A shifting alliance: NATO

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. It was a crime that gripped Sweden for 34 years. Who gunned down the then Prime Minister Olaf Palma right in the middle of Stockholm? Last week, prosecutors at last provided an answer. But many Swedes are only more frustrated now. And the pandemic is making lots of Japanese people look for love. Dating agencies have had to get creative. There are even drive through introductions. As with so many new behaviors, the question is whether this matchmaking surge will. First up, though NATO has been a keystone in international stability since it was founded in the aftermath of the Second World War.

In 1949, the realities of the Cold War led the Western European nations, the USA and Canada, into a new military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

It was created to stand up to an aggressive Soviet Union in Europe. Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, though, the alliance has suffered repeated bouts of angst about its relevance. Now it must contend with a rising China. In a speech earlier this month, the head of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, raised his.

And the rise of China is fundamentally shifting the global balance of power, heating up the race for economic and technological supremacy, multiplying the threats to open societies and individual freedoms, and increasing the competition over our values and our way of life.

And on Saturday, he warned about China's increasing military capabilities. Meanwhile, repeated barbs from President Donald Trump continue to undermine the alliance. Earlier this month, Mr. Trump ordered the military to reduce the number of American troops in Germany by nearly 10,000 before September. That's more than a quarter of the force stationed there. It all adds up to a tricky agenda. As NATO defence ministers meet virtually this.

Week, NATO really faces a twofold challenge. One is to get its posture right for the threats that it faces at the moment, and the other is to prepare itself for the longer term future and trying to make sure that it remains relevant.

Daniel Franklin is the Economist's DIPLOMATIC EDITOR.

Right now it faces a Russia that has not so very long ago invaded Ukraine. That poses serious threat, security threat in Europe. And it has to make sure that it's strong and beats itself up sufficiently to deter any future Russian aggression. But in the future it needs to make sure that it is also relevant to an America which is increasingly focused elsewhere outside Europe and particularly on China.

I mean, in a sense, facing Russian aggression has been the way NATO has stayed relevant for much of its existence.

Yes, of course, but when the Berlin Wall came down, that was in question and there were really serious questions asked about whether NAT had a future at all. It did start to operate more out of area and it now has operations in Afghanistan, for example. It's helped with the safety of shipping and the combating piracy off the coast of Africa and so on. But particularly faced with an America which is weary of paying a lot of money to support allies in Europe and is increasingly worried about new threats emerging in the world, NATO has a bigger rethink to do. And it's actually asked the Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, to have a so called reflection on what NATO might look like in 2030.

And so much of this rethinking this assessment is on the basis of President Donald Trump's rejection of NATO's relevance.

Well, actually, Donald Trump is an interesting phenomenon for NATO because he certainly challenges NATO and he's bullied NATO and said consistently that European allies in particular need to spend more money in their own defence. They need to live up to their promise of spending at least 2% of GDP on defence. And many fall far short of. But actually, if you look at what NATO has done, what the United States has done under the presidency of Donald Trump, it's put more resources into Europe, it's put significant new oomph into NATO's forward presence in Europe. In Poland, for example, in the Black Sea, it's conducted very chunky exercises off the coast of Norway. So when you look at the actions of the United States under Donald Trump, it's actually been quite a vigorous reinforcement of NATO. And that's why I think the latest decision to withdraw troops from Germany has come as a particular blow. Because until now everything had been to increase America's presence in Europe, not to withdraw.

But the most recent news is that America wants to pull a large chunk of its troops out of Germany. And that runs counter to the beefing up principle.

Yes, about 9,500 troops, more than a quarter of Americans presence in Germany. And that has come as a shock, not Least because there doesn't seem to have been much communication of that decision in advance to Germany or indeed to other NATO parties partners. So it may be that that will be contested and softened. It may also be that some of those troops will get redeployed elsewhere within NATO. The Poles would certainly be keen to be home to more American forces. But it is also true that there's been a particular irritation of Donald Trump with Germany, with Angela Merkel, not just Germany's spending on defence, which is far below the 2% minimum. And it's just a number of other irritations in trade, on pipelines and various other matters with Germany that may have helped to explain. President Trump was keen to go ahead with something that he's long threatened to do, reducing troop levels in Germany.

And as you say, at the same time there is this intent from NATO to realign itself on China matters. What will a NATO that preoccupies itself with China look like?

Well, it's very early days for this. It's new that NATO even starts to think about what its posture towards China should be. So it's starting to get its mind around it and that's important. Jens Stoltenberg is very keen to stress it's not about moving NATO into the South China Sea. He's also keen to stress that there are opportunities in China's rise. But the fact remains that NATO is finding itself coming up against China increasingly in all sorts of ways in the Arctic, in China's infrastructure spending and its investments in Europe, in cyberspace. And also because China is having more and more exercises in closer cooperation with Russia, which is one of NATO's prime current concerns. So it's right, I think, that NATO needs to start thinking about China. And also because the United States is increasingly focused on the long term challenge of its growing rival superpower. If NATO wants to stay relevant to the United States, it has to know what it's doing on China and to be useful to America on China.

And does all of that accord with what you think NATO should be doing in order to fit into the current geopolitical order to stay relevant?

Yes, it does. I think it will need to focus more on China, but it also needs to do other things as well. As it looks to the future, clearly it needs to make sure it stays strong militarily. It needs to make sure that, for example, with budgets under a great deal of pressure because of the economic fallout from COVID 19 defence, defence spending is something that's going to be under a lot of strain. And so it needs to make sure that it continue to invest and spend enough on defence to remain strong. And it also, I think the biggest challenge is to remain politically united, given the strains we've seen within the alliance in recent times. So a NATO that is thinking about China but can't agree amongst itself on other things is not going to be much use.

And what about the case that the American administration continues to pull away, continues to tweak its nose at NATO? Do you see that as an existential.

Threat under this particular presidency? I think NATO has got used to living with the troubles that have come and the pressures that have come to do more for NATO to play its own part. I think it's become less worried perhaps about the existential threat and it's already starting to perhaps hope that it won't be under the same sorts of pressure for very much longer, but that we'll have to see in November.

Daniel, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

For a lot more analysis like this, subscribe to the Economist. To get the best introductory offer wherever you are, just go to economist.com intelligenceoffer. In 1986, Olaf Palma, then the prime Minister of Sweden, was assassinated. Conspiracy theories circled and for more than three decades no one could crack the case. But last week, prosecutors named the killer. Our Europe correspondent Matt Steinglass takes a look at a crime that rocked Sweden.

Olof Palme was the most important social democratic politician in Sweden at the time, when the Swedish welfare state became a global model. He became leader of the Social Democratic Party in 1969. The slogan that he ran on was more equality. And over the course of his tenure in power, Sweden raised pensions, it established the system of universal childcare, it built, I think, a million units of subsidized housing, the generosity of the universal healthcare system. He, more than anybody, is responsible for making Sweden into the Sweden that we think of today. The global example of a social democratic welfare state that pursues a human rights oriented international foreign policy. He was extremely critical of apartheid in South Africa, one of the most critical international figures leading international condemnation of racist policies by the regime in South Africa. He criticized America's intervention in Vietnam very strongly. He marched with North Vietnam's ambassador in 1968 to protest American bombing. And through the 70s, he cultivated cordial relationships with socialist liberation movements around the Third World, had good relations with Cuba and with the Soviet Union for a while. And he incarnated the Scandinavian belief that some version of democratic socialism was the unquestioned destination of humanity. The British journalist Andrew Brown put it really well in A book about living in Sweden at the time. That the happiness and the tragedy of Palma's years was that when Swedes looked around the world, they assumed that everyone must share Swedish ideas of decency too. In Swedish socialist politics, it's very important that you walk the walk as well as talking the talk. And Olaf Palme was renowned for living an extremely modest life. He lived in a nice but fairly modest house outside of central Stockholm with his wife. If journalists came to interview him, they might find themselves invited to help cook dinner. And he didn't have much of a security detail. On 28 February 1986, he and his wife decided to go see a movie together. And on the way back, at about 11:20pm they were walking along a major street in downtown Stockholm when he was approached by a man. They may have exchanged some words. The man then shot him in the back and ran off. He died before he could reach the hospital. Immediately, all kinds of theories began swirling, particularly because Palma was such a significant international figure. The police ultimately interviewed a huge number of witnesses, but they were clumsy and unclear in the way that they decided who to trust and who not to trust. And they ended up arresting a local drug addict who had been in the area at the time. He was convicted, but then released within a couple of years because the trial was found to have been improperly conducted. And after he was released, there was no clarity as to who might have committed the murder. So Sweden remained in a state of confusion for decades. Dozens of Swedes over the years took up the task of researching the Palma murder privately, some of them as journalists, but some of them as a sort of a hobby. Some believe that he might have been murdered by the CIA. Some think he could have been killed by the Kurdish terrorist organization pkk. Some of them think that he could have been killed because of an arms deal gone bad with the Indian government. These all seem a bit outlandish. But the idea that he might have been killed by the South African apartheid government took a much firmer hold. Now. In the meantime, in 2017, the lead investigator on the Swedish side had changed and was looking at new ways of reinvestigating the case. So in March, the Swedes went down and had a meeting in Pretoria with the South African security services. And they, a couple of months later, announced that they were going to have a press conference on June 10 and announce their conclusions about who had actually killed Olof Palme. At the press conference, the chief prosecutor, Pettersson, rather than announcing that Olof Palma had been killed by agents of the South African apartheid regime, which is what many people were expecting, announced that police believed he had been murdered by a man named Stig Engstrom, who was a graphic designer at a Swedish insurance company and minor center right politician. He was politically quite opposed to Palmer's standpoints. Now, Angstrom had always been considered a witness to the case. He said that he had seen the shooting take place. He was interviewed by police at the time repeatedly, but they considered him an unreliable witness, partly because his story kept changing. And over the years, Angstrom kept on seeking publicity. He sought out a photographer six years after the killing to go through a reconstruction of the crime. He put on the clothes that he said had been wearing on the day that it happened and showed the photographer what his movements had been. He gave his photographer a long description of how he would have committed the crime if it had been him. And in retrospect, people in Sweden are looking at this guy's media presence over the years as if he were a character in a Dostoevsky novel. He was trying to bring investigators attention to himself, but couldn't bring himself to say that he had committed the murder. He had suffered career setbacks. He suffered from alcohol abuse, and in 2000 he committed suicide. Since he is now dead, there will be no trial and the case is simply closed. This resolution has been extremely frustrating for a lot of Swedes, partly because of the significance of the moment at which Olaf Palma was killed and what happened after he died. In the late 1980s, Sweden underwent a pretty severe recession and the welfare state was significantly tamed back. The killing of Olof Palma assumed for Swedes the significance of the moment when the dream of the Swedish welfare state had died. It became a kind of focal point on which history had turned. And one of the very frustrating things about the resolution is that it turns out that Oth Palme doesn't seem to have been killed by the CIA or by the South African apartheid regime because of the leftist politics and human rights oriented foreign policy that he had adopted. He seems to have been killed by a resentful insurance company employee. And it just seems perverse that a moment that's so important in the political and the moral history of Sweden could have turned on something so insignificant.

Matt Steinglass on the murder of Olof Palmer. That is the sound of a new matchmaking ad. In Japan, the pandemic has spurred the country's singles to look for love. That'll be welcome news for the government, which has long been trying to boost Japan's shrinking population.

Since the pandemic broke out. More singles across Japan have been on the hunt for spouses.

Miki Kobayashi writes for the Economist from Tokyo.

For example, San Marie, which is a matchmaking agency, reported a 30% rise in April compared with the year before.

And what's behind this big jump then?

So singles are cooped up in their homes alone for months and they're getting lonely. Thus the surge in business for matchmaking companies. And with COVID 19 dominating the news, singles are also getting anxious about the future and they want a partner to face the unknown with. So I spoke to a 31 year old hotel employee from Kumamoto, which is a city in the south. He vaguely imagined getting married someday, but when the pandemic hit, he found himself in his home all alone and he got lonely. So he quickly signed up for an online matchmaking service and is now thinking of settling down with a social worker from Tokyo that he matched with just two months ago. They actually haven't met yet, but she is planning to visit him in Kumamoto sometime this month.

So how do people get to know each other during lockdown? What's changed?

Before COVID 19 hit, matchmaking companies would organize parties and dates and events, basically everything for singles. But now that they are confined to their homes and need to practice social distancing, these events obviously do not work. So businesses have been getting creative to attract and retain customers. So a number of these businesses, including Sam Marie, have been advertising online Omiyai, Omiyai, meaning matchmaking in Japanese. Another company called Elmo even organizes drive thru Omiyai, where singles introduce themselves from their cars in the empty parking lots of wedding halls.

So is there anything that you think contributes to this being a uniquely Japanese phenomenon? Is there something sort of societally that makes this spike to be expected?

So back in early 2000s, around 2007, 2008, a term was coined by a sociologist, and this term is called konkatsu, which means spouse hunting in Japanese. And since then, there has been an increased interest from singles across Japan wanting to use matchmaking agents or apps, events, et cetera, to try to get married whether it's successful or not.

And how does this fit into the broader matchmaking and marriage dynamics in Japan?

So marriage has been in decline for decades in Japan. About 1 million couples tied the knot each year in the early 1970s, but the number has been sliding ever since. Last year, for example, only about half a million couples got married. And this decline is not just because the proportion of young Japanese in their 20s, 30s, 40s, has fallen in 1970. For example, only 2% of men and 3% of women had never married by the age of 50. But by 2015, nearly a quarter of men and 14% of women were not married.

So for whom those numbers are troubling. This new trend will be heartening news, but I guess the question is whether or not it will stick after the lockdowns are lifted. Do you think it is a Permian permanent feature then?

It's hard to say whether it will be a permanent feature. So this phenomenon of singles seeking spouses, this phenomenon was actually observed right after the Tohoku earthquake in 2011 as well. Memberships at matchmaking agencies increased and the number of couples that married in 2012 rose by 7,000 from the previous year. But sadly, the spiking marriages fell by over 8,200 in 2013. So the current trend we're seeing right now might also be short lived as well.

Miki, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts and see you back here tomorrow.

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