Europeans see a collision with Russia is a growing probability. That does not seem to have occurred to President Biden.

At the NATO summit in Madrid, Finland was invited to join the alliance. What does this mean for Finland?

On June 28-30, 2022, NATO leaders gathered in Madrid, Spain, to discuss the major issues and challenges facing the alliance. The summit ended with far-reaching decisions that will have a dire impact on global peace and security. Hailed as “historic,” the summit was indeed transformative: NATO produced a new Strategic Concept and identified what it says are the key threats to western security, interests, and values — none other than Russia and China.

The US-led West continues to push NATO’s eastward expansion and build NATO-like military alliances in the Asia-Pacific region such as AUKUS, the much-touted Australia-United Kingdom－United States strategic alliance. Now the Western powers with some other countries are holding RIMPAC 2022, or Rim of the Pacific, military exercises, the largest in the program’s history, which will further increase uncertainties in the Asia-Pacific.

Instead of lowering the chances of war, the membership of the two Nordic countries increases the risk for the entire alliance.

Incongruity was the hallmark of the extraordinary NATO summit just concluded in Madrid. NATO offered bluster and promised muster: more troops against its “most significant and direct threat ,” Russia. Meanwhile, Russian “cauldron”maneuvers in Donbas methodically destroyed or enveloped major units of Kyiv’s army, further strengthening Russia’s position there.

As the war in Ukraine drags on, already diverging camps in the Atlantic Alliance are likely to fracture further.

As NATO holds its Summit in Madrid on June 28-30, the war in Ukraine is taking center stage. During a pre-Summit June 22 talk with Politico, NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg bragged about how well-prepared NATO was for this fight because, he said: “This was an invasion that was predicted, foreseen by our intelligence services.” Stoltenberg was talking about Western intelligence predictions in the months leading up to the February 24 invasion, when Russia insisted it was not going to attack. Stoltenberg, however, could well have been talking about predictions that went back not just months before the invasion, but decades.

As weapons inventories dwindle, there’s little chance the West today can build a surge hardware-making capacity

Germans say the moment of truth for most children comes at the end of Grade 4 when primary education ends in Grundschule. By that reckoning, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) at 73 is in “second childishness and mere oblivion / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything” — to borrow from Jaques’ famous soliloquy in Shakespeare’s As you Like It.