From its military draft and 300,000-member reserve force to building bomb shelters in its cities to protect civilians, Finland maintains a whole-of-government approach to defense, the former foreign minister who helped negotiate Helsinki’s entrance into NATO said Wednesday.
“We need to protect ourselves,” Pekka Haavisto, who served as the foreign minister from 2019 to 2023 and as a member of parliament, said at a Wilson Center event. He pointed to Finland spending 2.4 percent of its gross domestic product on defense. That percentage needs to increase as security threats in Europe and the Arctic change. “That’s our message [along with France] to other European countries” in the alliance and European Union.
In April, French President Emanuel Macron proposed a European defense initiative to defend the continent with its own nations’ defense capabilities through a “common security framework.”
Two percent of GDP has been a NATO security spending goal for members since 2014, when Russia illegally annexed Crimea and first openly backed separatists in Ukraine’s eastern provinces.
Twenty-three of the 32 treaty partners meet the 2 percent target. Two of the largest economies in the alliance, Germany and Canada, do not.
In President-elect Donald Trump’s first administration, he repeatedly criticized alliance members for failing to meet that goal. During his 2024 campaign, he added that he would not necessarily protect “delinquent” members if they failed to meet the 2 percent goal.
Article 5 of the treaty alliance says members are to treat an attack on one as an attack on all.
Before a meeting in Brussels on Wednesday with the 32 foreign ministers, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said: “If you want to keep the deterrence at the present level, 2 percent is not enough. We can now defend ourselves and nobody should try to attack us. But I want that to stay the same in 4 or 5 years.”
At the Wilson Center, Haavisto said that for Finland, which is already a member of the E.U., that “it was self-evident to take the next step” to join NATO following the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Finland, along with Sweden, applied for membership in May of that year and Finland was admitted to the alliance the following April.
“We needed Sweden” to join in the application with its 200-year history of neutrality to make the case that the security situation in Europe had changed dramatically. He added that at first some NATO countries were skeptical about admitting the two countries. While most members supported the two countries joining the alliance, he said concerned parties didn’t want provocations.
Membership is granted by unanimous consent of all treaty partners.
Early in 2022, Finland was shipping arms to Ukraine to hold back Russian armored forces threatening to take Kyiv and Kharkiv.
Looking at the Ukrainian war as it began and now, he said: “We had to prepare for the whole spectrum of risks,” including cyber attacks, drones and hybrid strikes destroying infrastructure from energy pipelines to undersea communication cables.
At the same time, the battlefield fighting inside Ukraine was “more old-fashioned than we expected,” with striking similarities to World War I and II. He was referring to prolonged trench warfare with little maneuver.
As for lessons learned in Ukraine, Haavisto said E.U. members must realize that moving military equipment from one nation, through a second country and destined for a third “is a nightmare of mobility.”
“How do we do things together,” from standardizing artillery shell shapes and sizes and harmonizing transit laws, he asked rhetorically.
He also said the E.U. must pay more attention to cyber and infrastructure attacks, which have increased in the 2020s.
The cutting of cables at Svalbard in the Arctic just before the Ukrainian invasion and the explosions of the Nordstream 1 and 2 energy pipelines shortly after should have alerted Europeans to how nations try to use sabotage to influence public opinion and events, he said.
The most recent incident involved the cutting of two Baltic Sea cables in mid-November. The pair may have been cut by a dragged anchor from a Chinese bulk carrier over two days of movement. The Oslo government asked Beijing to have the merchantman that set out from Russia carrying fertilizer cargo to return to Swedish waters for further investigation.
The Chinese vessel has stopped in Denmark’s exclusive economic zone and under surveillance by coast guard and naval vessels from several NATO countries.
“Civilian authorities should take the first role” in addressing these gray zone activities, including cyber disruptions, but the military must be prepared to act. “In our judgment this is the new warfare,” Haavisto added. But he cautioned civil authorities “to be careful with public opinion” to ensure that every abnormal event is not seen as part of a larger conspiracy.
The reality for Finland is that “war is close to us [and] in worst case scenario, it can spread to our region,” he said.
