Regarding Finland. It's complex. There has been a pretty strong anti-US sentiment in the left leaning parts of the political establishment. Partly due to the s

Regarding Finland. It's complex. There has been a pretty strong anti-US sentiment in the left leaning parts of the political establishment. Partly due to the same reasons communism enticed global intelligenzia, and partly due to the lingering effects of Finlandization. Finlandization still causes some psychological baggage on the older generations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finlandization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finlandization Finland was "non-aligned" during the cold war and as silly as it sounds, most people in Finland believed this. What it actually meant was that Finland was heavily leaning towards Kremlin - politically and journalistically - even thought it's civil society existed in a nordic egalitarian bliss. But the higher you went in the society, the stronger the Kremlin corruption was. (I'm 42 and that stuff feels pretty foreign to me already). This corruption was hidden from the Finns as a people, who most part distrusted Russia - and as Ukrainian events have proven again, for a good reason. Hence - internal policy was based on blatant obfuscation of truth. After the second world war this was a strategy for survival as Stalin could have likely wiped out the whole nation if he had detected any inch of resistance. But after decades, it became an established "way the things are". Soviet Union was really successful in it's influence campaigns, and Soviet Russia was lauded as a paradise on earth by many prominent members of the intelligentsia up until it collapsed. Ideological hatred of capitalism is also a theme here. I have to point out that there was enough multipolarity in the political field that Finland never became a communist state. And could have not become - such a thing would have likely caused a civil war. But the left and center heavily colluded with Russia for decades. And Finland had the same president (Kekkonen) for 25 years. So, that's the background up to 1990's. So, Finland had a strong culture of Kremlin appeasement starting from the end of second world war, and it left the political and journalistic tradition scarred for generations. Like the victim in an abusive relationship, the subconscious tries to avoid irritating the bully with whom you live. The first time there was even a hint of honest journalism about Soviet Union was during the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. The political and journalistic establishment started only heal after the fall of the soviet union. For a while, though, it looked like Russia might grow up into a democratic liberal economy. There was therefore no reason for the pro-Russia sentiment to die. And no reason for the anti-US sentiment to die either. This left the political field with lots of people, who in their subconscious viewed US as "the enemy" and Russia as "the great enlightened people". I for myself cannot fathom this anti-americanism, and have not met it in my daily life as an engineer, but it seems to be a thing in the older corrupt generation of politicians, as well as among the more naive younger types. I think my generation (42 like I said) and younger recognize US as an innovative, cultural and scientific superpower and Russia as the degrading husk of a state it is. I think these "we can stand alone" and "make piece not war" sentiments are remnants of the Finlandization period. As horrible as the Ukrainian war is, I think this enables Finnish society to finally get rid of the 80 years of dishonest kowtowing to a totalitarian state and enables it to become the truly western state it needs to be and finally unleash it's full potential (even though small) in the western world.