Unsurprisingly, the question of NATO membership for Ukraine generated the greatest discussion among both the participants at the recent NATO summit in Vilnius and commentators in the major western media outlets. Beyond the sometimes testy exchanges, however, much of the focus seemed to be on the benefit NATO membership would provide for Ukraine. Everyone — including, significantly, the Ukrainians themselves — understands that NATO membership cannot occur with a war already in progress. The whole argument at Vilnius was about a future pathway to membership as part of the security alignment that emerges once some kind of peace is established. So not now, but in perhaps a couple of years. With that understood, why should NATO — and above all, the US — wish to bring Ukraine into NATO when the guns fall silent, say, for the sake of argument in 2025? (READ MORE: Edward Luttwak: The U.S. Must End the Russia–Ukraine War)
Put very bluntly, a well-armed and rebuilding postwar Ukraine is the only solution to NATO’s fundamental strategic challenge going forward. Critically, such a Ukraine would provide strategic depth for NATO’s eastern boundary and an essential level of forward-deployed combat power, something beyond the means of the frontline NATO members, save perhaps Poland, and beyond the apparent willingness of the remainder of NATO. The plain fact of the matter is that NATO is now internally divided, and its divisions compel a fundamental rethink of its role in European security. Furthermore, it’s widely understood that the period of maximum danger of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is the 2025-2027 time frame. If we want a stable security order in Europe, without hopelessly mortgaging the resources we will need to deal with China’s global challenge, then we need to come to terms with NATO’s internal divisions and plan accordingly.
NATO Basics
Let’s start with a few basic propositions. First, there is virtually no conceivable outcome to the current war in Ukraine that doesn’t perpetuate a destabilizing threat from Russia. We can all dream of a “Russian Spring” in which the good people of Russia take to the streets, the Russian army refuses to intervene, Putin flees to Belarus, and the various loudmouthed nationalists, the Girkins and Gubarevs, are shorn of popular support and follow him into exile. Moderate leaders emerge at every level and peace reigns. As I said, we can all dream. More realistically, the possible outcomes include battlefield stalemate and a Russian polity that congeals into Putinesque tyranny, regardless of what may become of Putin himself. Or chaos that threatens to spill beyond Russia’s borders at any time, all with nuclear sabers rattling in the background.
Second, so long as Russia possesses a vast nuclear arsenal, the most important aspect of our own role in NATO will remain the extension of our nuclear umbrella to cover the alliance. The nuclear politics of NATO deterrence deserve an essay all to themselves. Suffice it for now to say that the only conceivable deterrent to Russian nuclear brinksmanship is fear of US retaliation. How that might be applied is a complicated question; for example, would Article 5 of the NATO Treaty compel retaliation in kind by the US following a Russian nuclear strike on Warsaw or Riga? Many Eastern Europeans quietly doubt that the US would risk nuclear escalation in response to such an event, and many, quite reasonably, hope that the possibility of a US nuclear counterstrike would keep Russia from actually drawing the nuclear sabers they persist in rattling. The whole logic of NATO’s “flexible response” conventional buildup in the 60s and 70s came with the recognition that the earlier “massive retaliation” strategy was not a strategy for warfare, but simply for preventing war.
Third, and following the same logic that led from “massive retaliation” to “flexible response,” NATO now faces a situation not unlike that which presented itself in the aftermath of the Berlin Crisis of 1961. If nuclear deterrence failed to prevent a conventional attack by Warsaw Pact forces, then how was a conventional war to be fought. Withdrawal behind the Rhine barrier was the most credible tactical option, when combined with the extension of the Soviets always suspect logistical capabilities. However, conceding the bulk of West Germany (along with Denmark and a portion of the Netherlands) quickly proved politically unacceptable.
Thus, NATO at its Cold War peak was fully committed to “forward defense” along the border between East and West Germany. To this end, the Bundeswehr ultimately fielded 12 divisions, 7,000 tanks, and a mobilized strength of over a million men, while the Luftwaffe had some 1,000 combat aircraft, complemented by a massive US and UK military presence, and a significant deployment of forces from various other NATO countries. Additionally, for many years the US conducted annual REFORGER exercises, designed to demonstrate our ability to marry substantial US forces with pre-positioned heavy weapons and equipment at key locations in Germany.
NATO’s New Front Line
What does this history have to teach us about NATO’s current role and how the inclusion of Ukraine could make a crucial difference? Start by considering how NATO’s “front line” with Russia has relocated eastward. It now stretches from Finland through the Baltic States to Poland. The remaining eastern European NATO countries—Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria—are shielded from Russia by, you guessed it, Ukraine (for present purposes, one can only count Belarus as a potential launch pad for Russian aggression, not, in any sense, as a genuine buffer between Russia and NATO). It’s no accident that even Bulgaria, the NATO member with perhaps the closest active political ties to Russia, quietly provided significant military and economic assistance to Ukraine in the crucial early days of the war.
Crafting a “forward defense” comparable to that which once existed along the border between East and West Germany becomes immeasurably easier if a well-armed and motivated Ukraine is included in the picture. Only Poland among the eastern European NATO members provides comparable manpower and military capability. Indeed, the combined populations of all the other eastern European NATO members only slightly exceed that of Ukraine. Without Ukraine, building a revitalized “forward defense” based upon the eastern European NATO countries becomes almost unimaginable. The manpower base is simply lacking.
Similarly, there is a lack of physical depth. For example, the Baltic states are tiny, and, as such, extremely vulnerable. One can make light of the muddled first phase of Putin’s “special military operation” and it’s inability to sustain a rapid penetration toward Kiev, but it would be foolish to assume that the Russian military will have failed to learn from this experience, A similar thrust aimed at Tallinn or Riga might well succeed — the distances involved are trivial, the logistical challenges undaunting. One can’t make the Baltic states bigger, but they become much less attractive if an attack upon them triggers a NATO Article 5 response along Russia’s border with Ukraine.
Crafting a “forward defense” … becomes immeasurably easier if a well-armed and motivated Ukraine is included in the picture.
Including Ukraine in NATO is the key to resurrecting a credible “forward defense” along NATO’s current border with Russia. Indeed, there is really no credible alternative. If Russia continues to pose a threat, then who is to provide the alternative military strength, and where might it be deployed? Will it be Germany? Hold the laughter, please. For all the talk about a Zeitenwende, a turning point in German attitudes after the invasion of Ukraine, there’s little evidence that the Germans are willing to make the kind of sustained military commitment necessary to support a significant, forward-deployed capability in the east. Although the eastern European countries are politely quiet about it, none of them believes that the Germans will provide meaningful support in the event of a military confrontation with Russia.
Any doubts on this score were largely removed during the course of the recent Vilnius summit. President Zelensky appeared at the summit with the expectation that, at the very least, a path to NATO membership would be offered, and most of the eastern European NATO members had indicated their support. His expectations, however, were rudely disappointed, apparently because of behind the scenes pressure from the Germans and a reluctance on the part of President Biden to press Berlin on the issue.
If not Germany, then France? Not, it seems, so long as the country is riven with internal conflict. The UK? While the British have been early and staunch supporters of Ukraine, they simply lack the ground forces necessary to replicate the armored combat power provided during the Cold War by the British Army of the Rhine. In fairness, both France and the UK have a more meaningful role to play in “out of area” operations, where their naval capabilities come more usefully into play. We need them more in the Pacific than the Baltic. (READ MORE: A Broken Windows Policy Could Restore Order)
This leaves the US, and the simple fact is that we lack the required ground presence in eastern Europe. We rotate units up to brigade strength into the area, but there are no foreseeable circumstances in which we will permanently station even a single army corps there. Nor, frankly, should we. As Donald Devine argued convincingly in a recent American Spectator article, we are already stretched too thin, militarily and economically (and, perhaps also, spiritually and culturally) for this kind of forward deployment.
A New Model for NATO
The RAND Corporation recently published an in-depth analysis of what it would take for the US to develop a new global security strategy, one sufficient to three critical and interrelated purposes: (1) meeting the supreme strategic challenge posed by China, (2) holding the line in Europe against a continuing Russian threat, and (3) maintaining sufficient residual capability to deal with other potential threats (e.g., Iran). The analysis proceeds from the understanding that we can no longer enjoy the kind of dominance that we enjoyed in the years immediately following the end of the Cold War, and it tries to sketch a realistic model for creatively extending our limited resources to meet these multiple challenges. If we were to implement their many recommendations, and if our various allies and friends did likewise, then we would have cause for optimism. And the RAND study is simply one among many, each sketching approaches to solving our current strategic dilemmas.
The problem, then, is less a lack of good ideas, and more a lack of national will. For all the talk about the coming threat to Taiwan, one sees little sense of urgency in our preparations to meet that threat. Tiresomely, our current leadership still kowtows to Chairman Xi when it comes to climate policy and much else. Even when we try to draw a firm line, the message seems muddled, as witness the statements following the recent balloon overflight. The same has been true of our approach to Ukraine; for all that we’ve provided in terms of military support, we’ve also imposed illogical limitations, and have frequently been dilatory in our actions. Whether its China, or Russia, or Iran, we send mixed signals, largely, it seems, because we really don’t know what we want and because our current leadership — I use the term advisedly — seemingly views the world through a prism of absentmindedness and wishful thinking.
Therein lies the final and most important lesson. Despite ongoing attempts to paper over the differences, NATO no longer means what it once did, and its organizing “Three Musketeers” Article 5 principle — all for one and one for all — is no longer meaningful. The interests of the eastern European NATO members diverge significantly from the interests of their Western counterparts, not to mention the US, Canada, and such NATO wildcards as Turkey. These are “far away countries, of which we know nothing” as Neville Chamberlain remarked before giving up Czechoslovakia to Hitler in 1938. We don’t need to discard NATO — a successful history, after all, should count for something. But maybe the NATO that works in the future is one that recognizes that the countries along the border of an unstable Russia have security interests that differ significantly from the US and the remainder of NATO. And those security interests are best achieved with the inclusion of Ukraine in NATO.
James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring he’s begun as second career as a thriller writer. His 2022 novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region.
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