THE END OF SCANDINAVIAN NON-ALIGNMENT: Well, yeah. It’s been coming for quite awhile. What makes this essay interesting is Carl Bildt wrote it. Bildt served as Sweden’s foreign minister from 2006 to 2014 and Prime Minister from 1991 to 1994.

For example:

…in recent years, Northern Europe’s security landscape has changed. In response to Russian aggression and revisionism, NATO has deployed battalion battle groups in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as air force squadrons to police those countries’ skies. And in both Sweden and Finland, defense spending is increasing, and there is an ongoing debate about whether to upgrade the privileged partnership with NATO to full membership.

2015 is a recent year. Here’s a column I wrote on this subject, The Bluff Attack on Bornholm. Bornholm is a Danish island in the Baltic. The bluff atack was one of the Kremlin’s air and naval probes that “led Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland to reassess their military defenses.”

UPDATE: Chapter Four, Russia in Ukraine, analyzes the Scandinavian conundrum.