Of course Ukraine won’t be invited to join NATO in July
Tom Rogan
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NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg made clear on Monday that Ukraine would not be invited to join NATO at next month’s leaders summit in Lithuania.
As Stoltenberg put it, “At the Vilnius summit and in the preparations for the summit, we’re not discussing to issue a formal invitation.” This follows comments by President Joe Biden on Saturday in which he ruled out fast-tracking Ukraine’s admission to the 31-member defense alliance.
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The news that Ukraine isn’t joining NATO anytime soon shouldn’t surprise anyone.
First off, there is the not-so-insignificant fact that Ukraine is currently engaged in a major war with Russia. Were Ukraine part of NATO, Russia’s continued attacks on Ukrainian territory would give Kyiv legitimate cause to trigger the alliance’s Article Five mutual defense stipulation. Considering the utterly unjustified nature of Russia’s war and its deliberate targeting of civilians, NATO members would struggle to refuse the activation of Article Five without fatally undermining that article’s credibility.
While their tolerances for supporting Ukraine differ, no NATO member actually wants a direct war with Russia. That’s what admitting Ukraine, today, would mean.
Yet even setting a trajectory for Ukraine’s admission into the alliance would play to Russian narratives over the war. Russian state media have long presented NATO not as it is, a defensive alliance, but rather as an encroaching threat against Russian sovereignty. Were Ukraine given a timeline for admission, NATO would provide Putin’s propaganda apparatus valuable ammunition with which to justify his continued war effort. It is far better that Putin be left, as he is now, with the increasingly difficult task of justifying a war that Russia cannot win but that also costs a vast measure of Russian lives and resources.
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There’s one final point to note. Namely, that admittance into NATO shouldn’t be that easy. As shown by France’s utterly pathetic contribution to the Air Defender 23 exercise, and by Hungary’s and Turkey’s overt disdain for their NATO responsibilities, too many existing NATO members don’t take the alliance seriously. That reality undermines the alliance’s credibility.
Top line: A timeline for Ukraine’s future membership in NATO deserves consideration when the war in Ukraine ends. But that time has plainly not yet arrived.