Source The Atlantic Council Editors
This week’s edition brought to you by
John Cookson, New Atlanticist Editor
Media www.rajawalisiber.com – APRIL 8, 2023 | Finland joined NATO on Tuesday, and as a military band played its national anthem, I was reminded of American composer George Gershwin. Exactly seventy-four years earlier, when NATO was founded in Washington, a military band played then, too. Its set list included the then-popular song “It Ain’t Necessarily So” from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. With its title and lyrics dripping with wry skepticism, the song was a pinch of salt in the otherwise hopeful vision of peace and unity presented at the ceremony. Just saying there’s an alliance, the song seemed to interject, doesn’t make it so. This week’s Editors’ Picks serves a similar salty purpose, but in the service of highlighting that there is hard work ahead for NATO, for Finland, and for anyone who wants to make a hopeful vision of the future a reality.
 From left to right. Joining NATO was not the only big news for Finns this week. On Sunday, Prime Minister Sanna Marin’s party fell to third place in national elections. The center-right National Coalition Party, which is now the largest party, has earned the right to try to form a new government. With the country’s politics shifting from left to right, might support for NATO, which Marin backed, turn in another direction, too? Rasmus Hindrén, a former official in Finland’s Ministry of Defense, offers an important corrective to such speculation by explaining the various factors at play among the political parties and within Finland’s governing institutions. “Helsinki is doing its usual best to hold steady,” Rasmus writes. Get the scoop on Finland’s future.
 Spring cleaning checklist. IMF-World Bank Spring Meetings kick off in Washington on Monday, and they arrive as current World Bank Group President David Malpass (who visited the Atlantic Council this week) prepares to step down. Nicole Goldin and Mrugank Bhusari share five top policy priorities for the next president, including dealing with debt distress and changing the incentive structures for private capital. Each priority feeds into the larger challenge of setting the Bretton Woods Institutions on a new course, Nicole and Mrugank write. After you finish reading their recommendations for the bank, check out the events we have planned for next week with finance ministers and central bank governors.
 830 miles in an instant. Finland’s entry into NATO has “fundamentally altered the political-military picture of Europe,” writes the Atlantic Council’s John R. Deni in the Wall Street Journal. “We’ve likely seen no comparable boost to the strength of Western security since West Germany joined the alliance in 1955,” he argues. While the newest Alliance member has a relatively small active-duty force, it has a large reserve of citizen-soldiers that can be mobilized if needed. Of course, the 830-mile border Finland (and now NATO) shares with Russia also changes how the Alliance needs to plan for its defense, John cautions. Read more on what the new addition means.
 Throwback or fast forward? A monitoring group recently discovered that Russia is sending tanks from the 1940s (!) toward Ukraine. One could be forgiven for viewing Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a reversion to an older form of ground warfare—and it is that, but it is not only that. As scholar and Marine Corps veteran T.X. Hammes explains, there are important technological and organizational transformations in ground warfare happening in Ukraine. Semiautonomous loitering munitions, near-persistent surveillance with drones, and other advances are creating a battlefield in which twenty-first-century tech operates alongside twentieth-century equipment. There are important steps the United States and its allies need to take now to manage this era-eclectic ground warfare. Dive into T.X.’s recommendations.
 Avoiding a dependency trap. Russia’s weaponization of energy following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine vaporized any doubts that Europe had been too dependent on Russian oil and gas. Since February 2022, European leaders have doubled down on an ambitious vision of a decarbonized future built not on Russian hydrocarbons, but rather on clean energy development. But Richard Morningstar, András Simonyi, Olga Khakova, and Paddy Ryan explore the risk that Europe could next become overdependent on China for clean energy materials, including rare-earth elements used in wind turbines. To avoid that, our energy experts argue, Europe and the United States need to advance transatlantic public-private cooperation on clean energy supply chains, financing, regulations, and standards. Read more on how to secure the energy future.