Turkey okays Finland, Sweden’s NATO entry
Plus, a guest post on the ending of abortion rights in the US
Hello! I hope you had a good week. Turkey, which was blocking Finland and Sweden’s entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), finally relented this week. This has cleared the path of the two Nordic nations to join the military alliance — amid what they see as a new Russian threat at their doorstep. But there were other key developments at the NATO summit. That’s our key point of focus this week.
We also have a guest post by S Shobana on the recent ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States on ending abortion rights there.
There’re a bunch of other developments we’re looking at from across the world. The Group of Seven (G7) nations met this week and agreed on a series of initiatives, Argentina and Iran have applied to join the BRICS and Scotland is eyeing another independence referendum next year. Let’s get started.
This day that year
1997: The British crown colony of Hong Kong was officially handed over to the People’s Republic of China after 156 years. The city became China’s “special administrative region” for 50 years (up to 2047), with the aim of retaining its own economic and governance systems under the “one country, two systems” principle.
1863: The Battle of Gettysburg between the Union and Confederate forces, one of the most important battles of the American Civil War, began. It involved the largest number of casualties of the civil war and is considered the civil war’s turning point.
Turkey okays Finland, Sweden’s NATO entry
Members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), on June 29, formally invited Finland and Sweden to join the military alliance. The invitation was extended at the annual summit meeting in Madrid, Spain. This marks the beginning of the next stage of the process for the two Nordic nations to join the western military bloc — a shift triggered by the changed European architecture following the Russian invasion of Ukraine earlier this year. Historically, Finland (which borders Russia) and Sweden had opted to remain neutral. But the prevailing security threat perception and a very quick change in public sentiment has pushed the two nations to join NATO.
Finland and Sweden boast of modern military hardware that is compatible with that of other NATO members. Plus, the pros of their addition to military alliance (such as gaining the ability to seize control of the Baltic Sea, ability to threaten Russian defence installations in the Kola Peninsula and ease of blockading Kaliningrad) significantly outweigh the cons (such as frustrating Russia further).
While it was widely expected that both the Scandinavian nations would be allowed into NATO, their applications had been temporarily blocked by Turkey, which had cited its own security interests for doing so. But that changed on June 28, when Turkey, Finland and Sweden signed a tripartite agreement addressing Ankara’s concerns, including those about arms exports and the fight against terrorism.
As per this new agreement, Sweden will intensify work on Turkish extradition requests of suspected militants. Sweden and Finland will also amend their laws to toughen their approach to them. The two nations will lift their restrictions on selling arms and ammunition to Turkey. Remember, when the two countries applied to join NATO in May, Turkey has threatened to veto their entry saying that Sweden, particularly, was hosting members of groups — such as the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) — which the Turkish government considers as terrorists. The Turkish government has painted this agreement as a victory, claiming that Turkey “got what it wanted”, which meant “full cooperation with Turkey in the fight against the PKK and its affiliates”. It’s worth noting that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s popularity has plummeted in the past year and he’ll be facing a stiff contest in next year’s election. So, he’s trying to salvage as many “victories” as possible, hoping to jump-start his electoral prospects.
Yet, just a couple of days later, Erdoğan warned that his government could still block the process (and Turkey’s parliament could refuse to ratify the tripartite deal) if Finland and Sweden fail to fully meet the expectations.
How Moscow sees this: With Finland and Sweden taking a step closer to joining NATO, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that he would respond in kind if the military alliance deployed soldiers and defence infrastructure in its two Nordic neighbours. “With Sweden and Finland, we don’t have the problems that we have with Ukraine. They (Finland and Sweden) want to join NATO, go ahead,” Putin told Russian state television. “But they must understand there was no threat before, while now, if military contingents and infrastructure are deployed there, we will have to respond in kind and create the same threats for the territories from which threats towards us are created”.
“Everything was fine between us, but now there might be some tensions, there certainly will,” Putin said. “It’s inevitable if there is a threat to us.”
This, of course, is a difficult moment for Moscow. As Biden noted: “He (Russian President Putin) wanted Finlandisation of NATO. He got the NATO-isation of Finland”.
The NATO accession protocol for both Finland and Sweden will be formally signed on July 5, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg confirmed.
NATO’s new Strategic Concept
NATO’s previous strategic concept, released in 2010, had pushed for cooperation with Russia. However, with everything that has happened in the last few months, and since the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, the alliance is looking at Russia differently in the new strategic concept. The strategic concept pins the blame for disturbance in “Euro-Atlantic area” on Russia, saying that “the Russian Federation has violated the norms and principles that contributed to a stable and predictable European security order”. NATO has now expectedly said, in as many words, that Russia “is the most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security”. The document suggests that the possibility of an attack against the sovereignty and territorial integrity of NATO members can’t be discounted. However, NATO sought to highlight that the allies are not seeking confrontation with Russia and will “respond to Russian threats and hostile actions in a united and responsible way”.
On China: NATO said in the new strategic concept that it considers China’s “stated ambitions and coercive policies” as a challenge to its “interests, security and values”. China “strives to subvert the rules-based international order, including in the space, cyber and maritime domains,” the document suggests. The military alliance said it will boost “shared awareness, enhance our resilience and preparedness, and protect against the PRC’s (People’s Republic of China) coercive tactics and efforts to divide the alliance”.
This is the first time NATO’s strategic concept has recognised the challenges posed by China’s rise. And in fact, the NATO summit, for the first time, also included its key non-member Indo-Pacific partners — Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea. All of them are concerned about China’s growing influence.
Read the full ‘strategic concept’ document here.
Besides inviting Finland and Sweden to join NATO and endorsing the new strategic concept, leaders of the military alliance agreed to strengthen NATO's forward defences (especially on the eastern flank) and increase the number of high readiness forces to over 300,000, invest more to increase common funding and continue long-term support for Ukraine through a “strengthened Comprehensive Assistance Package”.
The end of abortion rights in the US
By S Shobana
Last Friday, it finally happened. Six unelected Supreme Court justices in the United States stripped bodily autonomy from millions of women by overturning the fundamental right to abortion established nearly 50 years ago.
The verdict in the case, Dobbs vs. Jackson, came more than a month after Politico published a leaked opinion by conservative judge Samuel Altio indicating that the court was prepared to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe vs. Wade ruling that had legalised abortion nationwide.
Well, it still didn't soften the blow.
As the court’s three liberal justices wrote in their dissenting opinion, “One result of today’s decision is certain: the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens.”
The judgement, experts say, is expected to disproportionately harm poor people and women of colour. Imagine the human crisis that will unfold when children who will be born aren't wanted in the first place, to parents unable or unwilling to look after them, combined with a state power that can force a woman to “bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial costs”.
Restricting access to abortion doesn't stop people from seeking it. All it does is make it more dangerous.
This nightmare came into force after clinics in at least eight states — Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, South Dakota, Utah, Louisiana and Oklahoma — stopped performing abortions following the verdict. More states will quickly follow suit.
Conservative judge Clarence Thomas who voted to overturn Roe, meanwhile, seized the moment and urged the Supreme Court to also reconsider the landmark rulings that protect the right to contraception, same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage (Thomas is the same guy who has been accused of sexual harassment and whose wife Ginni Thomas tried hard to overturn Joe Biden’s presidential election victory over Donald Trump).
The Supreme Court practically reduced women to second-class citizens a day after it struck down a hundred-and-eleven-year-old law that imposed strict restrictions on carrying concealed firearms in public for self defence.
The same week, the court decided that it should regulate women more than guns despite a series of mass shootings in the country.
The reverberations of the June 24 ruling will be felt far beyond the US, which projects itself as a beacon of democracy and freedom.
A statement by United Nations Human rights experts says: “The excessive use of the legislative process, executive power and judicial authority over the years to restrict and criminalise abortion rather than to expand it and ensure equitable access to safe abortion services, signals a deeply troubling erosion of democratic values and process.”
Digital experts have also warned that people’s search histories, location data, messages and other personal information could be used law by enforcement agencies investigating abortion cases or to identify anyone who is planning to get an abortion. Anti-abortion “advocates” are adept at using modern technology despite being stuck in the past when it comes to understanding reproductive rights.
Around the world, including in India, courts have relied upon Roe for their constitutional recognition of reproductive rights.
“The US Constitution has long been the starting point for thinking about individual rights, state power, and the role of courts, even for those of us who’ve disagreed with its fundamentals,” legal commentator Gautam Bhatia said. “Watching the unravelling — along with the damage and harm - is very saddening.”
As we women process these tumultuous events, we also wonder “Are we next?”
Other must-read pieces:
We’re not going back to the time before Roe. We’re going somewhere worse, writes Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker.
In Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, women had almost no rights. The Supreme Court ruling is ‘making it real’, she said in The Atlantic in May.
Linda Greenhouse writes in The New York Times a requiem for the Supreme Court.
The New York Times’ blow-by-blow account of how the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade.
S Shobana is a New Delhi-based journalist at Scroll.in.
What else?
G7 summit
Leaders of the Group of Seven (G7) nations met at the picturesque Schloss Elmau — a castle in the Bavarian Alps of Germany — this week. They agreed to stand by Ukraine “for as long as it takes”. Their financial support would amount to $29.5 billion this year. The G7 nations said they will “expand targeted sanctions [against Russia] to further restrict [Moscow’s] access to key industrial inputs, services and technologies produced by our economies, particularly those supporting Russia’s armament industrial base and technology sector”. The G7 leaders said they are working to end energy dependence on Russia by phasing out Russian coal and oil, and expanding renewable energies, renewable hydrogen and energy efficiency. They also agreed to establish a “Climate Club’ by the end of the year to help in the fight against climate change. More importantly, they committed — for the first time — to decarbonise electricity supply by 2035 and promised to end coal-fired power generation. In a move that is being seen as a counter to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), G7 nations said they will collectively mobilise up to $600 billion in public and private investment for infrastructure over the next five years through their national and regional initiatives.
Read the summit’s detailed outcomes here.
Argentina, Iran apply to join BRICS
Argentina and Iran have applied to join the BRICS. The admission process is already under way, but the final decision about their addition to the group of major emerging economies will be made by consensus, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced. Brazil, China, India and Russia — the B, R, I and C — first started the grouping in 2009, and South Africa — the S — joined a year later. The BRICS have since emerged as a strong emerging markets alternative to the West. With the West trying to isolate Russia, and China increasingly involved in an economic competition with the US, the BRICS has become a heavyweight. The five countries together account for more than 40 percent of the world’s population as well as over a quarter of the global economy. Though India has moved closer to the West in certain domains such as defence, remaining a part of the BRICS is New Delhi’s balancing act.
Iran has had very rough relations with the West since the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s regime, backed by the US, was toppled in the 1979 Islamic Revolution there. The country, holding the world’s second largest gas reserves, has been facing western sanctions in response to its nuclear program and Tehran's support for groups like Hezbollah. Argentina’s economy, meanwhile, is the third biggest in Latin America. But it has faced a series of economic crises and has dealt with inflation in recent years.
I wonder if the BRICS will become BRIICSA, or if it just doesn’t make sense to change the name every time new members join.
Scotland’s first minister pushes for fresh independence referendum
Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has proposed October 19, 2023 as the date for a fresh independence referendum. Scotland has an active independence movement, seeking to separate from the United Kingdom. Just like in the previous unsuccessful referendum held in 2014, the question asked to the voters in Scotland would be: “Should Scotland be an independent country?”.
Sturgeon has asked UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson for a formal consent to hold the referendum. Johnson has maintained that it’s not the right time to hold such a vote. The Scottish government would go ahead with the plan if the UK government doesn’t approve the demand, Sturgeon said. Yet, the Scottish first minister contended that a referendum would still need to be “indisputably lawful”. The Supreme Court is being asked if the Scottish government has the power to hold such a referendum on its own, without approval from London. If the proposed referendum next year does not happen, her political party could treat the next general election (scheduled for 2024) as a “de facto referendum”. Meaning, Scotland could become independent if Sturgeon’s Scottish National Party (SNP) picks up a majority of votes there in the nationwide parliamentary election.
In the 2014 vote, 55 percent of the voters in Scotland had opted to keep it within the UK. About 44 percent had voted in favour of independence. But the situation has changed drastically since then. The UK has left the European Union (EU) even though a wide majority of Scots wanted to remain in it. The UK is going through a cost-of-living crisis and voters in Scotland — who have consistently voted for the pro-independence and Sturgeon-led SNP — have grown averse to London-based decision making especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. The tricky political position PM Johnson’s Conservative Party finds itself in due to the ‘partygate’ scandal isn’t helping matters either. Therefore, the Scottish political leadership has reasons to believe that the outcome of a fresh independence referendum could be different this time.
Interesting stuff
“Whereas Washington sometimes relies on soft power to distract from its hard power, Beijing sometimes draws attention to its hard power to buttress its soft power.” Maria Repnikova, Associate Professor at the Georgia State University and author, writes in Foreign Affairs about the US and China’s quests to project soft power. Read the full piece here.
“[Russian President Vladimir] Putin has learned a great deal from the Soviet collapse, managing to avoid the financial chaos that doomed the Soviet state despite intense sanctions. Russia today features a very different combination of resilience and vulnerability than the one that characterized the late-era Soviet Union.” Vladislav Zubok, Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and author, writes in Foreign Affairs that “it would be deterministic for the West to expect that a weakened Russia would fall” and that there'll be a period where the West will coexist with a “weakened and humiliated but still autocratic Russian state”. Read the full piece here.
“[For] all the talk of European resolve, the past few months have in fact underlined something else: the continent’s dependence on the United States to resolve its security problems.” Emma Ashford, senior fellow at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council and author, writes in The New York Times why Europe remains dependent on the US for its defence and how an American retreat could leave the European states high and dry. Read the opinion piece here.
Bangladesh opened the massive Padma Bridge on June 25. Crossing over the Padma River (the main distributary of the Ganga), this is the longest bridge in Bangladesh. Built at a cost of $3.6 billion, it’s a double-layer steel truss bridge with a four-lane highway on the upper level and a single-track railway on the lower level. This mega project is very important for Bangladesh as it will provide much-needed connectivity between the economic hub of Dhaka (also the capital) and 21 districts in the country’s southwest region. It’ll cut down travel time significantly. Currently, a 180-200 kilometres journey takes about 15-22 hours. The bridge will also enhance connectivity between Dhaka and the port in Mongla — thereby helping the economy. Al Jazeera reported citing a study that the bridge will help boost the annual gross domestic product (GDP) of the country by over 1.2 percent.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in the guest post are those of the contributor.
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