Four French frigates and 40 billion kronor later, Sweden is no longer the country it thought it was. I was on the Djurgårdslinjen tram last Wednesday morning, half-listening to the radio, when the announcement cut through the noise. Four frigates. France. Forty billion kronor. Sweden's biggest military purchase since the Gripen. I looked up, and a few other commuters had done the same — that brief, shared pause when something doesn't quite fit the picture you carry of where you live. Sweden doesn't buy warships. Sweden mediates. Sweden abstains. Sweden is the country that spent half a century carefully, deliberately, staying out of exactly the kind of entanglements that come with ocean-going military hardware. And yet, there it was. The decision. On Tuesday, May 19, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and Defence Minister Pål Jonson stood on the deck of a Visby-class corvette at Skeppsbron in Stockholm and announced that Sweden had selected France's Naval Group to build ...