Sweden Is the Land of Ikea, ABBA—and China Hawks
It’s not just in NATO. It’s one of the alliance’s most confrontational members.
By Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and Frida Stranne, a senior lecturer of political science at Halmstad University in Sweden and is an affiliated scholar at Uppsala University.
July 24, 2023
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/07/24/nato-has-its-sights-set-on-asia/
NATO members breathed a sigh of relief as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan finally approved Sweden’s entry into the military alliance. To most NATO members, Sweden’s membership is a no-brainer: The peace-loving Swedes—the country has not been at war since 1814, has played a crucial role in the formation of the U.N. system, and has a well-earned reputation for peace-making and mediation—deserve to be defended by the alliance and will also be able to add to the security of NATO members with their modern and NATO-compatible military, the reasoning goes.
Yet the Sweden soon joining NATO is not the same country that once mediated conflicts in Africa, used its active diplomacy to reduce tensions between the two blocs during the Cold War, supported peaceful resolutions to armed conflicts, or championed disarmament and nuclear nonproliferation.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has not only shattered Sweden’s 200-year-old tradition of nonalignment, principled stance against selling weapons to warring nations, and staunch opposition to nuclear armament. (Sweden’s letter of intent to NATO from last year stated that “Sweden accepts NATO’s approach to security and defense, including the essential role of nuclear weapons”). Today’s Sweden views dialogue with Russia as appeasement and actively opposes diplomacy and compromise.
That, however, does not put Sweden outside of the current European consensus—despite being a complete departure from its deeply rooted values and long-standing foreign-policy tradition. Given Sweden’s historical conflicts with Russia, it is unsurprising and understandable that both Sweden and Europe have responded so strongly to Russia’s brutal and illegal invasion of Ukraine.
What is surprising is how hawkish and militarized Sweden’s perspective on China has become. On China, Sweden’s position and approach not only break with its own tradition, but Stockholm’s hawkishness also puts it outside the European consensus on China—and may help tilt NATO further toward confrontation with Beijing as the alliance’s mission slips eastward.
According to a new poll by the European Council on Foreign Relations of 11 European Union countries, Sweden has the most hawkish attitude toward China. Europeans, by and large, want to remain neutral in the U.S.-China geopolitical competition and are reluctant to “de-risk” from China. But on most questions, Sweden ranks among the most hawkish states. While 41 percent of Europeans favor sanctioning China if it supports Russia in its war in Ukraine, Swedes favor this approach to the tune of 56 percent.
Perhaps most importantly, while only 23 percent of Europeans favor joining the United States in a war with China over Taiwan and 62 percent prefer staying neutral, the numbers in Sweden are much higher: Thirty-five percent of Swedes favor supporting the US in a conflict with nuclear-armed China in this scenario—the highest level of support among surveyed European states.
These sharp views can’t be explained by any event in the Swedish-Chinese bilateral relationship. Rather, the shift in public opinion appears to be linked to the panic-stricken atmosphere in the country after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the rushed NATO application, around which very little debate was tolerated in public. The Swedish public discourse on security issues increasingly resembles the American debate around Iraq after the 9/11 attacks, where critical analysis that does not directly comply with the official Swedish stance or the dominant media narrative is treated with suspicion if not outright vilified. Moreover, in recent years, the public discourse has moved in an ideological direction in which the Biden administration’s narrative that the fault line of this century is a great “battle between democracy and autocracy” has been adopted hook, line, and sinker.
This new-won hawkishness is even sharper in the Swedish equivalent of the U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS), published last month. The document is startling in its rejection of Sweden’s previous foreign policy and its uncritical embrace of the worldview of Washington’s China hawks.
As a point of comparison: The German NSS, also published last month, mentions climate 71 times and China a mere six times. The NSS of climate activist Greta Thunberg’s motherland, however, mentions climate 53 times—and China 331. And while the Germans follow the EU consensus of defining China as a rival and competitor but also an inevitable partner on common threats such as climate and pandemics, the Swedes only define China as a threat—even though the document admits that China does not pose a direct military threat to Sweden.
This shift has not been gradual and has occurred with virtually no public debate. The Swedish NSS from 2017 only mentions China three times. The 2019 NSS devotes more space to China, but the country is not once mentioned as a threat. Rather, Beijing seeks to influence rather than challenge the rules-based international order, the report states, while treating rising tensions between the United States and China as a threat because of the manner in which Sweden and Europe may be forced to pick sides.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg welcomes Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida prior to a meeting of the North Atlantic Council with Asia Pacific partners during the NATO Summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, on July 12, 2023.
Instead, the Swedes have abruptly adopted Washington’s view that China threatens and challenges the rules-based international order. (The German NSS, in contrast, states that China seeks to “remould” the current order.) An entire chapter is dedicated to it in the 2023 NSS, and upholding this order is considered “a central and long-term interest” of Sweden’s. Yet previous iterations of the NSS hardly mentioned the rules-based order—or the central Swedish interest its survival constitutes. And while the 2023 NSS names China and Russia as the primary threats to that order, previous Swedish assessments also list American unpredictability and retreat as such threats. They even criticize NATO for destabilizing North Africa. But no more—Sweden’s latest NSS has been cleansed from any criticism of the United States or NATO.
Stockholm accurately recognizes that the rivalry between China and the United States will significantly shape Europe’s security landscape going forward. But it is reflective of the self-emasculation of its new foreign-policy orientation that Sweden has concluded that the only path toward security and stability in the 21st century is through confronting China. Previously, Sweden utilized its nonaligned status to foster dialogue, ease tensions, and seek peaceful win-win solutions. Sweden punched above its weight and brought crucial value to the realm of conflict resolution. But Sweden’s new foreign policy is designed to be reactive, and its response is solely to counter China rather than to counter the mindset and policies that push the U.S. and China toward a lose-lose confrontation.
Sweden’s China stance is poised to win it many friends in Washington, including in the Republican Party, where Sweden traditionally has enjoyed few inroads. Indeed, Sweden’s new posture may shield it from the volatility of American politics as its China outlook will create common ground between Sweden and even a potential second Trump administration. That may very well have been a central consideration behind Stockholm’s dramatic foreign-policy shift. The ramifications for avoiding a disastrous NATO-China confrontation, however, is a different matter altogether.
Trita Parsi is the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Twitter: @tparsi
Frida Stranne is a senior lecturer of political science at Halmstad University in Sweden and is an affiliated scholar at Uppsala University.