Ready for War in Sweden

“Never say that Swedes have no religion,” I wrote in 1996 after spending the previous summer in an apartment overlooking the crystalline Stockholm archipelago. “That is a myth.” What they have is

sommar: that sweet, intense, yet poignantly short season from mid-June through mid-August when seemingly all nine million Swedes close up shop and head upcountry, or to one of the myriad islands or archipelagoes surrounding this narrow landmass on the Baltic Sea, to savor the long blue days and brief “white nights” at their rustic vacation cottages.^*

Last July, when I checked into my hotel adjacent to the six-hundred-room Swedish royal palace in Stockholm, I discovered that the trappings and tenets of that religion were still in place. As I watched the ancient ferries putter off, it could well have been the summer of 1995 or even 1953, when Summer with Monika, Ingmar Bergman’s film about a torrid, doomed romance set in the outer Stockholm archipelago, was playing in theaters.

My déjà vu persisted when I turned on the TV and was greeted by the familiar strains of “Stockholm in My Heart,” the upbeat theme song of Allsång på Skansen, the sing-along held every summer at Skansen, an open-air museum on the Stockholm island of Djurgården. King Carl XVI Gustaf, who celebrated his fiftieth year on the throne last September, was at Skansen again too, along with Queen Silvia, smiling tightly as a Swedish rapper cut loose. And when I tried to speak to government officials, I found that almost all of them were away in the archipelago, just as their predecessors had been thirty years ago. Yet 2023 may have been Sweden’s last sommar in the classic sense, the last summer when Swedes could lose themselves in the archipelago, literally or figuratively, and forget about the rest of the world, because now the world is very much with them.

While I was in Stockholm I met with Swedish defense minister Pål Jonson, who belongs to the Moderate Party, the largest member of the rickety center-right coalition—which also includes the Liberals and the Christian Democrats—that took office after the September 2022 elections. The week before, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the mercurial Turkish president, had dropped his long-standing objection to Sweden’s entry into NATO—in his view Stockholm had failed to take sufficiently aggressive action against alleged Kurdish “terrorists” living in Sweden. In March 2023, following an overwhelming vote by the Riksdag, the Swedish parliament, Stockholm had formally submitted its application to join the defensive alliance, on the same day as neighboring Finland, its closest ally. Then Erdoğan equivocated. And equivocated.

Sweden’s decision to finish shedding its two-century-old neutral status—something it had been doing gradually since the mid-1990s when it joined the EU as well as NATO’s associate program, the Partnership for Peace—required an even greater psychological leap than Finland’s. For Helsinki neutrality was never more than an expedient forced on it after its defeat by the Soviet Union during World War II. The bellicose Finns, who fought Soviet or Soviet-backed forces three times in the last century, were never neutral at heart. Swedes for the most part are—or at least were before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The last time Sweden engaged in a major war was in 1809, when it lost the Finnish War against Russia. Since then it had steadfastly adhered to its neutral status, including during World War II, which still rankles the conscience of many Swedes.

Although the modern Swedish Armed Forces (SAF) have participated in international peacekeeping operations, the idea that the country would give up its cherished neutrality and fully join the West was unthinkable until recently. William Shirer put it succinctly in The Challenge of Scandinavia (1955): “There is no likelihood, barring a Russian move into Finland, or some equally provocative act, of Sweden—in the immediate future at least—going with the West.”

While Sweden has always been Western culturally as well as philosophically—“More than a few people have called us the most Americanized country in Europe,” said Fredrik Logevall, a Swedish American historian who teaches at Harvard—Swedes saw themselves as being in a politico-military zone of their own that they could defend alone if necessary. They also had a formidable military and a redoubtable armaments industry to back that hubris up. To be sure, as Oscar Jonsson, a researcher at the Swedish Defence University, reminded me,

Swedish neutrality has always been something of a façade. You have to remember that in 1966 Sweden gave up its close-to-complete nuclear weapon program when Karl Frithiofsson, the state secretary for defense, stated that Sweden was protected by US nuclear weapons if Sweden was attacked. Also Sweden secretly extended its airfields to receive NATO planes, although nothing was said publicly.

Nevertheless, if neutrality was a façade, it was one most Swedes ardently believed in prior to the Ukraine war. The Swedish military, however, had long been in favor of joining NATO, and it “already started seeing Russia as a military threat in 2008 after the Kremlin’s incursion into Georgia,” according to Lieutenant General Carl-Johan Edström, the SAF’s chief of joint operations. A Russian aerial exercise in 2013 in which warplanes staged a mock attack on Gotland, the large, strategically vital Swedish island astride the approaches to the Baltic, further shocked the SAF. “That was the extreme low point of our combat readiness,” Lieutenant General Michael Claesson, the SAF’s chief of staff, told me on my last visit to the Swedish military’s sprawling headquarters in March.

However, it wasn’t until February 24, 2022, that Sweden awakened to the possibility of a Russian attack on its territory, and public opinion swung in favor of joining NATO. Even then the Social Democratic Party, which has been in government for most of the past century and for which nonalignment was an article of faith, resisted. Defense Minister Jonson told me last summer, “There are hard-core Atlanticists like me who have been working for this”—NATO membership—“their whole lives.” Sweden’s impending membership, along with Finland’s, he said, was

the mother of all unintended consequences for Russia’s strategic thinking. If Russia had one objective regarding Finland and Sweden when it invaded Ukraine, it was to keep us out of NATO. Now it has ended up with exactly the opposite result—along with a 1,300-kilometer-longer border with the alliance.

Jonson, a career military analyst, was bullish about what Sweden could bring to NATO:

Sweden can be a security provider to the alliance with its military assets and capabilities. We have great experience of operating in the Baltic Sea with submarines and Visby-class corvettes. The army can operate in demanding environments due to its subarctic prowess. Sweden has a strong air defense with almost one hundred Gripen fighter jets and Patriot systems. And what other country of 10 million in the world has the ability to design and produce its own fighter jets and submarines?

Jonson was also proud of how, after the long period of downsizing, the SAF was returning to nearly its cold war strength. “There was something of a disconnect between the society and the armed forces, particularly during the 1990s and 2000s,” Edström conceded. “There was a feeling that war was so far away that we didn’t need to invest so much in defense.”

Sweden was not alone in this regard. “Finland is the outlier here,” Claesson said. “The Finns are the only ones who stayed the course in readiness. The rest of Western Europe went down the same path as Sweden did—decommissioning, closing units, bases, reducing defense spending.”

When we spoke last year, Jonson pointed out that Sweden would spend $12 billion, or 2.1 percent of its GDP, on defense in 2024, a 34 percent increase from 2023, surpassing the NATO-recommended 2 percent and nearly double the 1.07 percent figure from 2015. When I first visited SAF headquarters in 2015, it had a total of 50,000 personnel, including active troops, national guard, and reservists. Now it stands at 60,000, including 8,000 conscripts—Sweden reintroduced national conscription in 2018. Jonson said that he was aiming at an eventual total of 110,000, including 10,000 conscripts. Officials are encouraged by the rising number and motivation of the Swedes who are volunteering. “There are more people who want to do military service than those who can do it every year,” Jonson said. In 2022 there were 30,000 applications to join the military reserve force of the Swedish army.

The vast majority of those applications were received within three weeks of the outbreak of the Ukraine war, Claesson pointed out. What a difference a war, and a decade, can make. When I first interviewed Claesson in 2015 he was a brigadier, total SAF strength was nearly 20 percent less than what it is today, and barely a third of the Swedish population favored joining NATO, while close to half were firmly opposed, according to a poll taken that year. “There is a 180-degree turnaround from those days,” said the lieutenant general, who is slated to become the SAF commander in chief in October.

During the 1960s and the Vietnam War, pacifistic Sweden was Washington’s most outspoken Western critic, but those days were over, Jonson declared. Today Sweden was combat-ready and in sync with the US and its NATO partners. The Ukraine war, along with the expansion of the defensive alliance that Vladimir Putin had inadvertently provoked, was nothing less than “a revitalization of the West,” he said.

In the event, Jonson’s excitement was premature. Uncertainty regarding Swedish NATO membership persisted for the rest of 2023 until January 2024, when the Turkish parliament finally voted to ratify it and Erdoğan signed off. After that, Hungarian president Viktor Orbán dragged things out further. Finally he relented, and on February 26 the Hungarian parliament voted its approval as well. Two weeks later, on March 11, the blue-and-yellow Swedish flag was raised at NATO headquarters, as Crown Princess Victoria and a host of Swedish officials, including Jonson and Claesson, looked on in pouring rain.

The SAF is certainly ready for war, or getting there, particularly now that Sweden is fully in NATO. But how ready is Swedish society? Civil Defense Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin has his doubts. On January 7 he shocked the country when he told a defense conference that “there could be war in Sweden.” “If there is one thing that keeps me awake at night, it is the feeling that things are moving too slowly,” he said. Bohlin’s statement was backed up by General Micael Bydén, the outgoing Swedish commander in chief, who declared that “Russia’s war against Ukraine is just a step, not an end game” and that Swedes needed to prepare. In 2018 a brochure entitled “If Crisis or War Comes” was distributed to all Swedish households. Nevertheless Bydén felt that a further wake-up was in order.

The Swedish media put a sensationalist spin on Bohlin’s and Bydén’s statements, causing something of a panic. Many children took to TikTok to share their fears. “The warnings may have been clumsily worded,” wrote the Swedish journalist Martin Gelin in The Guardian, “but they were intended to wake the country up from a long slumber of geopolitical naivety.”

At any rate the country still seemed fairly somnolent last summer when I boarded the Juno, the flagship of the Göta Canal Company, which owns and operates the 120-mile-long waterway linking Stockholm on the east coast with Gothenburg on the west via a series of lakes and locks. The 150-year-old vessel, one of three built specifically to fit the historic canal, which opened in 1832, was the same one I had taken in 1995.

“The most picturesque trip in Sweden,” boasts a 1920s poster for the bucolic journey, featuring an elegantly attired woman seated on one of the converted steamboats as it makes its stately way through the verdant Swedish countryside. And it is. To be sure, it took a little longer to get out of the capital than I recalled. The population of metropolitan Stockholm is now 1.7 million, more than 50 percent larger than it was in 1995, making it one of the fastest-growing cities in Europe. As I glided by the long rows of posh apartments lining the waterfront, it seemed to me that the Swedish welfare state was working well, at least for the better-off residents of the folkhemmet, or folk home, a term dating from the golden days of Swedish social democracy following World War II.

The crew seemed divided on the question of joining NATO. “I’m not sure joining NATO was the best way to deter war,” one of the younger deckhands, a college student from Gothenburg, confided in between watches. “At the very least there should have been a referendum on the matter.”

Swedish neutrality dies hard.

The sense that perhaps all is not well with the folkhemmet struck me after I disembarked in Gothenburg, the country’s second-largest city, and spoke to Christofer Ahlqvist, the editor of its leading newspaper, Göteborgs-Posten. “My picture is completely that more people are concerned about where society is going,” he told me over coffee at the venerable Hotel Eggers. Though the war in Ukraine, along with the renewed Russian threat, was on Swedes’ minds, it was not foremost in the minds of his readers. Crime, particularly gang-related crime, followed closely by migration, were the issues that loomed largest, Ahlqvist thought.

I didn’t feel especially unsafe the next day when I walked around Trädgårdsföreningen, Gothenburg’s ravishing main park. Nevertheless I couldn’t help but notice that the front door of my hotel automatically shut at 10:00 PM, the better to deter uninvited guests, perhaps like the two men whom I saw gruffly taken into custody, apparently for shoplifting, from the Eggers breakfast room as I tucked into smorgasbord.

Statistics for more serious crimes around the country are certainly up. In 2022 Sweden had 391 shootings resulting in 62 deaths, up more than a third over the previous year, along with 90 attacks with explosives, as heavily armed gangs continued their lethal battles. The figures for 2023 are also frightening. On the one hand, the total number of shootings and fatal shootings fell slightly, to 363 and 53, respectively. The latter figure also includes the record 11 shooting deaths in September, the most of any month since 2016. Meanwhile, the number of bombings shot up by a jaw-dropping two thirds, to 149. This year the violence continues. Last month there was a particularly shocking case: in a purportedly gang-related incident, the well-known rapper C. Gambino was shot dead in a Gothenburg parking garage.

According to police the recent crime wave is mostly foreign in origin and involves turf wars between gangs dominated by nonethnic Swedes from the Balkans and the Middle East. And it is definitely getting worse, Hampus Dorian, the crime reporter for Göteborgs-Posten, confirmed. “The main change is that gang violence now has a real impact on people’s everyday lives,” he told me.

The killings and bombings that are going on no longer take place in empty industrial areas at night but in the middle of the day in crowded areas. Not only do “civilians” see the violence, they also risk being subject to collateral damage. The same pattern can be seen with explosives. Grenades are being thrown into buildings. Cars are being blown up.

By late September last year the situation had deteriorated to the point that Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson gave a speech to the nation about it. “Sweden has never seen anything like this,” he said. The latest violence had included a young man shot dead close to a busy sports field in Stockholm where scores of young children were training and a bombing in Uppsala in which a young woman was killed. “No other country in Europe is seeing anything like this.”

“It is an unnerving feeling to hear a bomb blast ring out over the suburb where you live,” said Charlie Duxbury, the Stockholm correspondent for Politico Europe, describing an explosion that occurred near his house in October. “You have no feel for how close it was or what might come next.” Lately Stockholmers have become inured to news reports about the latest bombing or gang-related mayhem. Nevertheless the shocks keep coming, even during the sommar. On July 10 at Central Station, the police intercepted a man and a woman with an explosive device in their luggage, forcing the terminal to be evacuated.

One of the causes of the crime wave, many feel, is the country’s historically liberal immigration and asylum policy, which has resulted in Sweden becoming home to 2.1 million foreign-born residents, and more importantly the lack of a coherent and comprehensive plan for integrating them. “The debate about gang crime and migration is interlinked,” said Maria Stenergard, the minister for migration and a member of the governing Moderate party.

Unfortunately we see that the lack of integration of the second generation has led to a situation where there is a large proportion of immigrants and second-generation immigrants who are active in these gangs. Many of the young people do not learn Swedish at home; consequently they have a problem in school, and after a while these gangsters become their idols. I think the main focus the government must have now is to break this lack of integration. We used to have a country of emigrants, of labor migrants, people who came to Sweden to work. Everyone shared the same values, more or less. We thought that they will manage, that we will manage. But we didn’t. No one really thought about the need for integration.

Did she think Swedes were naive? I asked. “Yes, and I understand why we were naive,” she replied, “but we should have realized much faster that we needed an active integration policy.”

The minister was not eager to point fingers. The failure of Sweden’s immigration policy could not, she felt, be ascribed solely to the Social Democrats. It was a failure of

many parties—mine too. The problem really began in the 1990s, when there was a large influx, for example, of Somali immigrants, many of whom had no or little education, nor any idea of what it means to be Swedish at all.

Almost anyone who applied for permanent residency was accepted. “There was a check to see if you were a heavy criminal, but basically that was it,” she said.

Stenergard emphasized that she was not opposed to immigration—the “right” kind of immigration, of people who knew “what it means to be Swedish” and were prepared to contribute.

I am really afraid that otherwise the country will become more polarized and that people will believe that we have lost control—and some already think this when they see the crime and the segregation—that Sweden will close itself.

Debora Spar, a Harvard Business School professor and author of the case study “The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Sweden’s Utopia at a Crossroads” (2022), says that the Social Democrats tried to do the right thing by welcoming all comers into the folkhemmet, but “there is a tacit consensus that they went faster and farther than the country could sustain, so they’ve started to wheel that back.”

When it comes to how the two-year-old center-right government proposes to wheel it back, however, most particularly its plan for encouraging “voluntary return” migration—the euphemism for pressing migrants to go back where they came from—consensus on this volatile issue breaks down. The Social Democratic opposition feels that the government is going too far. The nativist Sweden Democrats party, which in October 2022 agreed to back the Moderate-led coalition government in return for a program of strict measures to combat crime and “irregular migration,” believes that it has not gone far enough. “The steps taken for the paradigm shift in migration policy have not been completed or taken full effect,” according to an SD press officer.

Swedes don’t seem to agree on much of anything these days—whether there ought to have been a referendum before the country applied to join NATO or how to deal with immigration. And yet they agree on more than they think, Logevall told me over coffee in the university city of Uppsala, where he was on leave:

It’s striking when seen from the American context that the parties agree on certain core things that are points of deep division in the US. In the 2022 Swedish election campaign I didn’t hear anyone who wanted to loosen Sweden’s gun laws, or who questioned the need for universal health care, or that the government has a key role to play in creating a more equitable society, though of course the parties differ on how that should happen. In important respects, Swedish politics is still consensus politics, if not to the same degree as in the past.

Meanwhile, as the government approaches the halfway point of its mandate, its fissures are beginning to show. They were amplified by a sensational TV exposé of a troll farm operated by the Sweden Democrats, which slimed its opponents with things like racist memes. The latest polls show that if elections were held today, the Christian Democrats and the Liberals, the two smaller parties in the current coalition, would lose all their MPs, and the center-left, led by the Social Democrats, would regain the majority, while the Sweden Democrats, who suffered a shocking loss in the recent elections for the European Parliament, would lose influence. At least for now, Sweden seems to have resisted the Europe-wide turn to the right.

The 1,200-square-mile island of Gotland, like Sweden itself, seemed to have a decidedly ambivalent character when I visited last August. In one part, P18, a resurrected armored regiment that traces its roots back to 1808, was rehearsing for war. I was impressed with the spirit and élan of its young conscripts as they executed a live-fire exercise under the proud eye of their deputy commander, Anders Malm, a lieutenant colonel and native Gotlander. Malm’s military career typifies the recent history of the SAF. A thirty-year veteran, he left the SAF in 2013 because, he said, “the long-term strategy of how the armed forces should be developed was unclear to me.” No more. Malm gave me a handout that detailed how Gotland—which has gained even more strategic importance since the Ukraine war—would be involved in the NATO regional defense plan once Sweden was formally admitted.

With Putin seemingly musing about turning the Baltic into a Russian lake, as his hero Peter the Great managed to do after he defeated his Swedish nemesis Charles XII in 1709 at the Battle of Poltava, the climactic battle of the Great Northern War, the possibility of an actual invasion of Gotland, instead of the simulated assaults that spooked the SAF in 2013 and again in 2015, has become more serious. “I am sure Putin even has both eyes on Gotland,” Micael Bydén, the outgoing commander in chief, told a number of German correspondents this spring. “Putin’s goal is to take control of the Baltic Sea.”

The Russian air force clearly has its eye on Gotland. On June 14 a Russian Su-24 aircraft breached Swedish airspace just east of Gotland. The plane did not respond to radio warnings from air controllers and refused to alter its course. Swedish air command immediately mobilized two JAS-39 jets to escort it out of the country’s airspace. The intrusion, the first since Sweden officially joined NATO, was certainly no accident. “The Russian action is not acceptable and shows a lack of respect for our territorial integrity,” said Jonas Wikman, the Swedish air force chief. “We followed the entire process and were there to intervene.” Memo to Moscow: Sweden is ready for war.

Last summer at least, in the county capital of Visby, north of the regiment’s training ground, the prospect of a Russian invasion still seemed far from the minds of the rowdy, pub-crawling mainlanders for whom Gotland is also Sweden’s favorite vacation spot. Recently I asked Malm whether the alarms issued by Bydén and Bohlin had had an effect on his Gotland neighbors. Not really, he said. “Most people on the island are more aware that there is a real threat compared to mainlanders.” But according to Duxbury,

There has been a definite change in mood, which the statements by Bydén and Bohlin further accelerated. People here are talking more often and in more sober terms about the threat of war than before. Conscription papers for those who will turn eighteen this year, including my daughter, landed on doormats across the country in January, which has also served to hammer home how things have changed.

The Swedish civil contingencies agency, which specializes in crisis management, reported a more than 3,000 percent increase in visits to its online list of bomb shelters following the two officials’ statements, as well as a 900 percent increase in downloads of its war preparedness pamphlet.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump threw another wrench into the works with his implicit threat to withdraw the US from NATO if he is elected in November, when he bragged in February about telling a NATO ally that he would let Russia “do whatever the hell they want” to members who do not pay their dues. I asked Claesson if he was concerned about that. “I am,” the incoming supreme commander said.

I am concerned about all the potential breaches of Western unity and cohesion. This is not just about Ukraine anymore. This is a systemic conflict—the collective West against Russia. And behind Russia there is China. So the transatlantic link is more important than ever.

As one Western diplomat puts it, “Sweden is undergoing perhaps the most profound reformation of its identity since the early 1800s. It is a bewildering process, for some even painful.”

And yet some things about Sweden never change. One of them is that pillar of Swedish kultur, the Royal Dramatic Theatre, better known as Dramaten. Established in 1788 by Gustav III, Dramaten, where stars such as Greta Garbo and Max von Sydow began their careers, is still going strong. Last year there were more than nine hundred performances of dozens of plays on the five stages at its century-old Art Nouveau building.

I saw one of them, Europeana, directed by Mattias Andersson, the theater’s artistic director, a position once held by Ingmar Bergman. Described as a “megalomaniacal attempt to encompass the whole of Europe’s 20th century in a single theatrical performance,” the play, adapted from the Czech writer Patrik Ouředník’s novel Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century (2001), was performed by a multiracial cast amid a phantasmagoria of music, photographs, and props. As it reached the 1960s, when Sweden’s antiwar movement was at its height and Swedish neutrality was an article of faith, a balloon with the words “NO TO NATO” popped up for a moment, an errant reminder of a bygone era.

—July 18, 2024