The Vilnius Summit

What was the spat really about?

NATO

If you watched the Vilnius Summit forum, you may have noticed that the gathering took an awkward turn.¹ The first day saw a public spat between Zelensky and NATO leaders, with both using the kind of language that diplomats call “regrettable.” By the second day, the unpleasantness had been resolved, or papered over, and everyone smiled for the cameras.²

Unless you’ve been closely following the debate about Ukraine’s NATO accession, it may not have been clear to you what this was about, or why Jake Sullivan felt it appropriate publicly to lecture a Ukrainian anti-corruption activist about her ingratitude. It’s not fully clear to me, either. I assume that behind the scenes, things to which we’ve not been made privy transpired. But I can at least explain the context, which might help.

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The first bit of big news from the summit was that Turkey had dropped its opposition to Sweden’s accession. Hungary obediently followed suit, never having articulated a reason for objecting to it beyond, “Turkey does.” So Sweden will be joining NATO as soon as possible. Erdoğan can’t quite bring himself to let go of the delicious power he’s been enjoying, so he’s since dropped hints that perhaps it’s not a done deal. But it’s a done deal.³

The rest of the news from the summit was more ambiguous.

Here’s the background. Ukraine wants a concrete promise that it will join NATO after the war. Zelensky asked NATO to issue a formal invitation and a timeline for Ukraine’s accession at the Vilnius summit, stressing that Ukraine doesn’t want vague assurances that “one day Ukraine will be in NATO.” That’s what they got at the 2008 Bucharest summit, when NATO opened the door to Ukraine and Georgia then closed it again, owing to objections from Berlin and Paris, with the catastrophic consequences we all now clearly see.

This time, Paris was willing—even strongly in favor. So was Poland. So were the Baltic and Nordic states. Germany remained on the fence, but that would have been diplomatically manageable. It was the United States that proved the obstacle.

Ukraine argues, for good reason, that nothing short of NATO membership will be sufficient permanently to end Russian aggression. Without such a guarantee, any peace settlement will be no more than a temporary truce. Ukraine may succeed in expelling Russia’s military, but unless Russia can be deterred, it will rebuild its military and try again. It is lost on no one that Russia has not attacked a NATO country, at least not in the way it attacked Ukraine.⁴ What’s more, Ukrainians say, they need this commitment because without it, Ukraine will never be able to recover the war. Why would foreign investors help Ukraine rebuild absent the confidence that any victory Ukraine achieves is permanent?

Why, you might ask, does this need to be resolved now? Isn’t worrying about the postwar settlement premature? It’s necessary, say Ukrainians and their supporters in NATO, because issuing the invitation would send an important message to Russia: “You cannot outlast us. We’re committed for the long haul.”Unspoken—or spoken, in fact, by many Ukrainians—is that such a commitment would shore up their morale.

Just before the summit, the historian Timothy Garton Ash—known for his work on the contemporary history of Central and Eastern Europe—visited Ukraine. He returned arguing that if Biden failed to extend this commitment to Ukraine at the summit, he risked losing it. Ukraine’s fighting spirit, he reported, remained intact. But Ukrainians were exhausted, he wrote, and profoundly traumatized. Nearly 80 percent now report that they have close family members or friends have been wounded or killed. They are deeply worried about Ukraine’s future.

“So when I say, ‘Who lost Ukraine?,” he wrote, “I don’t mean losing the war.”

… I mean losing the peace: a country exhausted, ravaged, traumatized, still robbed of some of its territory, a land in limbo. For this is now Putin’s brutal, vengeful objective: if he can’t force Ukraine back into the Russian empire, he will try to ruin it.

All of Europe is now ready to extend to Ukraine an invitation to join NATO—even France, in what appears to be a diplomatic miracle. Especially France, in fact. France is now supporting Ukraine with the zeal of a convert. Before the summit, France announced it would send Ukraine long-range cruise missiles. The United States is still dithering about sending these. Leaks from the Biden-Hamlet Administration indicate that it worries Ukraine would use the missiles to strike deeply into Russian territory. On announcing his decision, Macron said, “I have decided to increase deliveries of weapons and equipment to enable the Ukrainians to have the capacity to strike deeply.”

Likewise, the United States couldn’t be persuaded to offer Ukraine the invitation it sought at the summit. Unless this changed, Garton Ash wrote, there would be “massive disappointment in Ukraine.”

We already heard indications in Kyiv of growing anger against the West. Left to fight on alone for another 500 days, without a firm promise of future security, even the bravest of the brave would find it difficult to rebuild their battered, exhausted, traumatized country.

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When Americans politicians, diplomats, and strategists wish to make very serious foreign policy arguments, they do so Foreign Affairs. In the run-up to the Vilnius summit, Foreign Affairs published an important series of articles.

The first, by Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, ran in April. We can consider this Ukraine’s official position. Titled Why NATO must admit Ukraine, it argued that an invitation to join NATO was an essential display of resolve, one that would demonstrate to Putin that he would not succeed by waiting out the West. “I am not questioning NATO’s current commitment to Ukraine,” he wrote.

But I am questioning NATO’s strategy when it comes to Ukraine and the long-term security of the Euro-Atlantic area. Fear has clouded the alliance’s judgment, leading it to adopt an overly cautious strategy that has had grave consequences for thousands of Ukrainians who have been kidnapped, raped, tortured, displaced, or killed. NATO’s flawed strategy has also allowed Russia to undermine the security of the West with cyberattacks, espionage, and political interference.

The current leaders of NATO countries did not make the misguided decisions that brought us here, but they can make the bold decision to expand the alliance and thereby safeguard the Euro-Atlantic. Leaving Ukraine exposed will only lead to further instability and Russian aggression.

He stressed that Ukrainians were not seeking to drag NATO members further into the war:

We have never asked anyone else to put boots on the ground, and we do not intend to make such a request. We don’t seek a magic wand that will miraculously end the war and eliminate the need to win it on the battlefield. What we are asking for is a concrete timetable for Ukraine’s accession to NATO. (My emphasis.)

In response, Foreign Affairs published an article by Justin Logan and Joshua Shifrenson, of the Cato Institute. As you’d predict, given its provenance, it’s titled, “Don’t let Ukraine join NATO.” The costs of expanding the alliance, they argued, would outweigh the benefits. First, they wrote, there was no need: “The idea that Russia could pose a serious threat to Poland, much less to France or Germany, is outlandish.” (They did not seek comment from Estonia or Montenegro.)

Garry Kasparov wrote a blistering response to them in the Bulwark, observing that the claim Russia posed no threat to NATO countries was “so divorced from reality, so historically illiterate, that it shocks.” I agree. But I judge their second argument to be a serious one. As Logan and Shifrenson put it,

Admitting Ukraine to NATO would raise the prospect of a grim choice between a war with Russia and the devastating consequences involved or backing down and devaluing NATO’s security guarantee across the entire alliance.

This is always the case with security guarantees, and yes, countries must think very carefully before extending them, for if you extend them too promiscuously, they may cease to be credible. Should this come to pass, you may find yourself embroiled in the very war you hoped, by means of your commitment, to deter. Unlike the argument that Russia’s not really a threat, the argument that it is best to make only the promises that your adversaries will believe—and which they will believe because your promises are inherently credible—is not a disreputable one.

But there is also an argument to the contrary. No one believes the United States could or would defend all of the countries it is bound by treaty to defend, or at least, no one believes it would defend them all with the vigor it would exert on its own behalf. But the idea that we just might defend them—and God knows with what—offers those countries more protection than no guarantee at all. The United States is fickle (ask our Afghan allies), but you really don’t want to confront us when we’re in a mood (ask the ISIS Caliphate).

In early June, the former Ukrainian defense minister, Andriy Zegorodnyuk, took up the banner for Ukraine’s admission in Foreign Affairs. He even took the argument a step further. His article was titled, “To protect Europe, let Ukraine join NATO—right now.” This wasn’t an official Ukrainian communiqué, but it obviously expressed Ukrainian sentiments.

He began by acknowledging the concerns of the NATO allies: Wouldn’t admitting Ukraine to NATO now escalate and broaden the war? After all, the founding treaty states that an attack on one member is an attack on all of them. “These fears,” he wrote, “are completely misguided.”

Contrary to a popular misconception, NATO’s treaty does not require that members send troops to defend a NATO state that has been attacked. And the idea that Putin would meaningfully escalate because Ukraine joined the alliance reflects a misunderstanding of recent history. European states spent years ignoring Ukraine’s NATO application precisely to avoid antagonizing Moscow—and to precisely zero effect.

I agree with his second point: Efforts to placate Putin served only to convince him the West was fatally weak. But I’m puzzled by his first point. If being in NATO now would not escalate and broaden the war, why would Ukraine want to be in NATO? Surely that is the point?

The case for admitting Ukraine when the war is over is, to my mind, a strong one, and he went on to make it:

Ukraine has demonstrated that its military is no charity case. In the process of routing Russian forces, it has created hundreds of thousands of highly trained soldiers. The military has also given its commanders and civilian staffers deep knowledge of how to defeat Russian forces. The country has a massive industrial base that, despite Moscow’s best efforts, remains intact. It is no exaggeration to say that, given their experience and land warfare capabilities, the Ukrainian armed forces might be the best in all of Europe.

For NATO, then, Ukraine should be an extremely attractive member for a whole host of reasons—especially given that the organization’s security architecture has so many recognized and unrecognized flaws. Consider, for example, its defense industry. Despite years of mounting Russian aggression, European states allowed their military supplies and manufacturers to atrophy after the Cold War. As a result, when the war in Ukraine broke out, most of them discovered that their weapons and ammunition stockpiles had fallen to dangerously low levels. Some states, including Germany and the United Kingdom, said that they only have a few days’ worth of supplies. Their military contractors are also reluctant to hire personnel, and so they struggle to ramp up production. As a result, these states may need Ukrainian manufacturers to help replenish their stocks. …

… NATO clearly needs a bigger and better-equipped force if it wants to make sure it won’t be the victim of future Russian aggression. Ukraine’s large and talented military must be a part of it. Ukraine has another advantage that, to NATO, is invaluable: it is physically close to Russia. Under the organization’s current strategy, frontline states would have to hold out against a Russian attack until western Europe and the United States could arrive and flood the east with their soldiers. It is a risky gambit. As Moscow’s invasion has shown, even Russia’s poorly trained forces can sometimes take large amounts of land in just a few days. If Moscow tried to seize control of territory in Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania, American troops might not arrive until it is too late. Ukrainian units, by contrast, are nearby. They could make it to the battlefield fast and then do what they’ve done with great success for the last 15 months—stave off Russia.

These are excellent arguments. But I don’t know why they amount to a case for admitting Ukraine now.

At this point, let me point out that both sides of this argument are correct. NATO would, clearly, be much stronger with Ukraine in it. If Ukraine were in NATO, however, the risk of a wider conflict between Russia and NATO would be higher. It’s possible to believe both of these things simultaneously. In fact, believing them both is the only rational perspective.

In so far as this is true, the question, “Would it be in the United States’ interest for Ukraine to join NATO”—as opposed to, “Would it be morally right to invite Ukraine to join,” or “Would it be good for Ukrainian morale”—is something of a toss-up.⁵ One’s judgment will depend, necessarily, on one’s judgment of the likelihood that Russia will attack a NATO country. If you think there’s a significant chance that Russia will, say, invade Estonia, the right answer is, “Admit Ukraine.” If you think this unlikely, the right answer is, “Don’t.”

I don’t think Russia is likely to invade another country right now. Thanks to Ukraine, it is in no position to do so. But do I think it might in the future? I sure do. How can anyone contemplate Russian history—or read a Russian newspaper, or peruse Russian social media, or watch Russian television—without concluding that the likelihood of this is not trivial?

Russia is profoundly aggressive, expansionist, and irredentist. It is not just Putin and it is not just a phase. Today’s Russian teenagers will grow up to be Russia’s leaders, and one look at those teenagers tells you there’s little reason to think Russia’s future will be less bellicose than its past or present. It’s possible that defeat in Ukraine would shock Russians so profoundly that they would foreswear wars of conquest and join the family of civilized nations, just as defeat in the Second World War did Germany and Japan. But I wouldn’t bet on it. Germany and Japan were not just defeated. They were invaded and occupied.

So yes, if asked to make the decision, I’d favor inviting Ukraine to join NATO after the war simply as a matter of national interest. When you add to this the moral consideration—does Ukraine deserve our best efforts to protect it—my answer is, “Hell, yes.” I do not, however, think that people who have concluded otherwise are off their strategic trolleys.

Zegorodnyuk’s idea was more than a negotiating bid or a trial balloon. A number of prominent figures, including high-ranking former American officials, had been lobbying for Ukraine to be given immediate but partial membership—the so-called West German model. They included Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO’s former secretary general, and former high-ranking officials at the State and Defense Departments. NATO, they argued, should treat Ukraine as it did Cold War Germany, the western half of which was admitted to NATO. This idea, apparently, had quite a bit of support in Europe. Reportedly, as the summit approached, European NATO members were coalescing around it.

Objections to the so-called West German model were spelled out in yet another article in Foreign Affairs, by Cold War scholar M.E. Sarotte, titled NATO’s worst-of-both-worlds approach to Ukraine. Would this not risk freezing the conflict in place, Sarotte asked, consigning eastern Ukrainians to the fate of East Germans, namely, subordination to Moscow? And if the alliance accepted that Ukraine’s NATO membership did not mandate a specific response if a member state is attacked—and it would have to accept this, because otherwise it would be committing to all-out war between NATO and Russia—would this not weaken NATO’s deterrent posture?

These are strong objections. The case for admitting Ukraine immediately seems to me poor. It would be a symbolic gesture, and while it would be a powerful one, it would neither help Ukraine nor the alliance concretely. Ukrainians say they feel otherwise, and I don’t pretend that my ability to judge the Ukrainian interest is superior to that of Ukrainians. But I suspect they viewed this proposal as an opening bid. Only Europeans and some American foreign policy makers seriously considered it.

If you’ve been following this debate, however, you know that there was another set of proposals under consideration. Given the difficulty of achieving unanimity in NATO, and given Ukraine’s unusual circumstances, perhaps a special kind of non-NATO security guarantee could be crafted for Ukraine—something like the United States’ defense treaties with Israel or South Korea?

This idea has been around for some time. In September 2022, former NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and one of Zelensky’s top aides, Andriy Yermak, chaired a working group on the topic. They proposed something called The Kiev Security Compact. NATO membership, they wrote, was surely in Ukraine’s future, but while it waited for the blessed event, Ukraine would need “iron-clad security guarantees.” They proposed that these come mostly but not exclusively from NATO countries. The guarantees would be codified in a “joint strategic partnership document,” and the guarantor states would sign bilateral security agreements with Ukraine.

The main objective would be to yoke these countries to Ukraine in a way the Budapest Declaration did not. To this end, the guarantees would be legally binding, or at least, as binding as anything can be in international law. They would be ratified by the legislatures of the countries involved. They would “explicitly commit guarantors to Ukraine’s self-defense”—and the treaties would spell out what this meant, in detail.

In other words, while Ukrainians patiently waited for every last member of NATO to reach down and find a set, countries that had already found theirs would form a new international organization, in nature as close to NATO as possible, ideally with as many NATO countries as possible, to secure the peace in Ukraine.

Prior to the summit, Foreign Affairs published an essay by Lise Morjé Howard and Michael O’Hanlon, scholars at Georgetown and Brookings, respectively, who are both proponents of this idea. In The Case for a Security Guarantee for Ukraine, they envisioned the creation of an entity called the Atlantic-Asian Security Community. “Once Putin’s regime falls and is replaced by a government committed to peace,” they wrote hopefully, “Russia should be eligible to join, as well.”

The AASC would be very much like NATO, but its main task would be, they wrote,

to supervise and legitimize the indefinite presence of Western military troops on Ukrainian soil. These troops—from NATO and non-NATO countries alike—would monitor Russian troop activity, help train Ukraine’s armed forces, assist with demobilization, monitor any future peace deal, and act as a tripwire to prevent fresh Russian aggression. This mission could be led by a non-NATO officer, perhaps from India or another country seen as neutral, but it must include US troops. Nothing short of American boots on the ground can ensure Ukraine’s democratic future.

I suspect this is true, and favor the plan. I can’t figure out why it needn’t be under NATO auspices, but sure, why not—get Indian boots on the ground, too.

The final essay in Foreign Policy was the most important. Published the day before the Vilnius summit, it was written by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg. It provided what I took to be NATO’s official decision, because there is no way Stoltenberg was freelancing: The man wouldn’t so much as say, “Good morning” without holding lengthy consultations first with the NAC, the Nuclear Planning Group, and the Military Committee. The article was meant to announce and explain NATO’s verdict on this debate.

Titled A stronger NATO for a more dangerous world: What the Alliance must do in Vilnius—and beyond, most of it is bureaucratic boilerplate: The world is more and more dangerous but NATO is more and more unified; NATO is growing strong, stronger, strongest, etc. But his message to Ukraine about what it could and couldn’t expect at Vilnius was clear. He accepted the premise of the Ukrainian argument:

Everyone wants this brutal war to end, but a just peace cannot mean freezing the conflict and accepting a deal dictated by Russia. A false peace would only give Moscow time to regroup, rearm, and attack again. We must break the cycle of Russian aggression …

And he acknowledged NATO’s growing integration with the Ukrainian military:

Over the last 18 months, Ukraine has taken huge strides in transitioning away from military doctrines, training methods, and equipment dating from the Soviet era, toward NATO standards and equipment. Ukraine is more integrated with our alliance than ever before, and so we must take steps to reflect this reality.

But he did not then say that at Vilnius, NATO would issue a formal invitation to Ukraine. He instead wrote,

In Vilnius, we will upgrade our political ties by hosting the first meeting of the new NATO-Ukraine Council, together with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. This is a platform for decisions and crisis consultation, where NATO allies and Ukraine will sit as equals to tackle shared security concerns. All NATO allies agree that Ukraine will become a member of NATO. NATO’s door remains open, as we have proved by inviting Finland and Sweden to join last year. Ukraine’s NATO membership is a matter for NATO allies and Kyiv to decide: Russia does not have a veto. In Vilnius, we will set out a strong vision for Ukraine’s future and bring the country closer to NATO.

Ukrainians, in other words, would get a special council and more vague promises.

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I don’t know why the Biden Administration refused to countenance issuing the kind of invitation Zelensky wanted, but I assume it’s because it hasn’t yet worked out what it wants to do, and wants to keep its options open.

So this is the background to the Vilnius summit spat. If Zelensky believed that an invitation was forthcoming at Vilnius, it’s either because he was given to understand though private channels that something more was in the offing, or because he believed this despite this evidence. In either case, he seems to have allowed Ukrainians to expect such an invitation, which was a mistake:

A wartime leader needs to counter this kind of demoralization. Zelensky is ordinarily superb at this. But in allowing Ukrainians to expect a commitment they were not going to get, he encouraged them to see a rejection that wasn’t in evidence.

What I don’t understand is why NATO and Ukraine wound up airing their laundry in public. The Vilnius Communiqué, issued on the first day of the summit, clearly wasn’t what Ukraine had hoped:

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 Program. The Alliance will support Ukraine in making these reforms on its path towards future membership.  We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met.

“Reaffirming Bucharest” is exactly what Ukrainians didn’t want.

But surely this should not have come as a surprise. Did the US not speak to Zelensky before the summit? Even if it didn’t, its position was spelled out clearly in Foreign Affairs. Or clearly enough, if you know what to look for.

Zelensky, it seems, could not control his frustration. On the first day of the summit, he made his unhappiness known:

What, I wonder, did he mean by “on the way to Vilnius?” I don’t know, of course, but it suggests to me that he’d been given to understand, before the summit, that the US might drop its objections and give Ukraine what it wanted—but then, perhaps, at the last minute, he was told that it wasn’t to be. He sounds surprised, which he ought not to be. It sounds as if there has been a failure to communicate, or an imbroglio behind the scenes.

His suggestion that Ukraine’s NATO membership would be used as a bargaining chip in negotiations between NATO and Russia—which he presumably believes would take place without Ukrainian consent—is odd. Why does he think this? Is it just a theory, or does he have a concrete reason for saying it? Could this be an allusion to the news, which broke last week, that some of our former officials have been conducting their own, private diplomacy with Russia? If so, I understand his dismay. He probably concluded that this could not have occurred without the Administration’s blessing, and he’s probably right. Still, why not specifically object to this? Why not bring it up privately with the Biden Administration?

It must be said that he’s echoing the suspicions of many. Here’s Timothy Garton Ash’s assessment:

On Sunday [before the summit], [Biden] told the CNN journalist Fareed Zakaria that Ukraine was not ready for NATO membership and that Israel-style security arrangements should be available “if there is a ceasefire, if there is a peace agreement.” He emphasized the word “if.” Cross-checking this with public and private statements by senior US officials, one detects a rather hard-nosed stance. NATO membership is to be deployed as a future reward for Ukraine negotiating the best peace it can get, probably accepting some significant loss of territory.

Politico reported that Ukraine’s backers were “blindsided” by Zelensky’s anger: 

Even some of Kyiv’s closest friends within NATO were taken aback, seeing the blunt social media criticism from Ukraine’s president as unhelpful and unwarranted during the sensitive diplomatic negotiations. 

Yes, it was both. But his country is being raped by Russia. What’s our excuse? Because what followed was distasteful and weird. NATO officials scolded Zelensky for having the temerity to express his frustration. UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said the UK was “not an Amazon delivery service,” and Kyiv would be wise to let its supporters “see gratitude.” Jake Sullivan, meanwhile, used the question-and-answer portion of his appearance in the public forum to lecture Daria Kaleniuk, the director of Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Action Center, about how grateful Ukrainians should be to Americans. It was embarrassing to watch. The effect was patronizing, unpleasant, cold, tone-deaf, and arrogant.

The next day, however, the headlines suddenly took a different tone. The G7, it was reported, had offered Ukraine “strong guarantees”—this in Zelensky’s words. Here’s the statement from the G7:

Today we are launching negotiations with Ukraine to formalize—through bilateral security commitments and arrangements aligned with this multilateral framework, in accordance with our respective legal and constitutional requirements—our enduring support to Ukraine as it defends its sovereignty and territorial integrity.

I assume this represents a more detailed commitment, made privately, to the pursue an arrangement along the lines of the Kyiv Security Compact. Zelensky suggested as much:

Today there are security guarantees for Ukraine on the way to NATO ... that shall be further extended through arrangements with our key partners. (Our) delegation is bringing home significant a security victory for Ukraine.

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While the spat may not seem like a big deal, I suspect it was. Ukrainians were publicly humiliated. NATO did not look unified, despite its protestations. The US looked weak and fearful. Jake Sullivan came across as a callow, thin-skinned dick.

Russian propagandists will make predictable use of this. Very soon, if you haven’t already, you’ll be reading articles stressing that Zelensky is “so ungrateful even Biden and the UK are sick of him!” (First reader to spot that article: Post it below, and we’ll give you a prize.) “Zelensky threw a fit because the US wouldn’t agree to start WORLD WAR III for him!”

The image of Jake Sullivan scolding Daria Kaleniuk will leave a lingering bad taste in Ukraine. A Ukrainian mother spoke honestly to him of her despair, her exhaustion, her fear for her son, and her desperate desire for reassurance—and he bullied her? It was demoralizing and disrespectful.

However often we demand Ukrainians pay homage to our generosity and otherwise keep their mouths shut, it remains the case, exactly as Ukrainians say, that we don’t support them as a charity project. We all know that Ukraine, not NATO is doing what NATO was formed to do. It is keeping Russia the hell out of Europe. Is destroying half the Russian army not gratitude enough for us? When exactly Ukraine should be admitted to NATO is a policy question about which people can disagree. But are Ukrainians not allowed to have a preference? A strong one? Must we belittle them for being insufficiently grateful if this preference doesn’t accord with that of the White House?

Addressing his supporters in Vilnius before joining the leaders of NATO for dinner, Zelensky said,

Our flag means that there will be no more deportations from the Baltic countries to Siberia, no more divisions of Poland, no more humiliation of Hungary by invaders, no more tanks in Prague or winter wars against the freedom of Finland—no more occupations in Europe ever again.

This is what Ukraine is doing for NATO. In return, NATO has provided money and weapons—many of which were to be retired from NATO inventories anyway. Not a single NATO soldier has so much as had his hair mussed.

Had Ukraine rolled over and surrendered to Moscow, Russia’s military would still be intact. Putin’s grandiose fantasies would have been confirmed, not crushed. Only the professionally naive doubt that would have kept going. Instead, Ukrainians stopped him. They’ve paid an unendurable price for it.

So I don’t quite know why we’d force Zelensky to play the humble supplicant, then lecture Ukrainians about their ingratitude—especially because Ukrainians do thank us, over and over, creatively and charmingly. Why demand further tribute? Ukrainians have no choice but to placate us; they can’t just say what surely they’re thinking. But extracting a show of gratitude like this wouldn’t cause Ukrainians to feel more grateful, would it? Why would our egos require this?

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Nor do I understand the weirdness of the way the US described its decision. There would have been nothing wrong with saying what I assume the administration was thinking, correctly or incorrectly—that it wasn’t ready to make a decision about the kind of security guarantees it should offer to Ukraine postwar. It’s defensible to say, “We have to understand what postwar looks like on the ground.” It’s even defensible to say, behind the scenes, “We’re afraid the US public isn’t there yet and we wouldn’t be able to get this through the Senate.” I don’t know if that’s true, but perhaps that’s what they were thinking.

The words “when conditions are met” are so vague as to be meaningless. But NATO—and US officials, particularly—kept intimating, throughout the summit, that the rejection of Ukraine’s request was connected to the state of its democracy and its corruption. Not only did this ring false, it handed Russia another propaganda gift. (If you’re the first reader to spot the article—“Biden Administration officials agree that Ukraine is a totally corrupt dictatorship!”—post it below, and you’ll get a prize, too.) Why were they talking about this at all, still less in the context of delivering news that clearly demoralized, even devastated, Ukrainians?

It would make sense if we were talking about Ukraine’s EU membership. But NATO is a security alliance, not a democracy-promotion and corruption-reduction alliance. This has always been true. Hungary, which Freedom House classifies as a “hybrid regime,” and Turkey, which it considers “not free,” are NATO members.

NATO has, frankly, never cared about the democratic standards of its members. On paper, yes, NATO “promotes democratic values,” but ask Turks whether they’ve experienced the benefits of this. Or Greece, for that matter. Portugal became a founding member under the dictatorship of Salazar and didn’t become a democracy at all until 1974. Greece joined at the height of the White Terror, having just emerged from a bloody civil war. It was a democracy in name, but not much else. Turkey, when it joined, had only just experienced its first multiparty elections. They were neither free nor fair. Spain had barely emerged from the Franco years when it joined. France, a founding member, nearly succumbed to a coup in 1961.

And no one can argue that France’s imperial arrangements—or the UK’s, for that matter—at the time of NATO’s founding were democratic at all, no less more democratic than Ukraine’s current government. The United States joined NATO when Jim Crow prevailed throughout the south. As for corruption, Ukraine could surely do better—as could we—but are we really suggesting its challenges are significantly greater than Albania’s? North Macedonia’s?

So why lecture Ukraine about good governance as a condition for NATO membership now? Isn’t it more urgent to safeguard the existence of Ukraine before worrying about this? Our priority should be expelling Russia from Ukraine. This kind of discussion makes no sense until that happens. It’s like fussing over the color of the drapes when the house is burning down.

Above all, none of this should have been discussed in public, not least because none of it sounded true. As Garry Kasparov wrote, “Pathetic to hear people in Vilnius suggesting corruption as an excuse for not providing Ukraine a NATO ascension plan. If Zelensky were corrupt, Biden wouldn’t be president.”

Even more bizarre was Jake Sullivan’s remark that “letting Ukraine in now would have meant NATO’s at war with Russia.” What the hell was he talking about? Ukraine wasn’t asking to be admitted to NATO immediately, it was asking to be invited to be admitted to NATO. Obviously, an invitation isn’t the same as accession. Was Sullivan confusing the summit with a proposal floated in Foreign Affairs? Was he poorly briefed? Probably not: He must have intended this comment to become a highly deceptive soundbite on American television.

Why? Perhaps he sensed that Americans would not be happy about the Administration’s prevarication. It does, after all, make us look weak and gutless.

Or perhaps the public spat reflected a different, private disagreement. If so, we don’t know what it was and won’t for a very long time. But I did have the sense it was a smokescreen—that there must have been another, unreported source of tension.

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The Elephant

If so, I can think of two issues that may have been involved—or at least, two very obvious issues that were notable for not being discussed at the summit at all. At least not publicly.

The first is Donald Trump. When Biden promises to support Ukraine “as long as it takes,” it’s obvious that these are just words. He cannot promise this. Donald Trump is the GOP frontrunner, and London bookies give him a 30 percent chance of being reelected. That sounds about right to me. If that happens, we all know what it means: Ukraine is screwed. NATO is screwed. Europe is screwed. America is screwed.

Perhaps this gets discussed behind the scenes. But in public, one senses that the prospect is so terrifying and demoralizing that even saying his name is a taboo. The public forum devoted a whole session to nuclear deterrence. Do our doctrines need to be updated, the participants asked, in light of what the war is teaching us? The possibility of a second Trump presidency, apparently, can’t be discussed in anything like so forthright a fashion.

Does Biden have any kind of plan for this? Does Europe? Is it possible to make a plan for this? What could be done to contain an unleashed Trump? This time, he would not have a single responsible advisor who would be capable of dissuading him from immediately withdrawing from NATO and, as he has repeatedly threatened, bringing the war to an end “in 24 hours.”

To my way of thinking, this should be at the top of NATO’s agenda. It’s childish and an unacceptable act of denial to avoid the subject, reminiscent of the movie Don’t Look Up, in which no one will acknowledge the asteroid headed for the earth. Adults—and military planners, in particular—must look these things in the eye.

And perhaps, behind the scenes, that’s all they talk about. Or perhaps not. Is it possible that this prospect—and the anxiety caused by the taboo against mentioning it and the stress of suppressing the fear of it—led to Zelensky’s emotional outburst and the Biden team’s brittle, defensive response? I don’t know, but as unspoken emotional agendas go, it makes sense.

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The second point, strangely absent from the debate, is this: In the absence of ironclad security guarantees from its allies, there is another, obvious way for Ukraine to secure itself—by acquiring the weapons of which it was deprived by the Budapest Memorandum.

They’re perfectly capable of doing it. There’s a precedent, too: Poland was admitted to NATO after it bluntly explained to the Clinton Administration that NATO was Option B. “Nothing” wasn’t an option.

Frankly, if I were Ukrainian, I doubt I could be talked out of it. After what they’ve experienced? After being forced to supplicate as we measure our support in teaspoons, refusing ever fully to acknowledge our debt to them? Ukrainians are proud people. They’re also people who have every reason to think that the only people they can fully trust are themselves. What Ukrainian would not think—just as Israelis thought—“Screw the NPT. When we say never again, we mean it?”

Surely this has occurred to the Biden Administration. If it hasn’t, they’re grossly negligent. And perhaps this, too, is being discussed behind the scenes. This could also be a subtext that would make sense of the display of temper we saw.

The Biden Administration, presumably, does not want to be obliged to make this case for admitting Ukraine to NATO to the American people right now. Trump, as far as I know, paid no attention to Vilnius Summit, the details of foreign policy not being really his thing, but if Biden had to explain why he was asking the US to accept a commitment like this, Trump could very well begin agitating against it, with catastrophic consequences. God knows no one in the GOP has the spine to stand up to him. If Trump told the Senate it had to vote against NATO membership for Ukraine, how many of them would fall in line? What would be the effect of Biden losing a bid to bring Ukraine into NATO? Did he discuss this with Zelensky?

It’s hard to be the president with a subversive, seditious bomb like Trump waiting to explode. It’s probably why Biden never even tries to explain what we’re doing in Ukraine to the American people. Better not to talk about it than to turn it into yet battle in the culture war. It’s far too close to that already.

It was once widely understood that politics stopped at the water’s edge, but it sure isn’t now. If Biden were a better politician, he would put the case to the American people. He would speak to them like adults. He would win the argument against Trump, mano-a-mano. But he’s not.

All of this leaves me with an uneasy feeling. “Don’t compare me to the Almighty,” Biden is fond of saying. “Compare me to the alternative.” This argument is right as far as it goes. I’d sure rather have Joe Biden at the helm than Donald Trump.

But let’s be candid: Joe Biden has been hesitant and fearful. His withdrawal from Afghanistan badly harmed American credibility. He seems incapable of doing what’s needed when it’s needed. He’s always too little, too late. Personnel is policy, and his advisors are a bunch of consummate screw-ups. “Not being Donald Trump” is certainly a plus, but is that good enough to shepherd the free world through the worst crisis it has seen since the Second World War?

What if Joe Biden just isn’t good enough?

1. Here’s the video of the public forum.

2. NB: This version has been edited. If you’re a subscriber, you received this essay but with more typos. I also tidied up a few sentences that struck me on reflection as requiring improvement.

3. Murat Yetkin is a Turkish journalist with excellent sources in the Turkish security establishment. Here’s his best guess about what NATO promised Erdoğan in exchange. What he wrote after Erdoğan’s phone call with Biden helps to fill in the portrait. He continues the analysis here in Turkish. (It’s reasonably comprehensible if you use Google Translate.)

Something notable is happening in Ankara, though I don’t know what it is. Within 72 hours, Erdoğan endorsed Ukraine’s accession to NATO, let Zelensky to take home the Azov commanders (even though he’d promised Russia that they’d stay in Turkey, and the decision to release them infuriated Moscow), lifted his objection to Sweden’s membership, authorized France to monitor the nuclear reactor Russia is building in Turkey, and asked for a resumption of EU accession talks. What is he getting in return, I wonder? My guess would be a promise to prevent his economy from collapsing. Or perhaps Biden told him that if he didn’t stop obstructing Sweden’s bid, we’d crash what remains of the his economy. (The US is very capable of doing this. Trump triggered a Turkish currency crisis when he raised tariffs on Turkish metal exports.) Or might it be that Erdoğan, having seen how weak Russia and Putin really are, has decided NATO is the strong horse after all?

It helps to have complete control over the media:

4. Russia certainly does attack NATO countries in myriad lesser ways, from information warfare and cyberattacks to harassing NATO aircraft, downing commercial aircraft, and kidnapping Western journalists. But it has not been so stupid as to roll its army directly over a NATO border.

5. Arguably, what’s good for Ukrainian morale is good for us strategically, because we have a strategic interest in Ukraine’s victory. But I’m trying to disambiguate many points that tend to get mashed together in our discussion of the issue, so arguendo, let’s pretend that it’s possible to separate strategic and moral interests. It is not, of course. But it helps one’s thinking to try.