Lloyd Austin reaffirms commitment to Sweden, predicts it will join NATO ‘before July’
Mike Brest
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Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin met with his Swedish counterpart on Wednesday and reaffirmed the United States’s commitment to Sweden, predicting it would become a member of NATO by this summer.
Austin met with Swedish Defense Minister Pal Jonson at the headquarters of the Swedish navy in Musko Naval Base near Stockholm during the first leg of his four-day trip to Sweden and Germany for the next meeting of the Defense Contact Group, which meets monthly to discuss the war in Ukraine. He told Jonson that he hoped Sweden would be able to join the alliance by the summer.
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“We’ll do what we’ve done thus far and even more of it and then gauging our very important allies and encouraging them to come to that decision as quickly as possible,” he said during a press conference alongside Jonson. “And I joined the other 30 ministers of defense in the alliance, and I know that they feel the same way. Again, I’m sure that these countries will reach that decision. And then I feel confident that they’ll reach it before July.”
“You will … add a lot of value to NATO, our overall effort,” Austin said. “You have … a highly professional military, and you have invested a lot in modernization over the last several years. As you know, our forces have done a lot together and, thereby, increased interoperability here over the last several years. We have one of the largest exercises in recent history ongoing as we speak, and I look forward to some good results coming out of that.”
He wants it to happen before the NATO summit is set to take place in Lithuania in early July.
Both Finland and Sweden applied to join the alliance last year following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Finland joined the alliance last month, but Turkey and Hungary have objected to Sweden’s application.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan objected to the Nordic applications. Erdogan initially cited Swedish and Finnish arms embargoes on Turkey, as well as a broader complaint that they are too welcoming of Kurdish immigrants. Erdogan would condemn some of these immigrants as terrorists linked to the PKK, a group of Turkish Kurdish separatists.
U.S. and European officials agree that the PKK is a foreign terrorist organization, but they have worked closely with Iraqi and Syrian Kurds throughout the fight to dismantle the Islamic State since 2014 despite Erdogan’s hostility toward the group. The three countries negotiated a trilateral memorandum to resolve the disputes, but Erdogan remains unsatisfied with Sweden’s performance, although NATO’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has praised Sweden’s fulfillment of the trilateral agreement.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government has slow-walked the applications, similar to Turkey. Hungary’s Parliament hastened a vote to welcome Finland into the alliance once Erdogan announced that the country would proceed with ratifying Finland’s application. With the dispute between Sweden and Turkey underway, Budapest is pressing Sweden to undercut the European Union’s decision to freeze Hungary’s access to “EU cohesion funds” — a step taken by Brussels due to a widespread perception that Orban’s government is corrupt.
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Secretary of State Antony Blinken mused at the time that Finland’s admission into the alliance was a credit to Russian President Vladimir Putin because the war prompted Finland and Sweden to end their neutrality in exchange for being protected by NATO. By accepting Finland as NATO’s 31st member, it roughly doubled the border shared between the alliance with Russia.
On Monday, the U.S. decided to sell $259 million in software to Turkey as the country seeks to upgrade its F-16 fighter jets, but Ankara also wants to buy 40 new F-16s from the U.S. Some members of Congress, however, want to wait until Turkey allows Sweden to join the alliance.