Response to interpellation 2023/24:584 on the decision-making process regarding the DCA agreement

Försvarsministern Pål Jonson (M)

Mr. Speaker! has asked me when the DCA agreement will be put to a vote and when it will come into effect. She has further asked me whether I and the government have taken measures, and if so which ones, to ensure that nuclear weapons cannot become relevant on Swedish territory in the event of a potentially escalated conflict with Russia. Finally, Elsa Widding has asked me whether I and the government have taken the initiative for an analysis of in what way the DCA agreement contributes to Sweden's security and if I in that case can account for the outcome of the analysis.

To begin with, I want to emphasize that the DCA agreement becomes a cornerstone in the defense of northern Europe. The agreement makes it possible for Sweden and the USA to work together more effectively, which contributes to Sweden's security. The agreement is also a prerequisite for Sweden to be able to quickly and prepared receive support from the USA in a deteriorated security situation, which strengthens the security for the USA and our Nordic and Baltic neighboring countries. The conclusion of the agreement is in itself an important signal regarding the USA's security and defense policy commitment to Sweden.

The starting point for the DCA agreement is that all activities shall take place with full respect for Swedish sovereignty and Swedish laws. The closer security cooperation established through the agreement is based on Swedish consent. The agreement gives the USA access to a number of areas and facilities operated by the Armed Forces and, in one case, by the Defence Materiel Administration. Sweden and the USA will jointly have access to all sites, except for those parts that these parties shall agree that only the American force shall have access to. The agreement opens up for even closer cooperation with the USA both bilaterally and within the framework of Nato.

An entry into the DCA agreement does not change the position that was expressed within the framework of Sweden's Nato application. Sweden applied with broad support in the Riksdag for membership in Nato without reservations. This position remains firm, but in the same way as in other Nordic countries, there are no reasons to have nuclear weapons or permanent bases on Swedish territory.

The Defence Preparation Board stated in its security policy report Allvarstid from 2023 that the DCA agreement will create conditions for American support if the security situation so requires and thus will be of great importance for Sweden's security.

Sweden already has a close cooperation with the USA in the security and defense policy area, and it will be further deepened with the DCA agreement. Being able to quickly obtain American support before or early in a threatening stage is of very great importance to prevent the emergence of military threats against Sweden and against allies in the surrounding area, to deter, and ultimately to meet an armed attack. Norway already has a bilateral DCA agreement with the USA, and both Finland and Denmark have also signed such agreements with the USA. It is an important expression of the security and defense policy consensus that exists in the Nordic region and for the common needs.

Regarding the entry into force of the agreement, it is required that the Riksdag approves the agreement and decides on it. A proposition with a proposal is expected to be submitted to the Riksdag on May 8. After the Riksdag's processing, the USA will be notified that the agreement can enter into force. An entry into force should be able to occur during 2024.

The speech at riksdagen.se, in Swedish (opens in a new tab)

Elsa Widding (-)

Mr. Speaker! I begin with the conclusion: the DCA agreement does not strengthen Sweden's security. If the Riksdag approves the DCA agreement, we are committing security policy harakiri in this country. The agreement aims to satisfy the USA's military interests, not Sweden's. This is clearly evident from the wording in the agreement. It says nothing about what the USA will do for us.

Sven Hirdman, former ambassador to Russia, says in a long interview on Swebb-tv that the DCA agreement is humiliating for Sweden. American forces and their relatives shall be granted unimpeded access to a long series of military facilities. Sure - the USA may report what is to be brought into the bases, but we have no possibility or right to control it. We surrender the military control over our territory to a country that has started a long series of wars of aggression, which I will return to. A sovereign country should instead retain control over its territory and not surrender it in the way that the DCA agreement stipulates?

Mr. Speaker! What do we get back then? Military aid, says the Minister. The problem is that we have no control over that aid, just as Ukraine has now experienced that one does not have control over promised aid from the USA, which one was misled to believe when one chose not to fulfill the peace agreement with Russia in March 2022. The USA promised to support all the way if one just continued to wage war: Do not give up - you will get all the support you need, as long as you do not stop fighting against Russia! So let that be the case this time, and we all know how the war is going.

If the USA is to have unimpeded access to the bases, as stated in the agreement, then Sweden cannot also have unimpeded access to the same bases, can it? Or can both the USA and Sweden have unimpeded access to them or sovereign control over these – our – large land areas? Hardly!

We have used our sovereignty to give it away. The DCA agreement makes the USA's conflict with Russia our own, and Sweden will be drawn into a potential war between the USA and Russia. Russia gets 17 new reasons to attack Sweden. Obviously, this military buildup will simultaneously lead to increased defense efforts from the Russian side, which leads to increased tensions and threats of war in our immediate area. Sweden risks becoming a battlefield in an escalated conflict with Russia.

The USA gains control primarily over airbases, with a strong tendency towards northern Sweden. These are no small areas that the USA wants as a staging area towards northwestern Russia. It is five times the area of Gotland when it concerns Vidsel and two and a half times the area of Gotland when it concerns Älvdalen. The USA is also given the opportunity to act outside the bases if they find that the security of the bases would require it.

The purpose of the DCA agreement is claimed to be to strengthen our collective ability to withstand armed attacks with the USA. The question then is when Sweden became a collective with the USA, a chronically conflict-creating nation that has not defended American territory since World War II but has instead started countless wars of aggression since World War II, often against defenseless countries, and killed millions of people:

Vietnam 1965 - millions of people died, mostly civilians.

Iraq 1991 - the first Gulf War.

Iraq 2003 - the second Gulf War, which was built on the lie about weapons of mass destruction. The dictator wanted to sell oil in euros instead of dollars.

The USA and Nato began unprovoked terror bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. They also bombed the Chinese embassy.

The USA and the defense alliance Nato started the war against Syria in 2011, but already in 2006, the USA planned a regime change in Syria. The USA occupies Syria's oil fields today.

Libya planned to stop selling its oil in dollars. Nato terror-bombed Libya indiscriminately for seven months in 2011. USA occupies today a third of Libya, where the oil is.

The USA and Saudi Arabia began the airstrike against Yemen in 2015. The fighting is still ongoing. It might be oil that they are after there as well.

Mr. Speaker! It almost seems as if Nato has simply become a tool for the USA's aggressive war policy.

The speech at riksdagen.se, in Swedish (opens in a new tab)

Försvarsministern Pål Jonson (M)

Mr. Speaker! I can state that Elsa Widding and I have very different security policy perspectives. I can also state that the Defence Preparation Committee, which includes all eight parties, has made the assessment that Sweden is in the most serious security policy global situation since the end of the Second World War. We do this because Russia has started an unprovoked war against Ukraine. This creates very large tensions and risks in our immediate vicinity, and we must take measures in this deteriorated security policy global situation.

Such a measure is naturally that we strengthen our own total defense. It is absolutely necessary. We are now over 2 percent of GDP, as Nato calculated, and we have doubled our military defense budget in five years. We will also deepen our international defense cooperation. This is naturally about full Nato membership. Through Nato membership, we are covered by Article 5 and Nato's collective defense planning. A security policy analysis was conducted before Sweden became a full member. I personally had the opportunity to sit in the group for this, and it concluded that a Swedish Nato membership would be stabilizing, not destabilizing, and would contribute to stability and security in the surrounding area.

We also need to deepen our bilateral defense cooperation with the USA. It was the previous government that initiated the work with that process. It should also be seen against the background of the extensive bilateral cooperation that we have had with the USA actually since 2016, when Sweden and the USA entered into what is called the statement of intent to deepen the cooperation. Then we have a trilateral cooperation between Sweden, Finland and the USA, and we train today with the USA on a much larger scale than before. It is very important for Swedish security.

It is also good that Norway already has a DCA agreement and that now Sweden, Finland and Denmark will hopefully also get it. It contributes to stability and security. The Baltic countries have this, and also Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary.

This contributes to stability and is deterrent to war. It is not the case that it increases the risk of attacks. The security policy analysis that was made by the analysis group for Sweden's NATO membership, but also a unanimous defense preparation, pointed out that the DCA agreement is also important for Swedish security. It reduces the risk.

It naturally raises the threshold for attacking Sweden if we have an American military presence in our region. Nato is based on transatlantic cooperation, and the American part of this is indispensable. It is deterrent and stabilizing.

Let me also say a few things regarding Widdings' claim here about the access. It is naturally not about American bases. It is about American forces being able to use Swedish bases. That is a difference.

It is also based on respect for Swedish sovereignty, Swedish legislation, and Swedish consent. If the USA wants to bring in defense materiel into Sweden, one must state when this will be done, what type of defense materiel, and how much. It is an indispensable part of the agreement. It is important and stabilizing that we have the agreement.

Let me also say something about the process for the development of the agreement. It was signed by me and my American colleague on December 5. It will now be presented to the Riksdag. When the Riksdag makes a decision, I shall not decide, but it is the Riksdag that decides this.

We have referred a department memorandum of almost 400 pages. We have had 111 referral bodies. All conditions are in place to conduct debate and discussion on these issues.

Let me be clear about this. The agreement will contribute to stability and security in the surrounding area. It is good that all Nordic countries now have similar arrangements to strengthen the American presence in northern Europe.

The speech at riksdagen.se, in Swedish (opens in a new tab)

Elsa Widding (-)

Mr. Speaker! It is very good to strengthen our total defense. We find ourselves in a difficult situation. But the Minister apparently does not see the obvious: that this agreement dramatically increases Sweden's risk of being drawn into an upcoming war against the world's leading nuclear power, Russia.

The war in Ukraine shows that the USA today lacks defense against several Russian missile weapons that can carry nuclear warheads. A defense alliance with the USA gives us no protection against Russian robots.

At the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008, for example, Merkel and Sarkozy opposed Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO. Why? Well, Merkel explained that Putin would see it as a declaration of war. Even the military strategists George Kennan, William Perry, and Paul Nitze, advisors and high-ranking politicians in the USA, said the same thing in the early 1990s. That expanding NATO would lead to a catastrophe. That is exactly what we are seeing now, and hence this situation.

Then I do not mean Sweden's Nato membership, but the ambition that Ukraine should join Nato. The USA and Europe talk about the war as one in a row, but Russia sees the threats to its territory due to the Nato expansion as an existential threat. This has been repeated time and again since 2007.

It is now our sons and daughters who are next in line to be slaughtered, that is to say, to die or be mutilated in the same way as half a million Ukrainian soldiers have been sacrificed for the right to expand Nato.

Why is it so obvious for the Swedish government that Nato must be able to expand all the way into the Russian sphere at any cost, even if the price is hundreds of thousands of lives, where Swedish lives too can soon be added to the pile of victims?

Again: Why, for example, is the peace treaty that was negotiated under the leadership of Israel's then Prime Minister Naftali Bennett just one month after the outbreak of the war in 2022 not being discussed? The agreement never managed to be signed by Zelenskyy and Putin before it was suddenly torn up through intervention from the USA, with the United Kingdom's Prime Minister Boris Johnson as the messenger. It would have essentially been sufficient for Ukraine to stay out of Nato.

How does this, by the way, relate to Sweden's foreign policy declaration, where it is claimed that Russia's goal with the war, just as the Minister of Foreign Affairs says here, is to recreate an empire and by force overthrow the European security order? Is the attempt at a peace agreement in March 2022 not rather evidence of the opposite? Where is the diplomacy and the attempts at a peaceful solution?

And what was it now with the Minsk agreements that aimed to improve the situation for the Russian-speaking population in eastern Ukraine? Why are we not talking about it? With the benefit of hindsight: Would it not have been better if the Minsk agreements had been complied with? Then we might have avoided this hell with so many lost lives. Is there anyone who even cares about these lost lives, or is a defense industry in high gear more important?

The collective assessment of the threats to Sweden's security, conducted in investigations by FOI, Must, and FRA after Russia's invasion of eastern Ukraine in the spring of 2022, unequivocally concluded that there was no military threat against Sweden.

Since then, the government's actions have increased the threat of war to such an extent that ÖB has now declared that war on Swedish territory is fully possible and that it is time for the Swedish people to take action.

Other countries in Europe must now - through diplomacy - strive to recreate normal relations with Russia, our neighboring country, and move away from the influence that is so destructive for Europe where the USA and Nato now, at all costs, seem to want to start a major war.

Europe's economy is going backwards. We are heading towards a devastated Europe with the risk of something even worse, a global nuclear war with billions of wasted human lives. Even the Pope pleads for peace negotiations when he says: When you see that you are defeated, that things are not going well, you must have the courage to negotiate.

Since the interview was recorded, Turkey's president has offered to host a meeting between Ukraine and Russia to end the war. Why does Sweden not support this attempt at peace negotiations? Has Sweden completely abandoned its previously fortified role as a peace mediator in the world?

There are today several NATO countries that have chosen not to involve themselves in the Ukraine war, which in the end is a conflict between the USA and Russia where no one thinks of Ukraine.

The speech at riksdagen.se, in Swedish (opens in a new tab)

Försvarsministern Pål Jonson (M)

Mr. Speaker! I can state that Widding speaks of many other things besides the bilateral agreement between Sweden and the USA, the so-called DCA agreement, which regulates the legal conditions for a US presence on Swedish territory and which primarily concerns better conditions for exercises but possibly also for the prepositioning of US defense materiel.

Let me nevertheless comment on some of the claims that Widding makes, not least regarding the cornerstone that Sweden and this chamber have stood up for when it comes to the European security order. It is based on that all countries shall be allowed to decide their own security policy choices.

We are free countries in Europe. Then the population itself must decide, for example, whether one wants to belong to the EU or Nato. I can state that there is also a lot of talk about a Nato expansion. But fundamentally, this is about independent countries themselves having chosen that they want to belong to the EU and Nato.

Russia tried to influence us in that regard on December 17. Foreign Minister Lavrov sent a letter to all European capitals and said: There will be no more NATO expansions. By doing so, he indirectly said that Sweden and Finland were part of the Russian sphere of interest.

It is totally unacceptable for us. It is Sweden that shall make its own security policy choices. It shall not be Russia. A cornerstone of the security order in Europe is that all countries shall be allowed to decide their own security policy choices. We have previously had a Europe governed by buffer zones and spheres of influence. We shall not return to that.

Let me also comment on the second claim that Widding makes regarding the analysis of Säkerhetspolisen, Must, and FRA. These are agencies that I work very closely with on a daily basis. This applies in particular to Must and FRA, which fall under the Ministry of Defence.

The Defence Preparation Board has pointed out that an armed attack against Sweden cannot be ruled out. I can also state that in both FRA's and Must's annual reports, it is pointed out that the security policy situation in Europe is very serious. It has deteriorated significantly precisely because of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. What we have to contend with is a Russia that is willing to take large political and military risks.

We also have to contend with a Russia that is clearly demonstrating great brutality and bestiality in Ukraine. I have personally visited both Irpin and Bucha. Civilian targets have been systematically attacked. This is also something that Must and FRA take into account in their world situation assessments.

No one fails to point out that the geopolitical security situation has significantly deteriorated due to Russia's illegal, unprovoked, and unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine. It is precisely for that reason that we need to take measures to strengthen Swedish security.

As we have said for decades in Sweden, security is best sought in cooperation with others. Through NATO membership, we reduce the risk of Sweden being subjected to an armed attack, because by virtue of that, we are also covered by defense guarantees. We can participate in NATO's joint defense planning, and that is deterrent and stabilizing. That was pointed out by the Defense Preparation Board, and it has also been done by the security policy analysis group.

It is clear that it raises the threshold for attacking Sweden if we have other countries cooperating with us and if the Americans, for example, have the opportunity to pre-position defense materiel here. Then it goes faster and easier for us to receive support in the event that we are exposed to a crisis, and ultimately we have a better ability to defend ourselves than if we were to do it alone.

There is also no doubt that it is Russia that is the greatest threat to European security. It is Russia that is also acting destabilizingly in our own immediate vicinity.

The speech at riksdagen.se, in Swedish (opens in a new tab)

Elsa Widding (-)

Mr. Speaker! Russia's war in Ukraine is inexcusable. This is about our security.

Jacques Baud, Senior Advisor and Colonel in the Swiss Army, writes in his book Operation Z: an analysis of the war in Ukraine and its causes on page 33: "It is amusing that Sweden and Finland do not seem to have understood that they, in the event of war, could be the first to be attacked with nuclear weapons, for preemptive purposes."

A long line of experts from many different countries share this view today. The Minister may be following Professor Jeffrey Sachs, who was among others known as a special advisor to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon until 2006. The Minister may also be following John Mearsheimer, a very well-known professor of political science from the University of Chicago, or why not Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst in the USA.

There are very many experts, not least from the USA, who believe that the war in Ukraine has been provoked during a two-decade-long NATO expansion and EU expansion. We are now in an extremely dangerous situation because Russia simply does not accept NATO with the risk of nuclear weapons near its 200-mile-long land border with Ukraine, in the same way that the USA did not accept nuclear weapons in Cuba in the 60s. It is the same thing as if China were to place nuclear weapons in Canada or Mexico, for that matter. Russia has made it clear that they see this as an existential threat to the country - regardless of what we think.

Sweden's government has now, backed by the media, for two years uncritically conveyed the American view on the war in Ukraine with a strongly simplified and completely history-less image. Important information has been withheld from the Swedish people. That is how the public has been frightened with the enemy in the east in order to even be able to justify foreign power on Swedish territory.

If one has read the high school history regarding the alliance-building and the provocations before the outbreak of the First World War, one should actually understand that Sweden's provocative actions can be devastating for Sweden. Allowing the USA to have access to Swedish military facilities is provocative. The Minister for Defence should actually also have the sense to understand this.

The speech at riksdagen.se, in Swedish (opens in a new tab)

Försvarsministern Pål Jonson (M)

Mr. Speaker! My view is that it is much more provocative that Russia repeatedly invades and occupies other countries. We have seen it in Georgia in 2008, in Ukraine in 2014 through an illegal annexation of Crimea and naturally through the full-scale invasion of Ukraine which began on 24 February 2022. It is this that is the main problem in European security policy.

If Russia had a goal regarding Sweden and Finland, it was to keep us out of Nato. I believe that the Russian full-scale invasion is contributing powerfully to this Riksdag making a decision in broad political consensus that Sweden should become a full member of Nato.

It is not provocative that countries make their own security policy choices. It is a cornerstone of European security policy that countries have sovereignty and the right to make such decisions. It is not provocative that Sweden is a member of Nato; it is a matter between Sweden and the 31 other allies. Moscow does not have a veto over our security policy. We are a free people, and we make our own security policy choices ourselves. If we begin to compromise on that, it is my assessment that we will have to manage a significantly deteriorated security policy global environment.

The DCA agreement regulates the legal conditions for a US presence. A collective assessment is that an increased US presence and increased US engagement in our part of Europe contributes to stability and security. Therefore, it is good that Norway has such an agreement and that Sweden, Finland and Denmark will hopefully get it soon.

The interpellation debate was hereby concluded.

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