NATO for Kyiv? Not yet, says Vilnius
But vague promises are OK—for now—since expansion brings uncertain benefits
The NATO summit at Vilnius has just issued a statement on Ukraine’s eventual accession to the alliance. It offers an indefinite commitment: it says, essentially, that Ukraine will be able to join once it meets all necessary standards, which I take to mean “sometime after the war.” No formal Membership Action Plan will be required. That statement is certainly vaguer than Ukraine had hoped, and President Zelensky has already reacted with indignation—quite understandable in light of the bloody sacrifice his nation has already made.
Did Vilnius get it right? Membership for Ukraine is tricky to analyze because it lies at the intersection of two very different kinds of arguments: moral and strategic. There is, in my opinion, a very good moral case for the swiftest possible accession. And I happen to think that morality matters quite a lot in international affairs, sometimes more than in domestic matters. After all, Western actions abroad frequently take and spare human lives, and at other times control the very existence of entire nations. Foreign policy arguments should not be ignored merely because they rest on a moral basis. In many cases, too, it is in America’s strategic interest to do the “moral” thing, precisely because it is “moral”: such actions enhance our perception among allies and our domestic sense of self-worth.
But it is also important to avoid confusing purely moral arguments for properly strategic ones, since an argument that rests on morality alone, rather than sound strategy, is unlikely to provide the moral benefits it promises. The problem lies not in a consideration of morality, but in a kind of moral approach to foreign policy that attempts deliberately to exclude strategic concerns. And the strategic benefits of NATO expansion, from a Western perspective, are mixed.
Let’s briefly address the moral case: Ukraine has paid in blood for its freedom, and for its devotion to democracy. It has borne the loss that NATO might have borne had Putin attempted to seize the Baltics instead. It has shattered Russia’s military, nearly eliminating the conventional threat to Europe for the foreseeable future. It deserves a place, and we ought to provide such a place as a matter of honor.
That’s good, as far as it goes. But then the hard questions begin. In what manner is the West better off by including some new nation in NATO? Generally the benefit must be measured in deterrence. NATO inclusion ought to deter any Russian (or post-Russian, depending on how the next few years deal with Putin’s Tsardom) attack. If a nation is in NATO, the West will not need to send hundreds of thousands of artillery shells, billions of dollars in other equipment, and so forth, to defend its strategic interests against an advance from the East, because no such advance will ever come.
That kind of deterrence is very valuable—as long as it’s likely to work. It becomes less valuable as the incentive to attack anyway grows. Spain is at no threat of anything. But Russia will always be in a position to threaten the states on its border in a unique way, and even if the odds of a confrontation go down once those states join NATO, they don’t reach zero, and they might, in some cases, remain too high for comfort—especially because any attack will require a NATO response. The whole point of NATO is to avoid that response. And Russia may think that NATO is less likely to defend peripheral states, which in turn raises the odds of attack or other meddling. This calculation can even be reduced to a mathematical formula: (odds of attack)(expected cost of Western response)=disutility of expansion. If the result is lower when a nation is in NATO, then the West ought to extend membership. If, on the other hand, the result is higher, membership makes little strategic sense. In some cases, “attack” can be broadened to include many other potential problems. For example, a nation might be vulnerable to internal Russian disruption—one of many reasons why Georgian accession is far distant. Or a nation might have other internal dynamics and tendencies that impose costs on NATO as a whole, like Hungary and Turkey, for example. Ukraine will always be at risk of attack in ways most other NATO members aren’t, and membership comes with a number of those incidental costs, too. It doesn’t meet interoperability requirements yet: some people are angry about calls for Ukrainian “military reforms” because Ukraine has done so well, but such reforms are about ensuring interoperability for joint NATO operations, not success alone. Ukraine still has mostly ex-Soviet equipment, and it doesn’t use NATO tactics (though not Soviet ones, either—see this excellent new set of articles from the Economist). And it has undergone plenty of internal tension and instability since 1991, even if Russia caused almost all of it.
On the other hand, nothing stops the West from supporting a country that’s not in NATO. That kind of support is often preferable from a strategic standpoint. The West has been able to defeat Russia in Ukraine precisely because Ukraine is not in NATO; it allows a kind of indirect military confrontation with very little nuclear risk. We could also pull back if it became necessary for any reason. We have more flexibility: fewer commitments if things go wrong, more space to do mischief as long as things go well.
In other words, in the abstract, it’s often more useful and less risky to support allies without having first made formal commitments. And I think there’s a very strong chance that the current calculus for Ukraine comes out the same way, and may remain so for the foreseeable future. We can continue providing all our current support; we can provide more support (as we should); we can continue to eliminate the Russian threat. Nor does anything keep us from direct action, should it appear prudent, as might have been the case had Russia truly come close to toppling the Ukrainian state in the early days of the war. (I thought at the time, and still think, that Poland would have sent troops to Western Ukraine had that happened.)
But that leaves those lingering moral questions: is it just and conscionable to refrain from stronger steps toward membership? For now, I think it is, and I think the Vilnius communique’s vagueness is defensible. In the absence of clarity that expansion will in fact strengthen Ukraine’s and our collective security, we are under no obligation to extend a definite offer. That might change—if, for example, Russia does collapse into warring factions, while Ukraine consolidates its gains and meets interoperability requirements, the strategic benefits of expansion become more obvious: we’d want stability instead of flexibility, and might want to station NATO troops in Ukraine anyway. Ukraine would serve as NATO’s bulwark against unfolding disarray to the east (especially if nuclear ownership is suddenly unclear!). So it’s not as if Ukraine can’t or won’t become a NATO member: it probably will. It’s just not the kind of strategic silver bullet some analysts seem to think it is.
For now, at any rate, our moral duty and our strategic interest instead require intensified military support: ATACMS, faster F-16 training, newer versions of the F-16, more tanks, cluster munitions as needed, assistance in developing long-range strike capabilities, and so on. That remains the clearest, but also must prudent, way to defeat Putin and keep our allies safe.