The Vilnius Summit Repeats the Mistakes of the Past

The alliance’s original sin in this matter was making a promise in Bucharest fifteen years ago that it would not be able to keep.

The Ukrainian president came close to sabotaging his own cause this week:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s confrontational tweet this week challenging NATO leaders on the glacial pace of his war-torn country’s admission into the alliance so roiled the White House that U.S. officials involved with the process considered scaling back the “invitation” for Kyiv to join, according to six people familiar with the matter.

The administration’s reaction to Zelensky’s criticism is understandable, but he had a point in calling the situation absurd. It is absurd that NATO is even contemplating bringing Ukraine into the alliance after it has demonstrated that it is not willing to fight directly on behalf of Ukraine. If the alliance won’t fight for Ukraine today because doing so would be inimical to its interests, it would be irrational in the extreme to pledge to fight for it in the future. The U.S. is already overstretched as it is, and it makes no sense to add any more commitments to the already very long list.

It is also dishonest to keep saying that Ukraine will eventually get in when it seems obvious that there will always be some members that will refuse to let them in. The alliance will likely never reach a consensus on Ukrainian membership, and that is why it keeps putting off the final decision indefinitely. It is a stalling tactic that does Ukraine no favors, but by leaving the door open to future membership it makes it more difficult to convince Moscow that it won’t happen.

This leaves Ukraine in a bad position of being strung along by the alliance without reassuring Russia. It keeps raising Ukrainian expectations and it keeps stoking Russian fears at the same time. If you wanted to find a position that encourages both sides to keep fighting, you would be hard-pressed to do better than what NATO has done here.

The alliance’s original sin in this matter was making a promise in Bucharest fifteen years ago that it would not be able to keep. The Vilnius summit just updated and repeated that error. Ukrainian frustration with this “yes and no” position is natural, because it really is the worst of both worlds as far as Ukrainian security is concerned. It antagonizes Russia without providing any security commitment. Ukraine would likely have been much better off over the last fifteen years if the possibility of NATO membership had never been seriously considered.

I agree with Justin Logan and Joshua Shifrinson that NATO should close the door to further expansion. We will never know for certain if doing that might have helped to avert the 2022 invasion, but it might have. Regardless, it is the right thing to do for the interests of the U.S. and the alliance now. As they put it, “the stakes of the game today do not warrant Ukraine’s accession to NATO.” It would also be fairer to Ukraine in the long run to come clean and acknowledge that the alliance isn’t going to admit them.

If there are no vital interests at stake for the U.S. in Ukraine, the U.S. should not promise to go to war as if there were. Because treaty commitments are deadly serious, the U.S. should make these commitments only when it is essential. It would be foolish to make a pledge to go to war on behalf of another country when doing so has nothing to do with vital U.S. interests, and it would be wrong to extend a guarantee that Washington wouldn’t honor.