Sweden officially joined NATO today after Russia's invasion of Ukraine prompted it to rethink its defense policy and abandon its long-held position of neutrality.
Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson formally submitted the accession documents to the US State Department in Washington DC, the final step in a months-long process to gain approval from all members to allow his country to become the alliance's 32nd member. .
"If you take a step back and think about where we were three years ago, none of this was predetermined and in fact, none of this was predictable," Blinken said.
Blinken pointed to Sweden's "200-year-old policy of non-alignment" which stretches back to the Napoleonic Wars - and the Swedish population's lack of appetite to join the alliance before the invasion of Russia.
"Then everything changed," he said.
