In the year since the invasion, working the phones and traveling to Washington every few months, Niinistö moved his country firmly into the Western camp. He applied for full NATO membership, along with Sweden, a fact that Biden mentioned time and again, always to twist the knife that Putin had accomplished “exactly what he had tried to avoid”: an expansion of NATO. What Biden blew past, of course, was how hard that path had been. Even in the urgency of the war, NATO hadn’t been able to get out of its own way. What seemed like a clean vote to admit two qualified members—Finland and Sweden—got
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