Ukraine Will Be a NATO Member
A Breakthrough in Vilnius
Note: This piece was originally published on July 12, 2023 on a different platform. Despite this, it is still relevant today and I’m sharing it as part of the process of migrating Current History to Substack.
If you had asked me if Ukraine would ever be a NATO member back at the beginning of 2022, I would have said possibly, but in a few decades. At the time, Ukraine was in the midst of a frozen conflict with Russia, with Russian proxies fighting an ostensible war for independence from Kyiv in the Donbas.
The idea that NATO membership would be considered amid an ongoing conflict with a nuclear power was absurd. The conflict had been carefully managed by Western powers to prevent an escalation while still maintaining support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
The invasion ended any incentive to accommodate Russian security concerns. It was obvious that NATO membership was a deterrent to invasion. After all, Ukraine and Georgia were promised membership, but not granted it. And today both have 20% of their territory occupied by Russia. This is a large part of the rush of the former Warsaw Pact nations to join NATO, including Poland, Romania, and the Baltic republics.
Russia’s invasion also created an acute security concern for Europe as a whole, particularly Russia’s neighbors. They feel the need to support Ukraine now so they won’t be next, and to shore up their security alliance to deter further Russian aggression. There is now no incentive to accommodate Russia, and as a result, Finland has joined NATO and will shortly be followed by Sweden.
Ukraine in many respects is already a de-facto NATO member. Ukraine is supplied military intelligence from NATO members, consults with the alliance on defense and security matters, and relies on NATO for ammunition, equipment, and other supplies. They exist in a symbiotic relationship where Ukraine takes the brunt of Russian aggression and protects NATO’s eastern flank in exchange for implied security guarantees.
The annual NATO summit this week in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, was important for formalizing this de-facto arrangement and for signaling to Russia that its geopolitical fortunes were doomed if its invasion of Ukraine continued. On both scores, clarity was achieved, despite the pessimists who expressed disappointment that Ukraine wasn’t invited to join NATO.
But the fact we are even discussing NATO membership for Ukraine shows how far we have come in accepting the hard truth that only strength can deter Russia and guarantee peace in Europe. I discussed the reasoning behind Ukraine joining NATO in a previous piece, but even those 6 short weeks ago I considered this more a thought experiment than something that was on the table. The window of what’s possible has become dramatically wider.
There are many reasons for this. One is the tactical success of the Ukrainian counteroffensive. Russian logistics have been degraded significantly, and Ukrainian forces have progressed to the main lines of Russian defenses in occupied Ukraine. As a European defense industry is built and F-16 aircraft and air defenses are supplied, Russia’s occupation will become more and more untenable. China has also signaled that it will not be stepping up support for its Russian client.
So, as fears of antagonizing the Russians recede, the momentum has built behind ensuring that European peace will not be disturbed again. This trend was reflected in the communique released by NATO following the Vilnius summit (you can read it here). First, it reaffirmed the existing cooperation between Ukraine and NATO, as well as the open-door policy that allows any nation to apply for membership if it chooses. Military assistance will continue until Ukraine re-establishes control of its internationally recognized territory, which includes Crimea.
NATO reaffirmed Ukraine’s right to sovereignty and its right to choose its own security arrangements without a Russian veto. There was also a call to extend assistance to enhance the Ukrainian armed forces’ interoperability with NATO and monitor the progress of the political and security reforms required for NATO membership. We must remember how far Ukraine has come from being a corrupt former Soviet republic to resembling a modern European democracy.
Item 11 in the communique is the centerpiece and contains much of the new information regarding Ukraine in NATO. It also caused unwarranted controversy:
“We fully support Ukraine’s right to choose its own security arrangements. Ukraine’s future is in NATO. We reaffirm the commitment we made at the 2008 Summit in Bucharest that Ukraine will become a member of NATO, and today we recognize that Ukraine’s path to full Euro-Atlantic integration has moved beyond the need for the Membership Action Plan. Ukraine has become increasingly interoperable and politically integrated with the Alliance and has made substantial progress on its reform path. In line with the 1997 Charter on a Distinctive Partnership between NATO and Ukraine and the 2009 Complement, Allies will continue to support and review Ukraine’s progress on interoperability as well as additional democratic and security sector reforms that are required. NATO Foreign Ministers will regularly assess progress through the adapted Annual National Programme. The Alliance will support Ukraine in making these reforms on its path towards future membership. We will be able to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree, and conditions are met.”
The last sentence caused commentators to despair over Ukraine’s membership, which was understandable out of context. Since the Budapest Memorandum of 2008, Ukraine could not get a straight answer on its path to membership from an alliance determined to hold it at arm’s length. Promising to extend an invitation at an unspecified time sounds like a polite way of telling the Ukrainians not to hold their breath. That would be unconscionable given Ukraine’s sacrifice in defending NATO’s eastern flank.
The preceding paragraph is vital for understanding this statement in full. First, the requirement for a “Membership Action Plan” that all other NATO applicants abide by was removed. The full statement also acknowledges Ukraine’s increasing integration with the alliance and indicates there will be support for efforts for full integration. This removed the diplomatic and political obstacles behind membership and only left the requirements for anti-corruption reforms, interoperability with NATO forces, and being at peace. That is a very specific set of requirements.
NATO was never going to invite Ukraine to join now while it’s at war with a nuclear power. That would turn a tragic war of aggression into a potential global catastrophe. Ukraine is also making ongoing political reforms to remove corruption from its government and security apparatus. So, the statement is saying simply that once these specific requirements for NATO membership are met Ukraine will be admitted.
In my view, this fundamentally settles the question of Ukraine’s future following the war. In the meantime, Ukraine has been operating under a series of de-facto bilateral security guarantees offered by NATO members in the form of aid and equipment. The next step is to formalize these guarantees and ensure they continue to operate as long as Russia’s invasion continues.
The role of NATO as a defensive alliance is to deter attacks on its existing members. It is not meant to draw its members into a war with foolish and ill-considered offers of membership to nations at war. It’s reasonable for President Zelensky to press every possible opportunity to enhance his nation’s defense from invasion. It’s the rest of the world’s responsibility to ensure this does not transform the war into a potential nuclear conflict.
Ukraine will be in NATO. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will go down as one of the greatest geopolitical self-owns in history, and the management of this conflict by NATO and the Biden administration could go down as one of the greatest examples of statesmanship of this young century.