---
title: "The eastern border, treaties that no longer fit, and a chainsaw in Buenos Aires | Weekly Wiseguys, 20 November 2023"
summary: "Sami Miettinen, Tere Sammallahti and MP Onni Rostila on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 20 November 2023 — the Monday crossing points on Finland's south-eastern border were being closed and razor wire was going up. The episode works through the mechanics of the border situation at the level of an individual asylum claim, makes its most durable argument — that treaties written in the 1950s cannot be followed to the letter once everyone else has stopped — and ends in Argentina, where a self-described anarcho-capitalist had been elected president the day before. The panel's harshest passages on the Middle East are summarised here only as far as they can be checked."
datePublished: 2023-11-20
dateModified: 2023-11-20
originalLang: en
section: satire
sections: ["satire","society"]
authors: ["Sami Miettinen"]
tags: ["Media-vierailu","Viikon viisastelu","Weekly Wiseguys","Ivan Puopolo","Tere Sammallahti","Onni Rostila","Itäraja","Hybridivaikuttaminen","Kansainväliset sopimukset","Turvapaikkapolitiikka","Argentiina","Javier Milei"]
canonical: https://www.neuvottelija.com/ai/viisastelu-rajat-kiinni-kv-sopimukset-ja-milei/
---
# The eastern border, treaties that no longer fit, and a chainsaw in Buenos Aires | Weekly Wiseguys, 20 November 2023

# The eastern border, treaties that no longer fit, and a chainsaw in Buenos Aires | Weekly Wiseguys, 20 November 2023

> **Summary:**
> Sami Miettinen, Tere Sammallahti and MP Onni Rostila on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 20 November 2023 — the Monday crossing points on Finland's south-eastern border were being closed and razor wire was going up. The episode works through the mechanics of the border situation at the level of an individual asylum claim, makes its most durable argument — that treaties written in the 1950s cannot be followed to the letter once everyone else has stopped — and ends in Argentina, where a self-described anarcho-capitalist had been elected president the day before. The panel's harshest passages on the Middle East are summarised here only as far as they can be checked.

This is a summary on Neuvottelija AI. The episode itself is on Ivan Puopolo’s channel and is his — [watch the original](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9VbPMfJGeI). The appearance is catalogued at [neuvottelija.com/media](https://www.neuvottelija.com/media/viisastelu-close-the-borders-treaties-and-milei/), which is the canonical home of this content.

> **A note on reading this.** Weekly Wiseguys is a tongue-in-cheek political panel, not a news broadcast. The speakers are right-of-centre commentators and politicians talking in their own names, sharpening for effect and joking as they go. This article sorts their arguments and marks who said what; it takes no position on who is right, and it does not reproduce the personal jabs. Speakers are named only where the recording itself identifies who is talking: the transcript carries no speaker labels, so uncertain passages are attributed to the panel or to "one of the guests" rather than to a name. The opinions are the speakers’ own.

---

## The panel

**Ivan Puopolo** hosts; the guests are **Sami Miettinen**, **Tere Sammallahti** and Finns
Party MP **Onni Rostila**. Recorded on Monday 20 November 2023, mid-event: crossing points on
Finland's south-eastern border were being closed, razor wire was going up and the Defence
Forces were providing executive assistance. The panel says out loud that it does not know what
the week will bring.

Three subjects: the hybrid operation on the eastern border, international treaties, and the
president elected in Argentina the day before.

## 1. The eastern border — mechanics before opinion

The best stretch in the episode is the one where the panel **explains the mechanics at the
level of one individual** before taking a position. It is worth reading even if you reach a
different conclusion:

- A person with no travel documents is let through the Russian checkpoint and sent on towards
  the Finnish one.
- At the Finnish border they state they are in need of protection. That is enough to start an
  asylum process, and the Finnish authority has to follow the law.
- If the crossing point is closed, the person is stuck between two borders. Going back into
  Russia may not be possible, because the exit stamp has already been given.

The panel states the consequence directly: **if people accumulate in the border zone in
winter, the political situation changes**, and they expect support for a hard line to start
fraying at that point. That is a prediction, not an observation — but it is precisely put and
it is testable.

On whose responsibility those people are, the panel gives two answers in a row and leaves them
side by side: the responsibility lies with whoever organised the operation, and separately,
people who set out on such a journey carry some responsibility of their own. The second is a
position.

### The comparison the panel considers the right one

**Tere Sammallahti** raises the Poland–Belarus border situation of 2021: Poland answered with
a fence, water cannon and sustained persistence, and the operation stopped. Against it he sets
the then Finnish interior minister's public statements that people could not be prevented from
coming. The comparison is historical and checkable; the judgement drawn from it about the
present line is a position.

**Onni Rostila** frames the same thing as a **weakest-link argument**: if neighbouring states
hold under pressure and Finland does not, the pressure moves to where it produces results. The
argument is logical and does not depend on one's views about immigration.

### Criticism and credit, both aimed at their own side

Two moments worth marking, because they run against the episode's general grain:

- **Criticism of the government.** One guest considers the response too slow: if the closures
  were known on Wednesday, fortifying the crossing points should not, in his view, have taken
  more than a day, because the Defence Forces have both the equipment and the people.
- **Credit to the opposition.** The panel gives credit to both the Centre Party and the Social
  Democrats for communicating in unison, and says that if gaps appear in the law there should
  be readiness to legislate even by the constitutional-amendment procedure.

In the same passage comes the most honest point in the episode: **the law passed in the
previous parliamentary term** — the one allowing the border to be closed on grounds of hybrid
influence — is being used for the first time now, and without it the tools would be clearly
weaker. That law is the work of the previous, politically opposite government.

A practical limitation is marked too: **a barrier you can walk around through the forest is
not a barrier.** A closed crossing point is not a closed border.

## 2. Treaties written for a different world

The most durable claim in the episode is broader than its subject, and it comes in three
parts:

> **A treaty nobody observes protects nobody — but it still binds whoever observes it alone.**

The reasoning is not "treaties are bad" but **changed circumstances**, and the panel lists
three changes, each of them checkable:

1. **The original purpose.** The refugee convention system was built in post-war Europe and
   was applied during the Cold War to, among others, dissidents fleeing the Soviet Union. The
   panel calls that principle a good one and does not propose abandoning it.
2. **Social security.** Western societies in the 1950s had nothing like today's statutory
   welfare entitlements. Granting protection therefore did not carry the same fiscal
   commitment it does now.
3. **Capacity to organise.** There was then no way to assemble and move a large group from a
   neighbouring state in a controlled fashion. There is now.

From which comes the panel's concrete proposal: **process the claim somewhere other than the
border.** The need for protection would be assessed in a safe country before the journey, so
that tens of thousands of claims do not pile up at a frontier to be examined one at a time.
The proposal is given without detail, and its hardest problem — who decides, and on what
basis, when the country of departure is not safe — goes unaddressed.

The theoretical support is the realist school and John Mearsheimer in particular: states act
in anarchy, and there is no enforcer above the treaties. The panel nevertheless **separates
the description from the recommendation**, and that distinction matters here: that great
powers behave this way does not make it desirable. One guest says plainly that politics as
cold as that is not worth following.

One place where the panel contradicts itself deserves marking: in the same stretch, sabotage
against Baltic Sea infrastructure is spoken of approvingly, on the grounds that it "broke
interdependence". The defence of a treaty-based order that the panel demands of Russia does
not, at that point, extend to their own example. They do not notice.

## 3. The Middle East, platform moderation, and the double-standard claim

This is the sharpest stretch of the episode, and only the parts that are arguments rather than
suspicions about individuals are summarised here.

**The checkable core claim** concerns asymmetry in moderation: the same slogan that is removed
from an American platform as incitement to genocide is chanted publicly in Finland without
consequence. The panel says explicitly that it is not asking for it to be banned — their claim
is about **consistency**, not prohibition. Put that way it is a question both sides have to
answer: if free expression covers this, it covers what the other side says too.

**Rostila's broader claim** is that ethnic hostility is not recognised as such when the target
is the majority population. It is offered as general cultural criticism and is not supported
with evidence; it is a position and should be read as one. The panel jokes over the top of it,
which suggests it is not meant precisely.

**The media-criticism stretch** contains one checkable structural claim and a set of unchecked
individual cases. The structural claim: once a newsroom's moral starting position is fixed,
the material is selected to fit it, and contradictory information ends up as a small note or
not at all. That is a standard and sound media-criticism observation, and it cuts both ways.

The individual cases — what a given story omitted, what was said at a university demonstration,
and an unnamed opinion poll on Palestinian attitudes — are given live without sources. They are
marked here as unverified and are not repeated in detail. For the same reason, the panel's
assessments of a named academic are not carried over here: they are suspicions about motive,
not claims that could be checked.

## 4. Argentina, and why Milei won

Javier Milei had been elected the day before. The panel is of two minds about him, which is
the best feature of this stretch.

**What they like:** the direction of the programme. Argentina was one of the wealthiest
countries in the world a century ago, and on the panel's reading the long decline is a result
of policy rather than of chance. Venezuela is named as the extreme case: a country among the
richest in the world in oil reserves, where people went hungry.

**What they do not like:** the performance. The chainsaw on stage and the video removing
ministries one by one draw a blunt verdict — *"this guy's ranting was on another level
entirely."* So they do not treat the election result as straightforward vindication.

**The explanation they give** is the most transferable thing in the episode and it applies to
Finland too: election results of this kind do not happen in a vacuum. They are a reaction, and
the force of the reaction depends on how far policy has drifted from what voters experience.
The panel applies the same explanation at home: if the trade union movement cannot mobilise
people behind political strikes, the reason may be that people are reading the state of the
public finances for themselves.

In the same passage comes a prediction about the Dutch election, held two days after the
recording: the panel expects Geert Wilders's party and a new farmers' party to take a
significant share. **The prediction landed** — Wilders's PVV became the largest party on 22
November 2023. It is the only prediction in the episode that resolved quickly.

## Claims presented as claims

- An unnamed opinion poll on Palestinian attitudes.
- Descriptions of what was said at a university demonstration.
- What particular news stories left out.
- The estimate of how quickly the fortification work could have been done.
- Claims about who the people arriving at the border are and where they come from.

## What survives the episode

1. **Mechanics before opinion.** Following an asylum claim through the border explains why
   closing a crossing point does not settle the situation, and why a barrier you can walk
   around is not a barrier.
2. **Treaties are judged by changed circumstances, not by denying their value.** The panel's
   three-part reasoning — original purpose, welfare entitlements, capacity to organise — is an
   argument you can answer, not merely a position.
3. **An election result as a reaction.** The explanation the panel gives for Argentina is the
   same one it gives for Finland — and it is testable in both.

## How the episode runs

- **00:00** — Today's agenda
- **03:21** — A new segment and viewer suggestions
- **04:54** — A previous interview, and its musical footnote
- **05:42** — The border situation at the time of recording
- **06:35** — What happens if every crossing point closes
- **07:21** — The mechanics at the level of one person
- **08:10** — Whose responsibility the people at the border are
- **08:57** — A prediction about when opinion turns
- **09:47** — Where an asylum process begins
- **10:46** — The weakest-link argument
- **11:33** — The Polish precedent from 2021
- **12:26** — Mearsheimer and the realist school
- **13:14** — International law, or international aspiration?
- **14:06** — Treaties made in peacetime, applied in a crisis
- **14:55** — A treaty nobody observes
- **15:42** — Is this a NATO matter?
- **16:32** — Following the letter, and what it costs
- **17:24** — What the refugee convention was originally for
- **18:13** — A welfare state that did not exist in the 1950s
- **19:03** — Organising a diaspora with today's tools
- **19:51** — Who arrives, and who objects to closing
- **20:45** — The risk assessment for a new NATO member
- **21:35** — Interdependence and Baltic Sea infrastructure
- **22:24** — The cold-eyed view Finland avoids
- **23:10** — States in anarchy — and the number of battalions
- **23:57** — The criticism: the response was too slow
- **24:42** — Fortifying in twelve hours
- **25:29** — A barrier you can walk around
- **26:20** — A law being used for the first time
- **27:07** — Credit to the opposition
- **27:54** — And what about the airports?
- **28:42** — What tools the situation offers
- **29:35** — Western self-loathing as a topic
- **30:21** — Platform moderation and a double standard
- **32:10** — A slogan banned in one place and allowed in another
- **33:21** — Whose ethnic hatred gets recognised
- **34:09** — A university demonstration and what was said
- **35:46** — Editorial selection and moral framing
- **36:35** — The context that goes unmentioned
- **39:21** — A poll that was not reported
- **39:49** — Municipal state transfers and capital income
- **40:43** — Argentina: the chainsaw and the election win
- **41:30** — Populism rising in waves
- **42:27** — The Dutch election ahead
- **43:14** — Milei as a reaction
- **44:02** — Culling ministries on video
- **44:50** — Argentina's hundred years
- **45:36** — The Venezuelan story
- **46:29** — Ideology as religion
- **47:22** — Finlandisation and the trips nobody talked about
- **48:17** — Sign-off