Professors Ola Tunander from the Peace Research Institute Oslo and Glenn Diesen from the University of Southeastern Norway were asked if the Western military front against Russia could be moved from Ukraine to Sweden, Finland, and the Baltic States.
They were asked the question on May 28, 2024. Both experts said they don’t believe in a hot war with Russia, but the statements were made before the Swedish government decided to ratify the military DCA agreement in June.
The agreement, which allows the United States to use 17 military bases in Sweden, will come into effect as of August 2024. The US has a similar agreement with Finland.
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Later, after the Swedish government finally signed the DCA agreement, NewsVoice returned to Diesen and Tunander and asked whether they still believed Sweden could be used as a deployment area for a greater war against Russia.
Ola Tunander comments by mail:
”In the 1980s, Americans complained about Norwegian security policy restrictions. The construction of weapons of depots and pre-storage of military equipment in Trøndelag in central Norway and not in the north was perceived as idiotic, but the Norwegians did not want to become a target for Soviet pre-emptive strikes, which easily would have been the problem if this pre-storage had been located in the North.
But in mid-1990s, I remembered an U.S. attaché from the embassy who said that it may not have been such a bad idea after all, because you could quite easily transport materiel from Trøndelag through Sweden to the Baltic states. Sweden could be used as a transport link in the same way as we know from a previous war.
Sweden was also an unsinkable aircraft carrier, where the Baltic Sea served as a protection. For obvious reasons, the most senior U.S. military attaché in Sweden was, at least during the Cold War, an air officer, while the most senior attaché in Norway was and is a naval officer.
Under President Reagan, the U.S. Navy pushed for ”The Maritime Strategy,” which ultimately involved horizontal (or geographical) escalation in the event of a war on the Central Front, in other words, to hit the Soviets, where they were most vulnerable.
To escalate vertically into a tactical nuclear war was seen as possibly catastrophic, partly because it would be a terrible devastation in Europe and partly because no one knew whether such a war could escalate to a strategic nuclear war, which also included the United States.
The idea of the Maritime Strategy was that, in the very first minutes of a war, the US Navy should begin to sink Soviet strategic submarines (with their intercontinental ballistic missiles), which constituted the Soviet Union’s second-strike capability. The Navy should also try to knock out the Kola bases, which were of enormous strategic importance to Moscow.
If the US Navy succeeded in this, the United States could take out the land-based Soviet missiles, and that knowledge would, in turn, force Moscow to retreat, the Americans claimed. No one knows if it would work, but it was very risky in any case.
The problem is that the same thinking is almost certainly relevant also today. The Kola bases and strategic submarines are vulnerable and of vital importance to Moscow. They can be taken out by the use of very silent attack submarines but also with aircraft and missiles from Scandinavian territory, which in turn can open up for a Russian missile attack to preempt the American attack.
In the event of a stalemate in Ukraine, or perhaps rather in the event that Ukrainian and Western forces are losing the war in Ukraine, Western countries such as the United States or Great Britain could seek to identify vulnerable points for the Russians that, at the same time, are of great strategic importance, i.e., they would very likely focus on the High North, and with the DCA agreement between the United States and the Nordic countries, this problem will increase radically.
As I wrote in my article on Russian military thinking, the Russians want a double buffer zone with an inner zone of control and an outer zone of denial, where American air bases, etc., will be knocked out, and probably as early as possible.”
In short
”In short, the DCA makes the Nordic countries a target in the very first phase of the war. To have a war in the North implies an attack on the very vital Kola Bases and the strategic submarines. For the same reason as the U.S. wants to profit from this Russian vulnerability in a war, the Russians want to avoid it. They will avoid a war in Northern Europe and even more in the High North.”
Read a longer English version published on Substack on June 3 and the shorter version in Swedish in Parabol.
Proxy war against Russia
Glenn Diesen concludes that the war in Ukraine has become a proxy conflict where the primary goal of the NATO Cartel is to weaken Russia.
He argues that this strategic objective overshadows any genuine efforts to help Ukraine, as evidenced by the continuous escalation of the conflict and the significant human and material costs borne by Ukrainians.
Related in NewsVoice: Colonel Douglas Macgregor’s Warning: Sweden Sold Itself to Fight Russia
Glenn Diesen calls for a reassessment of Western policies, emphasizing the need for genuine efforts to help Ukraine rather than using it as a pawn in great power politics.
”We see now also that Ukraine is losing. This is a war of attrition. Every day, they’re losing scores of men, they’re losing all their military equipment, they’re losing their land, and the country is being destroyed.
And yet, we’re not talking about even negotiating with the Russians. We can offer something. We can offer an end to NATO expansion. That would be a huge bargaining chip if we want to get a good deal from the Russians.
But we don’t. Instead, we’re talking about how about we start expelling Ukrainian civilians from Poland or Germany, if we just stop giving them social benefits, they have to go home. And then we can fill up the trenches with more men who don’t want to fight.
So this is all being done again under this umbrella of trying to help Ukraine.
So that’s my main point. I think there’s a difference between hating Russia and loving the Ukrainians. And if we’re willing to fight the Russians to the last Ukrainians, I don’t think it’s based on anything to do with being pro-Ukrainian or helping the Ukrainians.
It’s more about targeting the Russians. And as all the American leaders keep saying all the time, this is what the war is about. We get to knock out the Russians and focus all our resources on the Chinese.
So again, I think this should be the point of departure when we discuss the war in Ukraine. It’s not about helping anyone. It’s about using Ukraine in the very cynical game of great power politics.”
Related
- NewsVoice: Glenn Diesen: The NATO Cartel Uses Ukraine to Confront Russia – There is no other way to put it
- NewsVoice: US-Swedish Military Exercise with a Strategic Message to Russia
- The Dissident Club
- University of Southeastern Norway
- Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO)