US Bases in Finland Will Make Nordic Nation Less Safe: Here’s Why
© AFP 2023 / ELIAS LAHTINEN
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Finland will provide the United States with access to 15 military bases under a defense pact reached following Helsinki’s move to join NATO. Far from strengthening Finland’s security, allowing US troops to set up shop on Finnish soil could make the country and region less safe. A leading Russian security analyst explains why.
The Finnish-US Defense Cooperation Agreement, expected to be formally signed on December 18 by Finland’s cabinet, and approved by parliament after that, has been justified by Defense Minister Antti Hakkanen on the grounds that the United States should help “protect” Finland.
“Finland’s close defense cooperation with the United States dates back to the early 1990s, and the DCA would not be possible without this long history of cooperation,” Hakkanen said.
“The signature of the DCA is not the end point, but a new step towards even closer cooperation between the defense administrations of Finland and the United States. The agreement reflects the United States’ commitment to Finland’s security and it creates the conditions for cooperation in times of crisis. Finland is not alone in defending itself, but does so as a NATO ally and together with the United States,” he added.
If approved, the pact will grant US forces access to military bases and facilities across the Nordic nation, from its Baltic Sea coastlines to remote areas of the country’s interior to a major training base in Finnish Lapland crossing the Arctic Circle.
The US would be allowed to preposition defense equipment, supplies and materiel across the country, deploy vehicles, warships and aircraft and take measures to ensure their “protection, safety, and security,” with Helsinki also waiving “its primary right to exercise criminal jurisdiction” over American troops, a waiver other countries hosting large quantities of US servicemen have come to regret.
The Kremlin has expressed alarm over the basing agreement. “It will certainly lead [to increased tensions],” presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Friday.
“We can only express regret in this regard, because we really once had excellent relations with Finland. No one threatened anyone, there were no problems or claims against one another, no one infringed on one another’s interests, there was mutual respect, and so on. Therefore, of course, now that Finland has become a member of NATO, and when NATO’s military infrastructure is going to be entering Finland, this will pose a threat to us, clearly,” Peskov said.
Finland, which shares a nearly 1,300 km long border with Russia, applied to join the US-led NATO bloc in 2022, after the Donbass crisis escalated into a full-blown NATO-Russia proxy war in Ukraine. The country completed its entry in April, bringing an end to decades of neutrality that Finland had enjoyed since the close of WWII.
Russia has so far demonstrated a sense of “restraint” in connection with Finland’s accession to NATO and the buildup of American military power in Europe, says Institute of World Economy and International relations security analyst and researcher Dmitry Stefanovich.
Nevertheless, Moscow has been forced to react to growing threats to its northern flank. “We have all heard about the creation of two new military districts, about a new division and about the strengthening of military aviation. The most important thing is that as a result of all of these processes, the architecture of mutual deterrence is changing both in the non-nuclear and nuclear dimensions,” Stefanovich told Sputnik.
“At the same time, these processes are not very fast. If the political will is there, the trends can be changed somewhat,” the observer stressed. “That is, we can once again realize that mutual deterrence is fraught with the constant underestimation or overestimation of threats, requires a huge infusion of resources into the military sphere that could be useful in other places, and most importantly, creates conditions for escalation, including unintentional escalation, simply by virtue of very powerful armed forces saturated with various weapons being mobilized and standing opposite one another.”
In such conditions, any flashpoint could quickly turn into large-scale fighting that could prove difficult to stop, Stefanovich said.
“The alternative is the restoration, strengthening and development of security confidence-building measures in the military sphere and the normalization of work, including through the OSCE. And in the end, a transition to something vaguely reminiscent of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe,” the researcher suggested. “In any case, some kind of regional agreements are quite possible,” as are channels of communication on a military-to-military level.
Otherwise, the basing agreement will threaten to escalate already sky-high tensions between Russia, NATO and the US, this time along a new front which did not exist even during the Cold War.
20 November 2023, 09:58 GMT
