  The laminated lumber is stronger than steel at the same weight, so wooden turbines can be taller and support bigger blades (generating more electricity) while needing less reinforcement (saving on building costs), the company says. Lundman declined to say how much the machine with the timber tower will cost. A standard 2-megawatt turbine is about $2 million, said Leo Wang, a wind analyst at BloombergNEF. Enel expects significant cost reductions from using wood once a supply chain and economies of scale have been established. “We are currently monitoring their development so that we are ready to use the technology once it will be available for large-scale applications,’’ said Nicola Rossi, head of innovation at Enel Green Power. “Wooden solutions are promising, but the long-term benefits of a full-scale adoption of wooden towers in a commercial wind farm are yet to be assessed.” Modvion, which bills itself as a tech company focusing on engineered wood, is the brainchild of David Olivegren, 56, a carpenter, boat builder and architect. He developed concepts for wooden masts and tubes during his studies, honed his skills while renovating old houses and even built a small wind turbine meant to charge a converted Renault SA car. The startup, founded in 2016, has received funding from the European Union and the Swedish Energy Agency. Earlier this year, 125 million Swedish kronor ($11 million) were raised through a convertible note issue. A capital round of €20 million ($21 million), raised primarily through equity stakes, should close in the first quarter of 2024, according to the company. That will helping financing a 150 meter tall tower, which will support a 6-megawatt machine ready to generate electricity in 2025. “We are not really stressed about the heights,” Olivegren said. “We are going to have more advantages as the industry goes higher.” The rural landscape surrounding the timber tower is peppered with traditional turbines, which generate about 20% of Sweden’s electricity. On a recent visit, several wooden sections were lined up on the ground, waiting to be hoisted up to form a tower. The outsides are painted in a steely gray color, but the insides are untreated, with the wood grain on full display. A dishwasher-sized climate-control system at ground level blows air up the tower to maintain the internal humidity below 65%. The boat builder’s startup also has visions of eventually using the timber at sea — in offshore turbine towers. “This is a brilliant material, and it has been overlooked for quite some time,” Lundman said. “‘Nature’s carbon fiber can be used for so much more, and we hope to help prove that.'' For more articles like this please visit us at bloomberg.com

När Joe Biden tillträdde som president var hans budskap till andra världsledare att ”USA är tillbaka” – deras reaktion var ofta ”hur länge då?”. Foreign Affairs beskriver hur omvärlden nu förbereder sig på en eventuell ny mandatperiod med Donald Trump. Rivaliserande länder som Kina har blivit alltmer isolerade av USA under Biden och hoppas på att en ny Trump-era skulle kunna riva upp allianser där de hålls utanför. De allierade världsledarna gör sig istället redo för ett ”ännu mer extremt och kaotiskt” styre än tidigare, skriver Daniel W. Drezner, professor i internationell politik. His Possible Return Inspires Fear in America’s Allies—and Hope in Its Rivals By Daniel W. Drezner 5 September, 2023 For most countries, the Biden administration’s foreign policy represents a return to normality after the chaos of the Trump years. Long-standing allies and partners have seen their relationships strengthened. Autocrats no longer deal with a U.S. president who wants to emulate them. Great-power rivals face a United States that is dedicated to outcompeting them. For many observers, it is hard not to conclude that under President Joe Biden, the United States has returned to the postwar tradition of liberal internationalism. In this view, the Trump administration was an ephemeral blip rather than an inflection point. Equilibrium has been restored. Beneath the superficial calm, however, many global actors are anxious about the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Despite four criminal indictments, Donald Trump is the runaway frontrunner to win the GOP nomination for president. Assuming he does, current polling shows a neck-and-neck race between Trump and Biden in the general election. It would be reckless for other world leaders to dismiss the possibility of a second Trump term beginning on January 20, 2025. Indeed, the person who knows this best is Biden himself. In his first joint address to Congress, Biden said that in conversations with world leaders, he has “made it known that America is back,” and their responses have tended to be a variation of “But for how long?” To understand international relations for the next 15 months, observers will need to factor in how the possibility of a second Trump term affects U.S. influence in the world. U.S. allies and adversaries alike are already taking it into account. Foreign leaders recognize that a second term for Trump would be even more extreme and chaotic than his first term. The prospect that he could return to the White House will encourage hedging in the United States’ allies—and stiffen the resolve of its adversaries. Russian and Chinese officials, for instance, have told analysts that they hope Trump is reelected. For Russia, Trump’s return to power would mean less Western support for Ukraine; for China, it would mean the fraying of U.S. alliances with countries such as Japan and South Korea that help constrain Beijing. The Biden administration’s best foreign policy move over the next year will not be a diplomatic or military initiative—it will be to demonstrate that Trump is unlikely to win in November 2024. During his first term, Trump scrambled the dense network of alliances and partnerships that the United States had built over the previous 75 years. For long-standing allies in Europe, Latin America, and the Pacific Rim, the United States suddenly exhibited a bewildering array of capricious behavior. Trump blasted allies for not contributing enough to collective security and for allegedly robbing the United States blind on trade deals. He repeatedly threatened to exit previously sacrosanct agreements including NATO, the World Trade Organization, the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement, and NAFTA. By contrast, although U.S. adversaries also had to deal with the occasional tantrum from Trump, it was for them in many ways the best of times. Trump bent over backward to ingratiate himself with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. His administration yo-yoed between coercing and accommodating these states, with the latter tactic usually winning out. These autocrats happily pocketed gains from the United States’ strained relations with allies. Xi could go to Davos in 2017 and effectively declare that China, rather than the United States, was the status quo power. Putin could bide his time while the Trump White House withdrew the U.S. ambassador from Ukraine and withheld Javelin weapons systems in an effort to coerce Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into aiding Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign. There was no need for Putin or Xi to act recklessly when their rival was self-sabotaging. Biden’s victory over Trump in 2020 ended much of this bizarre behavior. Biden has reasserted traditional alliances to an extent not seen since U.S. President George H. W. Bush. As Richard Haass, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, has put it, Biden has transformed U.S. foreign policy “from ‘America first’ to alliances first.” Biden consulted widely with European leaders in crafting the U.S. response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, resulting in a degree of transatlantic cooperation that has surprised even Putin. Similarly, the administration has garnered support from numerous allies to counter China: imposing export controls in consultation with Japan and the Netherlands; bolstering the Quad, a defense coalition made up of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States; and developing the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, a U.S.-led talking shop of 14 countries, including Indonesia, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam. Public opinion polling conducted across a group of 23 countries as varied as Hungary, Japan, and Nigeria shows that much of the world holds more positive attitudes toward the United States under Biden than it did under Trump. At the same time, rivals such as Russia and China have had to adjust to a U.S. president who walks the walk as well as talks the talk on great-power competition. Trump ranted and raved and lashed out at China, but in the end, he was more interested in making deals than in advancing U.S. interests—demonstrated, for instance, by his push to finalize the Phase One trade agreement with China in early 2020 without pressing Chinese authorities about the emerging COVID-19 pandemic. His approach to Russia was mercurial; Trump himself has said that he was the “apple of [Putin’s] eye.” By contrast, the Biden administration has proved ready and willing to mobilize the federal government to counter both these autocracies—the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act are far more ambitious pieces of legislation than anything passed during the Trump years. These measures aim to accomplish what Trump only talked about: “home shoring” critical industrial sectors. Biden has also been far more adept at attracting new allies and partners. NATO has expanded to include Finland and is soon likely to count Sweden in, as well. The trilateral partnership between Japan, South Korea, and the United States in Northeast Asia has been strengthened; the gathering of these countries’ leaders at Camp David in August would have been unthinkable during the Trump years. Biden will sign a strategic partnership agreement with Vietnam during a state visit to Hanoi in September, deepening ties between two countries wary of Chinese expansionism. The AUKUS pact with Australia and the United Kingdom has cemented security cooperation with these key allies. The United States has bolstered bilateral cooperation with Taiwan. Both Russian and Chinese firms are discovering that their ability to freeload off the liberal international order has been compromised. As U.S. adversaries find themselves increasingly isolated, many elites in these countries are holding out hope for a future windfall—heralded by Trump’s return to the presidency in 2025. China watchers report hearing more mentions of Trump in their visits to Beijing than they do in the United States. Chinese officials hope that a new Trump administration will fray U.S. alliances again. As for Russia, policymakers in Europe and the United States agree that Putin is unlikely to change his tactics in Ukraine until after the 2024 election. An anonymous U.S. official told CNN in August: “Putin knows Trump will help him. And so do the Ukrainians and our European partners.” Allies in Europe are also contemplating—or, rather, dreading—a second Trump term. Some observers argue that although Trump executed an unconventional foreign policy when he was president, he did not act on his worst impulses. He did not withdraw the United States from either the WTO or NATO, nor did he remove U.S. troops from across the Pacific Rim. These pundits hold that Trump’s second term would just reprise the bluster of his first term. Such equanimity is misplaced. A second Trump term would transpire with countervailing institutions that are even weaker than they were in 2016. Trump would be supported by congressional Republicans who are far more Trumpish in their outlook than the old-guard GOP leadership of five years ago. According to The New York Times, Trump, if reelected, “plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as ‘the sick political class that hates our country.’” Trump’s own foreign policy team would likely feature hardly anyone with a significant record of leadership in diplomacy or the military that could put the brakes on his wildest ideas—in other words, there will no longer be any adults in the room. There will be no James Mattis, the secretary of defense under Trump’s first term, or even a John Bolton, a former national security adviser, to talk Trump out of his rash actions or persuade him that he cannot bomb Mexico or that he is incapable of ending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in a single day. Trump’s second term would most closely resemble the chaotic last few months of Trump’s first term, when the 45th president came close to bombing Iran and unilaterally withdrawing all U.S. troops from a variety of trouble spots such as Somalia and Syria. As one former German official told The New York Times, “Trump has experience now and knows what levers to pull, and he’s angry.” Another European official compared a second Trump to the Terminator of the second film in the franchise, which featured a cyborg assassin even more lethal and sophisticated than the original played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Throughout his first term, Trump frequently held U.S. foreign policy hostage to his own political whims. He has faced some consequences; his demands that Zelensky relay damaging information about Biden (regardless of whether it was true) in return for sending Kyiv arms resulted in one of his two impeachments. If Trump is reelected despite these two impeachments—and four fresh criminal indictments—he will feel truly unconstrained and unrepentant. A second Trump term would make the first one look like a garden party. It is worth remembering that the foreign diplomatic corps believed that Trump would be reelected in 2020. U.S. allies feared that Trump would do what he tried to do during his lame-duck period in late 2020: withdraw U.S. forces from the world. Unless and until it becomes manifestly obvious that Trump will lose, it would be malpractice for the rest of the world to discount the threats and opportunities posed by a second Trump term. If anything, the stakes are higher now than four years ago. The responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s economic rise have more closely enmeshed U.S. and allied foreign policy. If Trump were to take over the helm of U.S. foreign policy, the result would be a much broader unraveling. U.S. allies have no choice but to craft hedging strategies for the next year, in case wartime sanctions against Russia are disrupted or Trump wants to be best friends with Kim Jong Un again. This explains why some eastern European countries and France are also pushing allies to admit Ukraine into NATO sooner rather than later, anticipating that Trump might turn his back on Kyiv as the war with Russia rages on. At the same time, countries such as Russia, China, and North Korea have every incentive to resist U.S. pressure in the hopes that a second Trump term will offer them foreign policy salvation. It will therefore be highly unlikely that China will allow for a warming of bilateral ties or that Russia will provide any indication that it is interested in serious peace negotiations before the election. It is arguably in Beijing’s and Moscow’s interest to do everything in their power to make it seem as though the world will be on fire if Biden is reelected. The Biden administration can respond to these behaviors by institutionalizing as much of the United States’ current foreign policy as possible. As the sanctions against Russia become the new normal, the United States would be wise to develop a new organization akin to the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls—also known as CoCom—that existed during the Cold War to manage the strategic embargo of the Soviet bloc. Such a structure might also prove useful in coordinating the export controls the United States wants erected against China. The more congressional buy-in that the Biden administration can secure, the harder it would be for Trump to reverse course. Biden can also exploit the possibility of Trump’s return to bargain with recalcitrant allies and long-standing adversaries. Trump’s hostile rhetoric toward Mexico might make it easier for Biden to pressure Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to allow accommodations in handling migration and narcotics trafficking. Faced with a choice between acceding to Biden’s wishes that Mexico cooperate on migration strategies and the threat of Trump deploying the U.S. military on Mexican soil, Mexican authorities might find the former option more palatable. Similarly, Trump’s demonstrated hostility toward Iran might enable Biden to jump-start nuclear negotiations with the theocrats in Tehran in a manner that makes it more costly for Trump to pull out of a deal again—for instance, by transferring frozen Iranian assets to third parties such as Qatar in advance of any deal, which would help insulate negotiations from White House whims. But the best move the Biden administration can make in response to the possibility of a second Trump term is to reduce the odds that Trump will be reelected. As long as there is a chance that Trump or someone like him will win the presidency, the rest of the world will doubt the durability of any U.S. grand strategy. The current administration needs to defeat Trumpism as well as Trump. This does not mean using nefarious means to stay in power; the surest route to U.S. decline is for Trump’s political opponents to adopt Trump’s tactics. Rather, the Biden team needs to use the campaign trail to remind Americans of the chaos of the Trump years while stressing the tangible accomplishments of Biden’s more traditional foreign policy approach. Under Biden, NATO is stronger than ever, as are America’s Pacific Rim relationships. Biden’s approach to China is multilateral, not unilateral—and polling demonstrates that most Americans like it when the United States acts with multilateral support. If Biden defeats Trump a second time while running on a foreign policy platform of liberal internationalism, allies could trust more ambitious forms of cooperation with the United States. Adversaries would recognize that they cannot simply hold out and hope U.S. policymakers change their minds. Echoing William Jennings Bryan’s three presidential defeats a century ago, Trump’s third loss of the popular vote in 2024 would send a powerful signal that isolationist and populist sentiments in the United States are trending toward remission. © 2023 Council on Foreign Relations, publisher of Foreign Affairs. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency. Read the original article at Foreign Affairs.

En självbiografisk anekdot från Putin har fått vingar, skriver The Atlantic. Som en pojke jagade Putin in en råtta i ett hörn, och fick en läxa om hur någon som är trängd kan agera när råttan gick till attack. Historien – sann eller inte – har tolkats som ett sätt för Putin att kommunicera: ”Pressa mig inte”. Det verkar också vara den lärdom omvärlden har gjort. Men nu, skriver sig tidningen, är det kanske dags att omvärdera historien och att minnas vad som faktiskt hände i slutet på den där historien: Putin flydde. We may be getting the moral of the Russian leader’s childhood story all wrong. By Uri Friedman 2 August, 2022 Rarely have so few, seemingly inconsequential words generated so many consequential ones. In a mere 109-word paragraph tucked away in an autobiographical collection of interviews published in 2000, just as he ascended to power in Russia, Vladimir Putin tells a nightmarish tale: Once, when he and his friends were chasing rats with sticks in the dilapidated apartment building in St. Petersburg where he grew up, a “huge rat” he’d cornered suddenly “lashed around and threw itself at” him, chasing the “surprised and frightened” Putin to his door before he slammed it shut in the rodent’s face. For Putin, it’s a parable: “I got a quick and lasting lesson in the meaning of the word cornered.” More than two decades later, that anecdotal seed has sprouted into a ubiquitous narrative that has helped shape the West’s response to Russia’s war against Ukraine. A cornered Putin, commentators and policy makers in the United States and Europe have frequently insisted, could behave like the rat, lashing out even with weapons of mass destruction if provoked. The assumption has informed policies on arms provisions to Ukraine and nuclear deterrence against Russia. Yet the Russian leader’s response to Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed mutiny in June has called the cornered-rat concept into question. Some experts argue that Russian propaganda amplified the metaphor, and that Putin’s reaction to the rebellion exposed it as a lie. Others paint a more complicated picture, suggesting that the story does reveal deep truths about Putin, but not the ones we imagined. To better understand the Russian leader’s psychology—and make sounder policy decisions as a result—it’s worth tracing how an obscure vignette from Putin’s childhood took on such a prominent life of its own. Putin has retold the rat story, and the lesson he learned about the perils of cornering others, several times in the 23 years since he first dropped the biographical breadcrumb, including in a 2005 60 Minutes interview. I’ve come across at least one instance of a former Kremlin official explicitly comparing Putin and Russia to the cornered rat. And Putin, along with other Russian officials and their allies, has occasionally implicitly echoed the anecdote’s themes via warnings to the West to not back Russia into a corner. But the story was barely mentioned in the Western media (with some exceptions, including a fleeting reference in this magazine) until Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, when references gradually ticked up. As Putin suffered setbacks in Ukraine, Russia experts and journalists writing about the conflict and searching for insight into the Russian leader’s mindset started citing the anecdote from the 2000 interview collection. And they did something curious: They identified Putin not with his younger self but with the cornered rat, suggesting that his precarious position made him liable to lash out against his adversaries. Only after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, however, did the notion of Putin as a “rat in a corner” achieve escape velocity, to the point that it now seems to be invoked much more frequently in Western countries than in Russia. The rat story served as the framing device for a flurry of articles in the early days and months of the war, both serious-minded (with headlines such as “A Cornered Vladimir Putin Is More Dangerous Than Ever”) and more sensationalist (“A rat with nuclear weapons ... That’s why we mustn’t drive Vladimir Putin so far into a corner he will do anything to save his own skin”). A May 2022 CNN documentary promising to take viewers “inside the mind” of the Russian leader seized on the rat story as a leitmotif of his biography, noting that Putin grew up in the “darkest corners” of St. Petersburg and that being “trapped in a corner only to fight his way out” has been “a theme throughout Vladimir Putin’s life,” building to the big question: “Erratic, obsessed, enraged. Is Putin now that cornered rat he once encountered?” References to the tale tend to crop up when Putin is either issuing nuclear threats or under intense economic or military pressure, and they have become so common that experts often describe Putin as a “cornered rat” or even “a snarling rat backed into a corner,” with nary a mention of the childhood story that spawned the metaphor. Perhaps most consequentially, the language has made its way into the vernacular of U.S. and European governments—popping up in NATO research and remarks by British lawmakers. In his new biography of Putin, the journalist Philip Short refers to a conclusion by CIA analysts that Putin’s rat story should be “read as a warning that, if Putin were ever cornered, he would turn and fight.” In the jittery days following Russia’s further invasion of Ukraine, as the United States slapped sweeping sanctions on Moscow, one anonymous official quoted by The New York Times gave a name to the ambient concern in the White House, voiced repeatedly in Situation Room meetings, about a trapped Russian leader lashing out: the “Cornered Putin Problem.” Last fall, when the Biden administration was resisting Ukrainian requests for more sophisticated weapons amid advances against Russian forces, Colin Kahl, then the U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, expressed concern that “Ukraine’s success on the battlefield could cause Russia to feel backed into a corner, and that is something we must remain mindful of.” Cornered-rat logic arguably has also informed calls to negotiate a face-saving way for Putin to get out of his quagmire. Alina Polyakova, the president and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis, told me she’s seen the concern about pushing Putin and Russia into a corner most “profoundly” among U.S. and Western European officials, whereas officials in Eastern European countries and in Ukraine itself, given their experience with Soviet occupation, tend to believe the best way to deter Russia is through “force and strength.” “I don’t know if senior policy makers, as they look at this situation, call to mind that [cornered rat] metaphor, but anyone who says, ‘We can’t take certain steps in Ukraine, because Putin might go nuclear’ is manifesting the logic of that paradigm, which is precisely the policy impact that Putin has been seeking,” John Herbst, the head of the Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council (where I work), told me. Some leading experts on Putin and Russia have argued compellingly that the cornered-rat metaphor has real merit in illuminating how the Russian leader might act. Shortly after Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, for example, the journalist Masha Gessen wrote that the rat story “keeps coming up in my conversations in Moscow” and that “no one who has ever heard it doubts that the adult Putin identifies with the rat.” Around the same time, the Cold War historian Vladislav Zubok told me he was alarmed by those in the West who “keep shouting, ‘Press this guy Putin against the wall. Squash him like a rat! Kill him!’ And this guy has a nuclear button. Come on! Don’t make him nervous.” Andrei​ Kolesnikov, a Moscow-based expert on Russian politics at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote to me that, in his opinion, the cornered-rat image “is very accurate.” He noted that Putin “responds to every challenge (e.g. damage to the Crimean bridge) with a brutal attack (e.g. missile strikes).” But other experts—such as Polyakova, who studies disinformation, and Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine—argue that Putin and the Kremlin have intentionally spread the image of Putin as a cornered rat as a form of propaganda, a verminous spin on Richard Nixon’s “Madman Theory.” They hypothesize that Putin, as a former KGB agent during the Cold War, would have been well versed in psychological operations and thus likely had a calculated reason to repeatedly relay the rat story and the lesson he drew from it. Whether or not Putin had an ulterior motive in sharing the rat story, Herbst told me, the Russian leader and “his henchmen” have emphasized the trope over the years “to instill fear in Western policy makers and also in policy makers in smaller, closer-by countries” that if they oppose Putin getting what he wants, he will strike back in devastating ways. Putin doesn’t have to repeat the story often, Herbst said, because the West has done the work for him by amplifying its theme. As striking as the story’s repetition is the frequency with which it has failed to predict Putin’s behavior. Faced with Yevgeny Prigozhin’s June rebellion—as mercenaries marched toward Moscow—Putin’s reaction was not to lunge forward but rather to back away, negotiate with the Wagner Group leader, and make concessions to the mutineers to defuse the crisis. Polyakova considers Putin’s behavior during the episode consistent with a broader pattern that even predates the current conflict: “In every instance where we [in the West] have pushed back against either Russian aggression or Russia’s economic interests, there hasn’t been this ‘all hell breaks loose’ response.” Herbst agrees. He points out that Western countries have repeatedly crossed ostensible Russian red lines—by providing advanced weapons to Ukraine, for example, or admitting Finland and Sweden into NATO—without Putin resorting to nuclear use or other major escalations. And yet, the notion persists, perhaps usefully to Putin, that he must not be forced on the ropes or he will unleash World War III. Natalia Gevorkyan was one of three Russian journalists who spoke with Putin for the 2000 autobiographical interviews. She told me she doubts that the Russian leader deliberately planted the rat story as propaganda—at least in its initial telling. Putin didn’t know in advance the questions the journalists would be asking, and he volunteered the anecdote only when they pressed him on whether the conditions at the communal apartment where he grew up were as horrible as a former teacher of his had suggested. The Kremlin had encouraged Putin to “talk openly” about himself so that the interviews would introduce him to Russians who “didn’t know anything about him” at the time, Gevorkyan said. Stories like the one about the rats seemed intended to fulfill that directive. “Nobody was cornering him” back in 2000, Gevorkyan reasoned. “I don’t believe that he was that smart to say, ‘Look, guys, listen to this story and never push me into the corner.’” She conceded that it’s “quite possible” he has sent a political message by repeating the story and its lesson in the ensuing years. But Gevorkyan, who is now based in Paris, did challenge the conventional interpretation of the story. She wonders why so many people (herself included, until she looked at the tale in a new light after Russia’s assault against Ukraine last year) gravitate toward a convoluted reading of it that associates Putin with the dangerous rodent. The more straightforward moral of the story is that a frightened young Vladimir backed off when threatened, and that the elder Vladimir might do the same under similar circumstances. Something about the tale, she mused, tempts people to concentrate on the pouncing rat rather than the fleeing boy. Putin had a stick that he could have used to protect himself against the much smaller animal. Instead, Gevorkyan said, “he runs away and he hides in his own apartment and he feels safe. For me, this is much more a story about Putin than about the rat.” No one but Putin himself will ever know for sure if, when push comes to shove, he is the cornered rat, the frightened boy, or something else entirely. But policy makers and the public can pay particularly close attention to what Putin does rather than what he says or what others say about him, and build their understanding of the Russian leader on a foundation of empirical evidence. They can avoid the siren song of popular frameworks that offer simplistic explanatory models for a complicated geopolitical actor. They can design policies and strategies to defend their interests that factor in their best assessments of Putin, while not accepting as gospel any single measure of the man and how he might behave. Aleksandar Matovski, an assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, has studied the connection between Putin’s military adventurism abroad and his political standing at home. He told me that he sees some limited but significant truth in the cornered-rat paradigm: “There is a genuine threshold at which cornered Putin (in the sense of losing his grip domestically) would lash out aggressively, as a fall from power for a personalized dictator like him would be catastrophic,” he wrote to me, noting that his comments constitute his own assessment and not the position of the U.S. Department of Defense. But he also underscored the evidence that has piled up against the paradigm. Putin has “exploited the fear of the ‘cornered rat’ as a sort of bluff, particularly through nuclear blackmail in recent years,” he observed. To avoid a situation in which a weakened Putin in dire circumstances blunders into nuclear use, Matovski argued, Western officials will need “to appeal to the survivalist outlook of Putin and his elite by signaling determination to retaliate in ways that will deny the Kremlin the benefits of a nuclear strike” and exert painful pressure on the Putin regime. In other words, to manage the risk of nuclear escalation with Russia, they shouldn’t dismiss offhand the man who once saw in a cornered rat a warning about the dangers of desperation. But they should nevertheless appeal to the survival instincts of the boy with the stick who, when faced with those dangers, decided to run for it. © 2023 The Atlantic Media Co., as first published in The Atlantic. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

Sveriges och Finlands medlemskap i Nato kommer att förändra Europas säkerhetspolitiska landskap under många år framöver – och ytterligare anstränga relationerna med Ryssland, det rapporterar Washington Post som har frågat ut flera olika analytiker om de båda nordiska ländernas påverkan på alliansen. Framför allt pekar man på att Sverige och Finland har geografiska fördelar samt att de kan ge alliansen utökade land-, sjö- och luftresurser; här nämns bland annat Gotlands strategiska placering som en tillgång. ”Ett svenskt och finskt Nato-medlemskap innebär att Nato får ytterligare en förstärkningsväg genom Östersjön”, säger den amerikanska experten Carisa Nietsche. (Svensk översättning av Omni). Sweden’s path to joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization appeared clearer this week when Turkey, after months of stalling, agreed to let the Scandinavian country enter the alliance. By Ruby Mellen, Dylan Moriarty and Júlia Ledur July 11, 2023 Over more than 70 years, NATO has grown to an alliance of more than 30 countries. Founded in 1949 to counterbalance the growing power of the Soviet Union, NATO – long a source of tension between the West and Russia – has reasserted itself as a significant and unified force against Moscow since Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Finland, a traditionally neutral nation, officially joined the alliance in April, after submitting a request along with Sweden in response to the war. Analysts say the move will transform Europe's security landscape for years to come – and further strain relations with Russia, which opposes the alliance's eastern expansion. The addition of both countries could offer the alliance expanded land, sea and air capabilities. Sweden has a strong navy, which would strengthen NATO's defenses in the Baltic Sea, and builds its own fighter jets. Finland's well-funded military maintains mandatory conscription for men. It's a ”whole society approach to thinking about defense,” said Christopher Skaluba, director of the Atlantic Council's Transatlantic Security Initiative. ”They can mobilize hundreds and thousands of their citizens.” The countries also offer key geographic advantages, which would enhance NATO's defenses. To the South, Sweden and Finland's membership gives the alliance an edge in the Baltic Sea, a strategic waterway bordered by Russia's St. Petersburg, as well as some of NATO's most vulnerable members. ”NATO's main mission is keep Russia away from the Baltic states,” Skaluba said, referring to Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. A growing presence on the Baltic sea's shores could strengthen security for those countries. ”Swedish and Finnish NATO membership would provide NATO with another reinforcement route through the Baltic Sea,” said Carisa Nietsche, an associate fellow for the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. In the middle of the sea lies Gotland, a 109-mile-long Swedish island home to medieval ruins and military fortifications. Last year, Sweden announced it would spend $163 million to ramp up its forces on the island, including expanding barracks to house more troops. Sweden's accession to NATO would mean an increased presence in the Arctic. Sweden, along with Finland, is a member of the Arctic Council, an organization overseeing the northernmost parts of the world whose members include Russia, Canada and the United States. With their membership, ”Arctic security would continue to climb on NATO's agenda,” Nietsche said. As more than 50 percent of Arctic Ocean coastline is Russian territory, it could climb on Moscow's agenda too. ”They see security in the area as a matter of homeland defense,” Skaluba said. Military missions from the Kola Peninsula – a strategic landmass some 110 miles east of the border where Russia keeps ballistic missile submarines and stores nuclear warheads – are deployed throughout the Arctic. As members, Sweden and Finland could help monitor that activity, but could also increase the risk of escalation. ”The Arctic is generally considered a success story of cooperation among NATO Arctic nations and Russia, but there are concerns that it will increasingly be a contested area in the security realm, something probably more likely with Sweden and Finland becoming NATO nations,” Skaluba added. Finland's border with Russia stretches more than 800 miles and is already closely patrolled. The nation's membership doubles the alliance's land border. ”On one hand, this provides NATO with enhanced deterrence as Moscow would need to defend this border,” said Nietsche. ”On the other hand, NATO also must protect this border against a Russian attack.” The Finns remember the Winter War of 1939-1940, when the country incurred great losses fighting back Soviet forces. ”Their relationship with Russia is defined by mistrust,” said Cristina Florea, a historian of Central and Eastern Europe at Cornell University. Finland's membership also brings the alliance closer to the Kola Peninsula. Russia's Northern Fleet, tasked with patrolling the Arctic, is based on the peninsula as well. Sources: NATO, The Geography of the International System: The CShapes Dataset (old country borders) © 2023 The Washington Post. Sign up for the Today's Worldview newsletter here.

Jens Stoltenberg får fortsätta som Natos ordförande. The Atlantics Anne Applebaum profilerar en byråkrat som sätter skräck i Putin – men som helst av allt vill hem till Norge. Unelected bureaucrats get a bad rap. But some do an essential job. By Anne Applebaum 4 July, 2023 The North Atlantic Treaty Organization announced today that Jens Stoltenberg, its secretary-general for the past nine years, will stay on for an almost unprecedented tenth year. Last week, after that development had already been predicted by The Times of London, the Financial Times, Politico, and who knows how many defense-industry newsletters, I met Stoltenberg in his clean, functional, almost featureless office—white walls, gray carpet—deep inside NATO’s shiny Brussels headquarters. I asked him about it. “I have one plan, and that is to go back to Norway,” he replied, deadpan. I raised an eyebrow. Yes, he conceded, there are “some requests for me to stay on.” Beyond that, he would not comment. Not hypothetically. Not under embargo. When the inevitable announcement was finally made this morning, he said in a statement that he was “honored,” because “in a more dangerous world, our great Alliance is more important than ever.” It would be hard to find a better illustration of the qualities that make Stoltenberg so popular. NATO is a defensive alliance representing a wide variety of countries and regions—Eastern Europe and Southern Europe, Scandinavia and Turkey, Britain and France. It makes decisions by consensus. To achieve that consensus, the NATO secretary-general does not personally need to fight battles or win wars. That’s the job of the supreme allied commander, who is always an American, as well as the 31 NATO heads of state and their 31 armies. Instead, the secretary-general, who is always a European, succeeds if he talks to everybody, finds common ground, negotiates compromises, never leaks, and never puts himself at the center of the story, even when the story is about him. In recent years, this sort of person—call him Multilateral Man (though of course some of them are women)—has had a bad rap. Enemies of the European Union, NATO, and the alphabet soup of organizations run out of Washington, Geneva, and Brussels have taken to calling their employees “unelected bureaucrats.” Multilateral Man is said to be lazy, or wasteful, or powerless. In an age that celebrates “sovereignty,” “national interest,” and the achievements of his chief opponents (usually called “strongmen”), critics disparage Multilateral Man as parasitic or pointless. Sometimes the critics have a point. But Stoltenberg is where he is precisely because he actually believes in multilateral organizations, NATO in particular. More than that, he thinks they are force multipliers that function better than the autocracies run by strongmen. He has argued that point rather passionately with NATO’s critics, among them Donald Trump, whom he famously won over by showing him bar charts illustrating increases in allied military spending. (“I love graphs,” Stoltenberg told me.) He also thinks that endless rounds of negotiation over alliance policy are worthwhile, because ultimately the result is a stronger sense of commitment. To those who say NATO is less efficient, he asks: “Less efficient than what? Compared to what?” True, if you don’t have NATO, “you don’t have a slow-moving decision process.” But that’s because if you don’t have NATO, you don’t have any decision process at all, at least not a collective decision process. “I believe in collective defense; I believe in one for all and all for one, that attack on one ally will trigger a response from the others.” And this, he says, is not just “good for small nations”; it’s “good for big nations too.” Everybody needs friends, even Americans. Strictly speaking, Stoltenberg is not an unelected bureaucrat in any case, given that he has now been “elected” four times by NATO heads of state, twice for regular terms in office and twice for extensions. He also spent many years as an elected politician. As prime minister of Norway (from 2000 to 2001 and again from 2005 to 2013), he regularly ran coalition governments, and so he got used to forging compromises. As the son of another Norwegian politician (his father was both defense minister and foreign minister), he grew up eating breakfast with world leaders, among them Nelson Mandela, and thus learned the value of personal contacts. He once told a radio station that he hadn’t realized until many years later that it is not actually normal for foreign ministers to invite foreign leaders into their kitchen. Breakfast isn’t always practical, nowadays, and so, according to those around him, he makes up for it with flurries of text messages and a constant round of visits to NATO capitals. He attended the inauguration of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan last month, spent extra time in Istanbul, brought his wife and squeezed in some conversations about Swedish accession. In the 48 hours before I saw him, he had met with the prime ministers of Denmark and Bulgaria, as well as the president of France. He had attended a training exercise in Lithuania the previous weekend, and a meeting of the European Council, which includes all European Union heads of state, that morning. If he was tired of this endless carousel, he didn’t say so. But at this particular moment, what really qualifies Stoltenberg for this job is his clarity about the dangers posed by Russia and a special affinity for Ukraine. Here I am treading delicately, because we don’t yet know the full details of the package NATO will offer Ukraine at a summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, next week. The Ukrainians are asking for full NATO membership, which is nothing new: This subject was first seriously discussed at a NATO summit back in 2008. The decision taken at the time, to deny Ukraine a path to admission but to imply that it might be granted in the future, was the worst one possible, because it left Ukraine in a gray zone, aspiring to join the West but without any Western security guarantees. The world has shifted since then, and many more countries are now open to the idea of Ukrainian membership. Although the U.S. government is reluctant to support that while the war continues, for fear that American soldiers would immediately be drawn into the conflict, the Biden administration might eventually consider it too. For the moment, NATO will offer a series of proposals for longer-term military integration and aid. Ukraine will shift from Soviet to Western weapons systems and will be offered new institutional arrangements, including the creation of a NATO-Ukraine council, which don’t sound like much outside the Brussels bubble but mean a lot to people inside. Plans for eventually speeding up the process—Ukraine, like Finland and Sweden, may eventually be allowed to join without an extensive “membership action plan”—are also under consideration. Some countries may ultimately offer bilateral assurances as well. Naturally, Stoltenberg didn’t tell me which countries hold which positions, even though these are widely reported. “My main task,” he said, “is not to give interesting answers, but it is to ensure that we make progress on the issue of membership for Ukraine.” Julianne Smith, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, told me that Stoltenberg hasn’t been looking for “the least common denominator” in his negotiations, but is rather seeking to forge the best deal possible for Ukraine. Maybe this is American spin in advance of the summit, but if so, it has a broader point. Because Russian President Vladimir Putin believes that time is on his side, one of NATO’s central tasks is to convince him that time is not on his side, that the Western alliance will go on backing Ukraine, indefinitely. The expression long term comes up in a lot of transatlantic conversations about Ukraine. So does the word permanent. Stoltenberg’s durability is part of that message too. But why should a former leader of the Norwegian Labor Party (and youthful anti-war activist) be so dedicated to this task? I saw Stoltenberg speak with great emotion about Ukraine at a private event a few months ago, and last week I asked him about that too. He told me that this was the result of personal experience. He visited then-Communist Eastern Europe during the Cold War, and saw stark contrasts between its inhabitants and their counterparts in the West. “I thought these were totally different people,” he recalled. “They have different clothing, everything smells different … and it was really dark, and it was so far away. But now I go to Riga or to Tallinn—I was just in Vilnius—and these are very trendy, modern cities; if anything, they are more trendy, more modern, and more creative than in Scandinavia.” The people were not different after all: “This was about politics, the rules that they lived under, and I am ashamed that I didn’t realize that earlier. And to some extent, I also made the same mistake about Ukraine.” For Stoltenberg, as for so many Europeans, the current war stirred some even older memories. Turning to his office wall, Stoltenberg pointed to a photograph (black and white, in keeping with the austere aesthetic) of his grandfather at age 100, a former Norwegian army captain who was at one point in German captivity. Both his parents and grandparents used to walk around Oslo and point out locations of wartime events—“There was an explosion there, a sabotage attack here; the resistance used to hide in that flat”—and he knows this tour so well that he can do it with his own children. The Ukrainians, he told me, “are fighting the same fight that we fought against Nazism.” This dual realization—that Ukrainians aren’t so different from Westerners, and that they are fighting a familiar kind of war—isn’t unique to Stoltenberg. On the contrary, quite a few European leaders, and for that matter ordinary Europeans, have traveled the same journey, which is why he and others in and around NATO seem so confident in their “long term” and “permanent” commitment to Ukraine. He insists that this transformation began not last year but at the start of his term in 2014, when NATO had just been surprised and confused by the Russian invasion of Crimea and Donbas. After that, spending rose, and strategic plans shifted. In 2016, the alliance agreed to set up battle groups—led by Americans in Poland, Germans in Lithuania, Brits in Estonia, and Canadians in Latvia. By February 24, 2022, “NATO was prepared. We had all of the increased readiness, we had all of the increased defense spending, we had deployed forces to the eastern border, and we had agreed defense plans—new defense plans—that we activated that morning.” Not everybody had taken this shift seriously. In 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron described NATO as “brain dead.” The Russian president’s disregard for NATO and its leaders had far greater consequences. Putin claimed to be offended by NATO’s presence on his western border, but in practice he was not bothered by it, and certainly not deterred by it. Had he really believed in the transatlantic commitment to Ukraine, or had he really feared NATO aggression, he surely would not have invaded at all. But although historians will argue about whether NATO could have done more to deter Russia, it is already clear that NATO did much more to help Ukraine than Putin expected once the war began. Putin not only underestimated Ukraine; he also underestimated Multilateral Men—the officials who, like Jens Stoltenberg and his counterparts at the European Union, helped the White House put together the military, political, and diplomatic response. Putin believed his own propaganda, the same propaganda used by the transatlantic far right: Democracies are weak, autocrats are strong, and people who use polite, diplomatic language won’t defend themselves. This turned out to be wrong. “Democracies have proven much more resilient, much stronger than our adversaries believe,” Stoltenberg told me. And autocracies are more fragile: “As we’ve just seen, authoritarian systems can just, suddenly, break down.” Here is a prediction: Over the next year—and this one, everyone swears, really is his last—Stoltenberg won’t be making any charismatic speeches about Ukraine or NATO. He won’t join the fray, start arguments, or appear on television unless he has too. Instead, he will keep talking about a “multiyear program of moving Ukraine from Soviet standards and equipment doctrines to NATO standards and doctrines,” keep meeting with prime ministers and foreign ministers, keep working on the integration of Ukraine into Europe. And then, one day, it will have happened. © 2023 The Atlantic Media Co., as first published in The Atlantic. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

Med sitt krig i Ukraina har Ryssland skadat sina relationer med väst på ett sätt som kommer att bli svårt att reparera även efter att kriget är över. Medan Kreml har förklarat krig mot det ”kollektiva väst” är väst i sin tur mån om att isolera nationen i största möjliga utsträckning. Klyftorna är numera så pass stora att de märks av även bland vanliga ryssar, oavsett om de stöder Putins krig eller inte. Det skriver historieprofessorn Michael Kimmage och Rysslandsexperten Maria Lipman i Foreign Affairs. Så länge kriget fortsätter kommer det inte att finnas något sätt att stoppa utvecklingen, menar artikelförfattarna. Putin has created a rupture that will be difficult to repair. By Michael Kimmage, Maria Lipman June 15, 2023 The war that is currently raging between Russia and Ukraine began in 2014. It started with a clash between Russia and Ukraine over Ukraine’s orientation, so important to Moscow that it risked its working relationship with the West by annexing Crimea and invading eastern Ukraine—and so important to the West that it levied sanctions on Russia and made efforts to isolate Russia diplomatically. In 2022, Russia widened the war. The tremor of conflict in 2014 turned into an earthquake as far as Russia and the West were concerned. The Kremlin now presents itself as at war with the “collective West,” and in support of Ukraine, the West is eager to isolate Russia as much as it can. Although it is not the only driver of Russia’s dramatic break with Europe and the United States, the war has radically exacerbated this rupture. Russia’s internal transformation under Russian President Vladimir Putin long predates Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and its consequences will be felt long after the war is over. This transformation is Russia’s departure from the West—a shift even more all-encompassing than was the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. One half of this story is Russia’s separation from Europe and the United States and its loss of contact with people, governments, institutions, and companies in the West. The other half is the newly anti-Western tenor of Russian life, a trend that is both spontaneous and government mandated. The speed with which these changes have taken place is unprecedented in Russian history. In a dramatic intensification of its 2014 drive to stigmatize and isolate Russia, the West made cutting off the country an explicit policy goal. As of 2023, Russia is led by a man the International Criminal Court has designated a war criminal. The country is enmeshed in an escalating war that has horrified and terrified many people in the West. For as long as this Russia is in evidence, Western leaders will distance it from their markets, bar it from gaining access to their technology, and keep its ruling elite and broad swaths of its economy under sanctions. The rising wall of separation extends, at times, to Russians per se. In May, PEN America canceled a panel discussion with two Russian writers, both of them strong opponents of the war, at its annual World Voices Festival in New York. The organization had come under pressure from Ukrainians who had been invited to a separate event at the festival and who had threatened to withdraw if Russians also participated, regardless of whether they were supporters of Putin’s war. The decision was startling given PEN’s mission to protect literary freedom and its charter’s claim that “in all circumstances, and particularly in time of war, works of art, the patrimony of humanity at large, should be left untouched by national or political passion.” The more such episodes there are—banning Russians from public events simply because of their nationality—the more the Kremlin can gloat about its decision to separate itself from the West. As long as the war continues, there will be no way to undo this profound parting of the ways. Putin’s zeal for detaching Russia from Europe and the United States is mostly beyond the West’s control. Breaking with the West has become synonymous with his regime, a part of its political and ideological essence. The forces driving this break will be immensely difficult for any Putin successor to reverse, assuming that a leader who is not expressly anti-Western can still come to power in Russia. For decades, conflict between Russia and the West may be an entrenched aspect of the international order. Against the grain of the present moment, modern Russia was built in dialogue and contact with Europe. Beginning in the seventeenth century under Peter the Great and continuing under Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century, Russia strove to be ever more European. Thanks to their efforts, Russia joined the European state system. In 1812, Russia defeated Napoleon and then joined with Prussia and Austria to guarantee the continent’s stability. In the nineteenth century, Russia became one of Europe’s indispensable nations, a major component of the balance of power after the Congress of Vienna and an organic part of pre–World War I European diplomacy. In the nineteenth century, Russia made significant contributions from within European culture, especially with its literature, music, and ballet. Such were the achievements of Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, and many others. This efflorescence of Russian culture was stimulated by contact with European ideas and European works of art. And Russia’s ruling house was dynastically linked to several of its western European counterparts. Nicholas II, Russia’s tsar at the outbreak of World War I, was a first cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany and King George V of the United Kingdom. The aristocratic, integrated, open-ended Europe these leaders shared would be completely overturned by World War I and the upheavals that followed it. In the twentieth century, the Soviet Union was paradoxically European. Although anathema to the postwar governments of Europe and the United States, the Soviets’ reigning ideology—communism—was a Western creation. Inspired by Karl Marx, the Bolsheviks dreamed of a world communist revolution and held special expectations for Germany, Marx’s homeland, and for its proletariat. Soviet leaders measured the Soviet Union’s modernization by Western criteria. American methods of mass industrial production left their mark on the Soviet imagination, and the Bolsheviks had a formidable dedication to highbrow European culture, encompassing Bauhaus and neoclassical architecture, the European canon of literature and philosophy, and elements of European and American modernism. In the 1920s, the Soviet Union was at the forefront of the European avant-garde in the visual arts, film, and theater. After Joseph Stalin consolidated power around 1928, he reluctantly gave up on the dream of a worldwide proletarian revolution, consigning himself to “socialism in one country,” but he continued to rely on Western engineers and Western technology. Stalin was suspicious of Europe by nature and might have preferred a “fortress Soviet Union.” Yet geopolitics—in the form of Nazi Germany’s designs on Soviet territory—tethered him to Europe. By 1945, a victorious Soviet Union had brokered a deal with the Allies. It kept the countries of Eastern Europe isolated from the rest of the continent while also entrenching the Soviet Union in European politics. After Stalin’s death, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev returned to the idea of Soviet internationalism, an element of which was the partial opening of the Soviet Union to Europe in the 1950s. The Helsinki Final Act of 1975 affirmed Europe’s existing borders, leaving Soviet control of the Warsaw Pact nations uncontested. With it, the United States and Western Europe accepted and codified the Soviet Union’s status as a European power. Among the unexpected outcomes of Soviet life was the emergence inside the Soviet Union of a grassroots fascination with the West. By the 1970s, the Cold War had lost much of its bite, and the Soviet Union increasingly struggled to compete with the cultural and consumerist elan of the West: its cigarettes, its blue jeans, and its popular music. To a degree, the regime tried to suppress this westernization of Soviet taste and attitude. Though they threatened the regime’s monopoly on ideology, Western influences were very hard to contain, and the children of communist elites were among the first to embrace them. In the 1980s, an affection for the West amplified Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, paving the way for the peaceful breakup of the Soviet Union. From 1991 to at least the early 2010s, Russia westernized rapidly. In the 1990s, for the first time since the collapse of the Russian Empire, Western political structures became the general model for Russia’s leaders—contested elections, political parties, a parliament—even though the Kremlin subsequently did a great deal to manage each of these political structures. Russia’s economy became deeply interconnected with European markets, and its popular culture opened itself to Western influence from cuisine, to fashion, to entertainment. The Internet made the West easily accessible to Russians, including those without the means to travel to Europe or the United States. Nowhere was Russia’s westernization more vivid than in Moscow and Saint Petersburg—which had been renamed Leningrad in 1924 but had its prior, European name restored in 1991. In the post-Soviet period, both cities had evolved into European megalopolises. Putin, a native son of Saint Petersburg, Peter the Great’s vaunted “window on Europe,” had argued in 2000 that he could not imagine his country “in isolation from Europe.” Although Russia’s foreign policy grew more aggressive toward the West after 2014, this transition had a limited effect on Russian society, which remained generally open to the West. Even as late as 2021, countless academic and business ties persisted. Tourists went from Europe to Russia and from Russia to Europe. Commodities and ideas continued to be exchanged. Putin may not have sought an abrupt break with the West at the outset of his invasion of Ukraine. Rather, his strategic purpose was probably to achieve greater independence for Russia or, as he might put it, greater “sovereignty” from the United States and from Europe. Apparently convinced that the campaign would be short and successful, he may have envisioned a relationship with the West that was damaged by the war but not irreparably so. The West had never radically severed ties with Russia—not after Putin’s war against Georgia in 2008, nor even after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, its invasion of the Donbas in 2014, or its meddling in the U.S. election in 2016. But the risks that Putin was taking in 2022 were far greater. Even a quick triumph in Ukraine would have had far more serious repercussions with the West than anything he had previously done. By the time of the invasion, however, Putin had also been seeking to construct a Russia that was increasingly anti-Western in political form and that could exist apart from the West and in conflict with the West. That project dates back at least to the winter of 2011–12, when Putin was orchestrating his return to the presidency amid large antigovernment protests. Newly embattled, Putin strengthened his hold on power by branding protesters (most of them westernized urbanites) unpatriotic, by increasing the level of domestic political repression, by promoting greater cultural conservatism, and by pursuing an increasingly extreme foreign policy. Genuine Russian euphoria over the annexation of Crimea in 2014 consolidated Putin’s vision for the country, further alienating pro-Western intellectual and political voices. When the West rebuked Russia for the annexation of Crimea and imposed sanctions on Moscow, Putin could present himself as prophetic. His thesis that the West was out to weaken Russia, which he had articulated years earlier, was now given fresh narrative energy: Russians would have to fend for themselves against a West purportedly intent on keeping their country weak and submissive. If this was a break with the West, though, it was still a relatively mild break. After 2015, Russia’s relations with the West for the most part normalized, especially through energy ties with Europe. Once the war in eastern Ukraine stalemated, further crises did not seem imminent. The Normandy Format—the diplomatic group composed of France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine that was supposed to work toward a settlement of the Donbas conflict —plodded along. Even intense competition in Syria did not significantly complicate Russia’s relations with the West. During the topsy-turvy Trump administration, much was changing under the surface. Russia acquired an increasingly dark reputation in the United States, and a degree of anti-Russian hysteria found a home in American politics. At the same time, the military relationship between Ukraine and the United States was deepening, and the NATO alliance continued to expand under President Donald Trump, presenting setbacks for Putin. All the while, Russia was becoming more authoritarian. In retrospect, it is clear—even if it was not so at the time—that Putin’s patience with the West was wearing thin. When the 2022 invasion of Ukraine almost immediately turned sour for the Kremlin, and Western leaders rushed to sever ties with Russia, Putin did not have to improvise in his domestic policy. In his wartime actions at home, he could simply synthesize and intensify existing approaches. He ratcheted up repression to the point of destroying independent media—rendering any public criticism of the government punishable by arrest or the threat of arrest. He militarized the cultural conservatism he had long been nurturing. And he made anti-Westernism a fulcrum of his domestic policy, presenting the West as dangerously decadent and Western governments as ruthlessly aggressive in their will to disempower Russia. According to this narrative, the West was bent on destroying the Russian people through a proxy war or even—so the Kremlin has claimed—by developing biological weapons for use against Russia. Nearly sixteen months into the war, ordinary Russians harbor substantial and most likely enduring anger and resentment toward the West. In the later decades of the Soviet Union, the government largely failed to convince Soviet citizens of an implacably hostile West and, in the 1980s, the barriers between the Soviet Union and the West were weakening. But since February 2022, Russian institutions—scientific, educational, cultural, athletic—have lost the option of partnering with Western counterparts. Contact has been severed on both sides. The Kremlin wants to keep the West at bay, and the West has erected a sanctions regime that makes institutional cooperation with Putin’s Russia impossible; even Western businesses and institutions unaffected by sanctions have chosen not to maintain a presence in the country. In today’s Russia, there is no longer any counterbalancing force to anti-Western hostility. Russia’s decoupling from the West is more than a harried response to sanctions. And it is not exactly a turn to autarky. Since the start of the war, Moscow has developed—not diminished—its relations with the outside world. Although it can no longer trade with Europe and the United States or harness Western technology for its own modernization, there are many parts of the world with which Russia can increase trade, including China, India, and even Turkey, a member of the NATO alliance. There are many non-Western paths available to Russia in the prosecution of the war and in the sustenance of its economy. Putin appears to see this reorientation as the foundation for Russia’s long-term strength and autonomy. Once it is accomplished, Russia will be a “unique country-civilization… performing a historically unique mission aimed at […]building a multipolar international system,” in the language of the Russian Concept of Foreign Policy, which the Kremlin adopted in 2023. A unique Russia will have freed itself from a West that Putin may sincerely believe is in chronic decline. The weak link in Putin’s project of uprooting Russia from the West is neither economic nor military. The current sanctions regime notwithstanding, the Kremlin will find ways to continue the war. The more embedded Russia becomes in non-Western economic structures, the more its military will be able to carry on. The weak link for Putin is cultural. For 300 years, Russia’s emulation of and immersion in Western culture has been integral to its own evolution: China and the so-called global South cannot replace Europe as a model for Russia’s culture. A modern Russia that has turned its back on the West is a Russia that has turned its back on itself. Despite Putin’s self-image as Russia’s savior, as the political leader who can win what he terms his country’s “battle for self-determination and for the right to be itself,” his radical anti-Westernism is in fact creating a Russia that has never been. In Europe and the United States, Russia’s flight from the West was not wished for prior to 2022. The metaphor of an off-ramp for tensions with Moscow—invoked widely in 2014 when disagreements over Ukraine first arose—implied that there was some common destination for Russia and the West. Russia had swerved onto the wrong road and needed to be redirected, or it needed to redirect itself. U.S. President Joe Biden spent his first few months in office trying to mend relations with Russia, giving the green light to Germany with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and meeting with Putin in Geneva in June 2021, after which Russia and the United States established working groups on strategic stability. A functional relationship with Putin seemed possible. After the war began, however, the West’s posture changed dramatically. In addition to aiming for Russia’s “strategic defeat” in Ukraine, Western leaders and policymakers embraced the unspoken end goal of either eliminating Russia from Europe or making Russia’s presence in Europe as small as possible. The sanctions and travel restrictions they have imposed have made it much harder for Russian businesses to operate in European countries. Their efforts to circumscribe Russian influence in Moldova and in the Balkans acquired new urgency, and outside of Austria, the notion that some European states could be neutral was no longer acceptable. Switzerland provided military aid to Ukraine. Finland and Sweden, worried about Putin’s recklessness, applied for NATO membership, while the notion of NATO as the security umbrella for all of Europe, including Ukraine, has been gaining momentum. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky responded to the 2022 invasion with an appeal to Russians outside the Kremlin. He has since made it clear that Putin’s Russia must be kept as economically and culturally far from Europe as possible: Ukraine’s entry into Europe and Russia’s exit from Europe have become two sides of the same geopolitical coin. The taint of war has also altered the valence of Russian culture in Europe and the United States—for whatever reason, much more so than was the case during the Cold War. Although the United States refused to send its athletes to Moscow in 1980 after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Russian writers like Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn continued to be lionized as voices of conscience. It is hard to imagine any contemporary Russian writer or Russian cultural figure being treated in a similar way. In some quarters, a cloud of suspicion has formed over core parts of the Russian classical canon, including such writers as Alexander Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. Some cultural institutions now approach these figures not as examples of Russia’s contributions to the West but as specimens of Russia’s eternal imperialism or as writers who have lent a patina of sophistication to Putinism. The effect is to make them less European, less Western, and more “foreign.” The breakup between Russia and the West has acquired an aura of permanence. For Putin’s Russia to rethink its ties to the West, the West would have to withdraw its military support for Ukraine and agree to a neutral Ukraine or a divided Ukraine in which Russia has dominion over at least half of the country. This is highly unlikely to happen. For the West to rethink its ties to Russia, Russia would have to end the war, participate in the war crimes trials of Russians, turn Putin over to The Hague, and pay war reparations to Ukraine. This, too, is highly unlikely. No matter how long the war continues, and regardless of how it ends, it will almost certainly leave in place a crucial new reality of twenty-first-century international relations. Russia will be absent from the West and the West absent from Russia, an abyss of hostility between them. MICHAEL KIMMAGE is Professor of History at the Catholic University of America and a Senior Nonresident Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. From 2014 to 2016, he served on the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. MARIA LIPMAN is Senior Visiting Fellow at George Washington University’s Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies and Co-Editor of the institute’s Russia.Post. © 2023 Council on Foreign Relations, publisher of Foreign Affairs. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency. Read the original article at Foreign Affairs.

Sweden Hills skapades för nästan fyrtio år sedan av hustillverkaren Sweden House. Idén kom när den svenske ambassadören besökte området och slogs av hur mycket naturen påminde om den i Sverige, skriver My Modern Met.

1984 började staden byggas och idag bor omkring invånare där, skriver Swedes In The States.

Både kräftskivor och midsommarfirande i den japanska staden

Den lilla orten har sedan det byggdes infört flera svenska seder som gjort att den fått en systerstad i Sverige, nämligen Leksand. En systerstad är ett juridiskt avtal mellan länder för att främja kulturella band.

Varje år håller invånarna i Sweden Hills både kräftskivor och midsommarfirande med midsommarstång och hela rubbet.

Faluröda hus, folkhantverk och en enorm dalahäst lockar både japaner och svenska turister till den unga staden. 

Så mycket kostar det att hyra ett hus i Sweden Hills

Vill man hyra ett rött hus ihop med sitt midsommargäng för två veckor kostar det ungefär 10 000 svenska kronor. Vill man lämna Sverige en längre tid kan man hyra ett hus för en månad och det kostar strax över 13 000 kronor.