Finland joins NATO

That's the news coming out of the media today.

Good? Bad?

I guess like anything else, there will be conflicting opinions. My gut feeling is that it's good. Finland's not much of a military power... but it's another border on Russia. Putin calls this a threat, which I've never understood. When was the last time anyone invaded Russia? World War II? With Hitler's ill-advised visions of world conquest? Other than that... nothing. Just Putin's madman machinations laughingly dressed up as national security. I guess Putin's threats to Finland landed on deaf ears.

On NATO's effectiveness... well Trump, for all his blowhard blustering, had made some valid points on NATO, most notably the inequality of funding among member nations. Has this been fixed to some extent? Is there any intention of leveling the playing field on this? Regardless... I think the overwhelming consensus is that NATO remains a good thing, all factors being taken into context. It's probably the only thing preventing Putin from invading other neighboring nations.

I am sure Finland does not have much of a border with Russia and they could walk across and invade Finland if they wished. Hope this does not escalate the conflict further but you have to be strong against Putin.

Bet Ukraine wished they joined.

I think Finland have a fairly good military, obviously smaller but with the terrain and Russia's incompetence i doubt the Russians would fare any better than they did the last time they tried to invade finland.

Very good news for the west and bad for Russia, one of the claims Putin made before invading Ukraine was that having a NATO ally so close makes it unsafe for Russia, so now there's another one right on the border and he can't do anything about it.

This is really bad for Putin. He now has an eight hundred mile border in northern Russia which is now not neutral but NATO. Changes dramatically any calculation he might have about attacking the west. And the Baltic Sea is now a NATO lake.

While we're talking about Russia worth mentioning that it's actually profitable in the long term for America to be supporting Ukraine. A lot of the billions of dollars of weapons they're sending are existing stuff that would never be used/is being phased out/replaced/mothballed and so on. The rest of it just goes on the national debt which eventually melts away to nothing with the passage of time. Really all the US is looking at even if it continues to fund Ukraine for a few more years is interest on the bonds it sells to finance this. Back of the envelope says thirty or forty billion in nominal dollars but that's thirty to forty in 2080ish money so around ten in real money over time.

This buys America insurance on its trade with Europe, currently over a trillion dollars a year. That's insuring trade isn't disrupted with a Europe suddenly at war which would cost hundreds of billions of losses, job losses and so on for America Inc. And when the war is over and Ukraine gets some kind of NATO protection it then gets a credit rating which will result in a trillion plus dollars of investment pouring in, a lot of which will be American on the back of massive Ukrainian goodwill to America for helping it out. That will result in many hundreds of billions of dollars heading back to American businesses and tens of billions in extra government revenue.

Ukraine may have studied up on the previous time the Soviet Union thought invading an undermanned and underequipped such as Finland would be an easy mark. The Fins promptly bloodied their nose and inflicted heavier losses in everything from aircraft to tanks to personnel. Probably saw the rise of one of the deadliest snipers in history by all accounts. Russia made an irreversible and costly blunder invading Ukraine. It's probably a good thing NATO finally decided to join Finland.

Erdogan buckled