Ahead of the NATO meeting in Vilnius, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said that it would be “absurd” if Ukraine were not offered a timeline for membership in NATO. Zelensky is, quite naturally, pressing as hard as he can to secure the best security arrangements that he can for his embattled country. He will also be aware that there is no chance that Ukraine will join NATO in the foreseeable future. Acceptance requires unanimity, which Ukraine would not conceivably receive. Moreover, there is a strong convention that NATO will not accept a new member embroiled in a border dispute, let alone one already at war. There are very good reasons for that, not least the logic of NATO’s mutual-defense obligations. For NATO and Russian forces to be in direct confrontation would carry the risk of setting off a chain of events from which no one would be able to find an off-ramp.
Understanding this, NATO has rightly agreed at the summit to extend an invitation to Ukraine at an unspecified time and only “when Allies agree and conditions are met.” This is in keeping with its 2008 declaration that Ukraine (and Georgia) “will become members of NATO” while putting no date on that, or even a firm timetable for when the application process would start getting seriously underway. That’s how matters — a welcome in principle, but nothing more concrete in practice — should stay. Even offering a pathway to NATO for Ukraine would, given the war that has been fought on its territory since 2014, be meaningless, and quite possibly counterproductive, raising the possibility of splits within NATO and playing to Russia’s paranoia about the alliance, a paranoia that is shared by a considerable portion of the Russian population. Nothing is to be gained by taking a step that would rally support for the war within Russia, would offer NATO no particular military advantage, and might make a dangerous situation more perilous still. Russia is a nuclear power backed by China and headed by a leader who may well now be feeling uneasy about his own personal security. That calls for some caution.
If Zelensky is looking now for something to encourage his people about the prospects of a future anchored in the West, an ever-closer relationship with the EU is the way to go. Equally, Brussels should do everything possible to prepare Moldova, already formally accepted as a candidate for EU membership, for full membership as soon as possible. A glance at the map shows why. Located between Romania and Ukraine, and with a dubious Russian exclave attached to part of its border, it has already been at the wrong end of Russian destabilization efforts.
None of this is to accept that Russia should have a veto over Ukraine’s treaty-making or to suggest that we should weaken our support for Kyiv’s fight for self-determination. Zelensky’s somewhat-undiplomatic complaints may raise hackles, but they are most likely aimed at his domestic audience and designed to maintain the pressure on NATO to maintain or increase the flow of arms and other equipment to Ukraine. And that is something the Atlantic Alliance should be doing. Meanwhile, all NATO’s members, which may soon include Sweden as well as Finland, should demonstrate that they are in this struggle for the long haul by increasing their military spending and taking steps to head off an energy crunch in Europe this winter.
And NATO should also show its resolve by picking the right secretary general to succeed Jens Stoltenberg, who has done an excellent job. Picking Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission (its top bureaucrat), as President Biden reportedly wants to do, is a declaration of frivolity, not resolve, made worse if reports are true that the idea of having a woman in that role is one of the reasons for Biden’s preference. While she was not primarily responsible for the chronic underfunding that dragged down the German military during her lengthy stint as her country’s defense minister, von der Leyen was widely felt not to be up to the job, an impression reinforced by a series of procurement scandals and blunders, and she has not distinguished herself in Brussels, most notably over the handling of the EU’s Covid-vaccine rollout.
Moreover, to appoint someone from a German establishment that played no small part in creating the conditions in which Putin felt he could risk an invasion is to reward failure, and to insult much of Eastern Europe. If gender is to be a requirement (it shouldn’t be), Stoltenberg should be succeeded by Kaja Kallas, Estonia’s impressive prime minister, an appointment that would send a very pointed message to the Kremlin and, even more importantly, our Eastern European allies, whose warnings about Russia were ignored for too long.
Finally, one of the most encouraging developments within NATO has been the emergence of Poland as a bulwark in the east. Warsaw is massively increasing its defense budget (to around 4 percent of its GDP) and clearly has the potential to become a linchpin bringing together the regional security arrangements now emerging along the length of NATO’s eastern borders. These range from Nordic defense cooperation, which now extends to air defense and closer ties with the Baltic states, to the Lublin Triangle (a grouping made up of Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine), to the Bucharest Nine, which comprises the Baltic trio, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, and, yes, Hungary. NATO’s center of gravity in Europe is shifting east, something that should strengthen NATO and encourage Ukraine.