The Obsession with Bringing Ukraine into NATO Has Not Ended

The U.S. and its allies have not suddenly acquired vital interests in Ukraine that they did not have before.

Ivo Daalder isn’t going to let something like an ongoing war get in the way of the obsession with bringing Ukraine into NATO:

Perhaps the biggest practical obstacle is that part of Ukraine’s territory is likely to be contested, if not, as in the case of Crimea, under foreign occupation for the foreseeable future. Indeed, if the current aggression settles into the kind of back-and-forth fighting that has characterized the conflict in the Donbas for the past eight years, NATO would be inviting into its ranks a country actively at war. That would be unprecedented, but it need not be impossible. Kyiv and its new NATO allies could agree that Ukraine would continue to bear the brunt of fighting in the east, and that NATO countries would continue to supply it with the weapons and intelligence it needed to defend itself. They could also agree that NATO would not directly intervene in the conflict unless Russia again threatened Kyiv or the viability of the Ukrainian state. Similar arrangements could be made with respect to any occupied territory in Ukraine.

Opponents of NATO expansion warned for the last fourteen years that the promise of future membership to Ukraine exposed it to greater danger, and so it did. It is possible that repudiating that promise would not have prevented the war, but the refusal to make the offer was a serious mistake in pre-war U.S and allied diplomacy. It was bad enough to insist on the “principle” of the “open door” before Russia attacked. Insisting on following through on the misguided pledge from 2008 today is a form of madness.