As the tides of battle have shifted against Ukraine, amid doubts about whether the U.S. Congress will approve a new round of aid, influential experts such as former NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen and former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder are repeating their earlier calls to bring Ukraine into NATO sooner rather than later. This step is marketed both as a way to convince Russia that its military campaign cannot keep Ukraine out of the alliance and as needing to provide adequate security for Ukraine when the war finally ends.
As the tides of battle have shifted against Ukraine, amid doubts about whether the U.S. Congress will approve a new round of aid, influential experts such as former NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen and former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder are repeating their earlier calls to bring Ukraine into NATO sooner rather than later. This step is marketed both as a way to convince Russia that its military campaign cannot keep Ukraine out of the alliance and as needing to provide adequate security for Ukraine when the war finally ends.
Reasonable people can and will disagree about the wisdom of this recommendation, because the contending positions rest on predictions about an uncertain future. In effect, we are all making bets about what the effects of bringing Ukraine would be. To make my own position clear: If I were a member of U.S. Congress I would vote for the additional aid package without hesitation, because I want Ukraine to be able to hang on to the territory it still controls and I want Moscow to realize that trying to take more territory is going to be costly and difficult. More aid today will improve Kyiv’s bargaining position when serious discussions begin, most likely after the U.S. presidential election in November. That said, bringing Ukraine into NATO now is a bad idea that will prolong the war and leave Kyiv in an even worse position over time.
Let’s start by recalling that the North Atlantic Treaty does not give any country the right to join if it meets certain criteria. Article 10 merely says that “the Parties may, by unanimous agreement, invite any other European State in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area to accede to this Treaty.” is a more recent development. It is sometimes viewed as a formal commitment that any aspiring country can join once it meets NATO’s membership criteria. In effect, the open door policy subtly shifts agency from NATO to aspiring members; it tells the latter that “the door is open and you’re free to walk in once you’ve met our standards.” The original treaty implies something slightly different, however: It says the door is closed until the existing members collectively agree that bringing in a new member will “further the principles of the treaty and … contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area.” At that point the members can decide to open the door and issue an invitation. The distinction is an important one, insofar as the original treaty creates no presumption that the alliance is actively committed to expanding. Hungary’s recent campaign to delay Sweden’s entry into NATO for several years reminds us how this process really works in practice: Sweden had no “right” to join until all the other members agreed.
Turning to Ukraine, my belief that bringing it into NATO now (or in the near future) is unwise rests on several assumptions. One is that Ukraine cannot reverse the situation on the battlefield and reconquer its lost territory unless it gets a lot more weaponry and has time to reconstitute its forces after the setbacks of the past year. It is suffering from a severe (and probably irreversible) shortage of manpower and the combination of drone surveillance, artillery, and extensive Russian fortifications will make it difficult-to-impossible for Kyiv to make large territorial advances. Ukraine’s cheerleaders in the West were wrong last spring when they offered up optimistic forecasts about the then-upcoming counteroffensive, and they are repeating this error by suggesting that there are still lots of ways for Ukraine to turn the tide. I wish it were otherwise, but we should base policy choices on the world as it is, not as we might like it to be.
My second assumption is that Russia’s leaders care more about Ukraine’s fate than the West does. They do not care more than Ukrainians do, of course, but it is a more vital interest for them than for the leaders and populations in most NATO countries. Russian President Vladimir Putin and his henchmen have been willing to send thousands of soldiers to fight and die in Ukraine, and no NATO country is willing to do anything remotely like that. When French President Emmanuel Macron unexpectedly raised the possibility of NATO sending troops last week, he was immediately rebuked by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg. This is not to say that NATO has no interest in Ukraine’s fate, only that Russia cares more.
Third, I further assume that one of the main reasons Putin launched his illegal invasion in February 2022 was to prevent Ukraine from gravitating closer to the West and eventually joining the alliance. Recent revelations of steadily increasing collaboration between the CIA and Ukrainian intelligence services, the West’s post-2014 efforts to strengthen Ukraine’s defenses, and NATO’s oft-repeated commitment to bring Ukraine into the alliance undoubtedly fueled Moscow’s concerns, in a classic illustration of what international relations scholars call the “security dilemma.” Putin’s actions may also reflect certain beliefs about the cultural unity of Ukrainians and Russians, but the evidence that the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO drove his actions is impossible to deny. Indeed, Stoltenberg has openly acknowledged this on more than one occasion. Putin may have misread NATO’s intentions and exaggerated the threat they posed, but he is hardly the only world leader to have exaggerated a foreign danger.
In light of those three assumptions: Here are the top five reasons why Ukraine should not join NATO.
1. It doesn’t meet the membership criteria. Ukraine is still a fragile democracy at best. Corruption is still endemic, elections have been suspended since the beginning of the war, and there are still influential elements in Ukrainian society whose commitment to democratic norms is questionable. For these and other reasons, the Economist Democracy Index rated the country a “hybrid regime” last year. Moreover, Ukraine has not yet met the conditions of the standard NATO Membership Action Plan. Recognizing that fact, NATO agreed to waive this criterion at its annual summit last summer, in effect changing Ukraine’s membership process from “a two-step process to a one-step process.” By watering down the standards for joining the alliance, this decision set a potentially bad precedent for the future.
2. It is not clear that NATO would honor its Article V commitments. As I’ve noted before, Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty is not a tripwire that commits members to fight in the event another member is attacked. At U.S. insistence, Article V only commits a member state to regard an attack on one as an attack on all, and then to take “such actions as it deems necessary.” Nonetheless, this clause is widely interpreted as a commitment to defend any member that is under attack, and a failure to come to any member state’s aid in the event of a serious invasion would call the entire alliance into question. Before bringing in any new member, therefore, the rest of the alliance should think long and hard about its willingness to put its forces at risk should it be attacked.
To repeat my earlier point: Thus far neither the United States nor any other NATO country has shown any willingness to send troops to fight for Ukraine. Weapons and money yes; people no. If we were willing to do so, we would have troops there already. Does it make sense to tacitly promise to fight for Ukraine five or 10 or 20 years from now, if you’re unwilling to do so today?
Moreover, it is by no means clear that the U.S. Senate would ratify Ukraine’s membership. It takes a two-thirds majority to ratify a treaty, and rounding up enough votes could be difficult. To be sure, 70 Senators voted in favor of the latest aid package, but that bill was also linked to additional aid for Israel and that may have swayed a few votes. More importantly, de facto GOP leader Donald Trump would probably oppose bringing Ukraine in, and his opposition could convince enough GOP senators to vote no and put ratification out of reach.
3. NATO membership is not a magic shield. The main rationale for bringing in Ukraine sooner rather than later is that doing so would discourage Russia from resuming the war at a later date. One can easily understand why Kyiv would like additional protection, but this argument assumes that being in NATO is a magic shield that will reliably deter Russian military action under nearly all circumstances. This same assumption drove earlier decisions to expand NATO into vulnerable regions such as the Baltics; advocates simply assumed that the security guarantees being extended were checks that would never be cashed.
NATO membership may deter attack in many circumstances, but it is not a magic shield. Indeed, a growing chorus of voices have recently issued alarming warnings about a possible Russian challenge to NATO in the next few years. If you truly believe that Putin is going to wrap up the war in Ukraine, take a brief pause to rebuild his battered armed forces, and then launch a new assault on Finland, Estonia, or some other NATO member, then you don’t really believe that the magic shield is all that reliable. And that means that NATO’s current members have to think long and hard about what their vital interests are and what countries they are truly willing to fight to defend. Which takes us back to reason number two.
4. Membership now will only prolong the war. If I’m correct that Moscow attacked in good part to prevent Kyiv from joining NATO, then bringing Ukraine in now will simply prolong a war that the country is presently losing. If that’s why Putin launched his “special military operation,” he’s not likely to end it if his forces are doing decently well and Ukrainian accession to NATO is still on the table. The result is that Ukraine will sustain even more damage, conceivably putting its own long-term future at risk. Ukraine was one of the most rapidly depopulating country in Europe before the war began, and the effects of the fighting (fleeing refugees, declining fertility, battlefield deaths, etc.) will make this problem worse.
5. Neutrality may not be that bad. Given the history of Russian-Ukrainian relations (including the events of the past 10 years), one can understand why many Ukrainians do not want to accept a position of neutrality. But neutrality is not always a bad thing, even for states in close proximity to Russia. Finland fought a costly and ultimately unsuccessful war against the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1940, and eventually had to cede about nine percent of its prewar territory. But like Ukraine today, the Finns had fought heroically and made the much larger Soviet Union pay a large price for its victory. The result was that then-Soviet leader Joseph Stalin did not incorporate Finland into the USSR or force it to join the Warsaw Pact after World War II. Instead, Finland remained a neutral country and a democracy, with a market economy that traded with both the USSR and the West.
This outcome was sometimes falsely derided as “Finlandization,” but it proved to be a pretty successful formula. Had Finland ever tried to join NATO during that period, it would almost certainly have triggered a major crisis or even a preventive war. The two situations are not perfectly analogous—especially given Putin’s views on the supposed cultural unity of Russians and Ukrainians—but it does suggest that formal neutrality need not preclude Ukraine from establishing a robust democracy and having extensive economic ties with Western countries.
For all these reasons, therefore, fast-tracking Ukraine into NATO is not a good idea. Instead, Ukraine’s supporters in the West need to think creatively about alternative security arrangements that can reassure Ukraine in the context of a postwar armistice or peace agreement. Kyiv needs to be secure against Moscow renewing the war; it cannot agree to be disarmed or be forced to accept de facto Russian domination. Figuring out how to provide sufficient protection in ways that won’t provoke Moscow into renewing the war will not be easy. But rushing into NATO is not the best route to a safer Ukraine; it is more likely to prolong the war and leave that long-suffering country worse off than ever.
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