Brussels – A call for calm, the cool, pragmatic calm that Europe needs to deal with the threats of war coming from Russia. Alexander Stubb has just become the new President of Finland, and he is a man with an important history, who likes to be in the limelight, and he is already making a lot more talk about himself than one would expect on the subject of the Head of State of a relatively small country like Finland, which has just over five and a half million inhabitants. Yet for almost 1,300 kilometers this country has a border with Russia, which makes it one of the leading players in this phase of European history.
So the Financial Times interviewed him to hear him say that he wants everyone to calm down. On rumors of an upcoming Moscow attack on a European country or NATO, Stubb has a message, “I would say to remain cool, calm, and collected.”
“In Finnish we have a saying, ‘a pessimist is never disappointed.’ I don’t like that saying,” Stubb told the British newspaper, explaining that “it is very easy to throw out these sort of simple terms, of you know ‘Russia will attack Europe next.’ I don’t think it’s going to do that. But we have to be prepared for it,” he stressed.
NATO, according to Stubb, is advanced in its preparation, but the European Union a little less so, talking about it but not acting. “When it comes to procurement of defense materiel, we need to start pooling. When it comes to financing, we need to start pooling. When it comes to planning and operations, we need to start pooling,” he said. “In Nato, we’re already doing that. But in Europe, I think we’re lagging a little bit behind,” he said.
He doesn’t speak of defense Eurobonds. “I’m not making a call for defense bonds,” he makes clear, specifying that in the Union, public money and common debt are too often seen as the only solution: “That is not the case.”
“This is an issue of really rigorous administrative planning and the private sector. If at the end of the day there is some mutualization, so be it. But I’m not advocating that at the moment,” Stubb added.
English version by the Translation Service of Withub
