If you are unfortunate enough to be a neighbor of Russia but a member of NATO, you discover that membership in this club has its privileges.
And now, two long-time neutrals--Sweden and Finland--are thinking seriously about membership:
It says something about post-communist Russia that two nations that once felt safe enough to avoid NATO membership during the Cold War no longer feel safe from today's Russia.
Something menacing is on the horizon.
I'll quibble about one point. I don't think that the Swedes and Finns felt safe in the Cold War as much as they felt it too unsafe to openly side with NATO with a powerful Soviet Union nearby. Indeed the term "Finlandization" was coined to describe a state too cowed by Soviet power to openly disagree with Moscow.
Even with Russia newly belligerent, Russian power is nowhere near the same as the old Soviet Union. So the old reaction to living near the Soviets is obsolete.
Russia will find that being as aggressive as the Soviet Union while having the power of a middling state is not a wise combination.
