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NATO’s annual summit in Vilnius has led to intense focus on the question of whether Ukraine should be invited to join NATO, or at least given some pathway to join in the future. An invitation to join is almost definitely not going to happen while active hostilities are ongoing, but some people hope that Ukraine might at least be told that it will be able to join once the fighting is finished and it has perhaps carried out some political or military reforms.
I’ve long viewed the debate over Ukraine’s NATO membership as a red herring - in fact, something more than a red herring, because I believe in many ways that it is actively harmful to the security of both Ukraine and the West. There is a lot that the West can and should do to help defend Ukraine in the future, and it can all be done without a damaging and divisive fight over NATO membership.
Ever since the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, when George W. Bush browbeat the rest of the alliance into offering the country eventual membership, NATO has spoken to Ukraine with a forked tongue. The compromise that emerged from that summit was that Ukraine would be given a vague promise of future membership, but with no concrete plan in place to achieve it. That has been the alliance’s position ever since because there are few members of NATO who would actually be willing to engage in war with Russia in order to protect Ukraine. This became bitterly obvious last February, when American officials were offering President Zelensky a ride out of Kiev as Russian tanks approached. If anything, the events of the last year have only made it clearer that while there is much that NATO members will do to protect Ukraine - for instance by providing training, equipment and munitions - the one thing they will not do is fight for it.
By pretending otherwise, NATO would only weaken itself, and it would also risk weakening Ukraine further into the bargain. It’s not at all clear that the Article 5 defense guarantee which ties NATO members to each other’s fates would be credible in the case of Ukraine, given how averse the other members of the alliance obviously are to engaging in a shooting war with Russia. And a promise that Ukraine would get NATO membership after the war would only provide additional incentives for Russia to keep hostilities going or hold onto Ukrainian territory as long as possible. It could make reaching a peace agreement to end the conflict harder, not easier.
One idea gaining traction is a West German model. Proponents point out that during the Cold War, West Germany was able to join NATO even though it was a divided country - and so Ukraine might do the same and hence join even without completely kicking out the Russians. But there are a lot of problems with this. The West German government in Bonn, unlike the government in Kiev, had given up any aspirations to the reconquest of the rest of its country. In other words, the West German model only worked because there wasn’t an ongoing conflict. In the case of Ukraine, attempts by either side to take further territory could easily plunge NATO into war with Russia - precisely the scenario that most NATO members have no appetite for, and the possibility of which they will not accept.
This might seem like a bleak picture. Actually, it’s not. Because what matters to Ukraine much more than some kind of imaginary pathway to NATO membership is the continued receipt of military support from the West. This is the other main topic of discussion in Vilnius, after which the allies will lay out some sort of long-term package of security assistance to Kiev in order to enable it to continue to defeat and in the future deter Russia. Many different precedents and models have been offered for this, with many referring to it as an “Israel-style” relationship. That implies that Ukraine will maintain access to the latest Western military technology and will benefit from a high level of military aid over a long period of time.
Given the political headwinds that this long-term military assistance faces, particularly in the United States, making sure that it can continue on a sustainable basis is a crucial and difficult task. Officials want to make sure they Trump-proof the relationship with Ukraine, making it harder for future presidents to walk away from the relationship. Unfortunately, this is very difficult to do - there’s no chance of getting a formal U.S.-Ukrainian treaty through the Senate, meaning that any deal will only be an “executive agreement”, subject to being torn up by the next president. In the event that an anti-Ukrainian or pro-Russian figure like Trump is elected, only political pressure - domestic and international - will keep it in place.
Here again it’s important to think through the concrete consequences of an offer of formal NATO membership to Ukraine. Such an offer is likely to be incredibly politically divisive in the United States, with even many commentators who are sympathetic to Ukraine questioning its wisdom or feasibility. It would be more difficult to maintain political support for a long-term security relationship if it was tied to the divisive issue of Ukrainian NATO membership. It’s not as if someone like Trump would have any qualms about blowing up Ukraine’s bid to join midway through, especially given how unsettled the state of the war is likely to be even next year.
The real priority for the West is to keep flowing the security assistance with which Ukraine is heroically resisting Russian aggression. NATO membership is a distraction from that, not a realistic way of achieving it, and I hope that the officials meeting at Vilnius act accordingly. I’ll be back with another post when they’re done to look at the results.