A Crisis of Credibility: the United States, NATO, and Ukraine
Amb. Robert Hunter's "curtain raiser" before the March 24 NATO summit
22 March 2022
Robert
E. Hunter served as US Ambassador to NATO and as chief White House
official for Europe and the Middle East. He was Senior International
Consultant to Lockheed-Martin from 1998 - 2013. He has written speeches
for three US presidents and three vice presidents and provides coaching
in strategic planning, political and executive communications and media
handling.
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This week, an emergency NATO
summit will convene in Brussels to deal with Russia’s aggression in
Ukraine. It is clearly designed to reinforce allied unity in opposition
to Vladimir Putin’s war – to put spine into any allied slackers,
especially on sanctions against Russia. It should help coordinate the
supply of arms to Ukraine, working out the terms and conditions: what
and who and how, as well as what not to do lest Putin decides, because
of these actions, to escalate the conflict even further. Russia has
already warned Poland by bombing near its frontier; and Poland has
pulled back from its offer to supply fighter aircraft directly to
Ukraine. Most important, the summit needs to show Putin that he cannot
split the Alliance politically, even by looking to NATO outliers,
notably Viktor Orban’s Hungary or Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey.
But
something with even greater significance for the longer term needs to
be on the agenda, even if only in secret session or in small groups: to
start the effort to rebuild NATO’s credibility as an alliance and
America’s as its leader. Make no mistake: their credibility has taken a
hard knock from Putin’s decision to invade, and awareness of that
weakening of credibility is so far being obscured only by the stiff
fight being put up by Ukraine’s military forces, its people, and its
amazing president, Volodymyr Zelensky. He is implicitly defying Putin
to do his worst, and the Ukrainian nation and people will continue to
resist. If nothing else, there is the national memory of Stalin’s
starvation of nearly 4 million Ukrainians in the early 1930s, the
Holodomor.
Damage to US and NATO credibility over the matter of
Ukraine can trace its history at least as far back as the 2008 Bucharest
summit, when President G.W. Bush proposed that Ukraine (and Georgia) be
enrolled in Membership Action Plans (MAPs), the next-to-last step
before becoming allies. This was a decisive move beyond the 1997
NATO-Ukraine Charter and consultative Council, which provided no
security guarantees. Most allies resisted, including because they were
not prepared to take the risk of pushing NATO right up to Russia and
straddling the traditional invasion route into the heart of Europe – in
both directions and with long memories. How would Russia respond to such
a step?
But the European allies also recognised that, although
moving Ukraine and Georgia toward NATO membership had to be ruled out,
the US president could not be sent home empty-handed. So the summit
declared that both countries “will become members” of the alliance.
Those words were designed to put off consideration of NATO membership
for Ukraine and Georgia to the indefinite future (“never,” in the eyes
of many European allies.) But in their haste, NATO’s leaders obviously
did not understand the full import of that statement. It signaled that
the two countries were geopolitically so important to the West that they
would definitely be brought into the alliance, whatever Russia thought:
in plain English, it was thus the actual moment of commitment.
Soon
thereafter, Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, tested the
proposition by using military force to try reclaiming occupied parts of
South Ossetia, only to be defeated by Russian forces. Not a single NATO
ally sent troops to defend Georgia. Finis, for any practical purposes,
to “will become members” of NATO.
Yet instead of putting the
commitment into George Orwell’s Memory Hole, NATO has repeated the
formulation at every summit and ministerial meeting, and, until just
before Putin’s 2022 invasion, top leaders of the Biden administration
were still harping on NATO’s “open door” to Ukraine’s membership, even
though it is a fantasy. This last observation is based on two
interrelated facts. First, NATO takes all decisions by consensus – a
unit veto; and second, many allies have already made clear that would
never be willing, in response to aggression against Ukraine (on Russia’s
border), to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Treaty: that “…an armed attack
against one or more [ally]….shall be considered an attack against them
all…” Thus Ukraine will never be admitted to NATO.
Nothing can
justify what Putin has been doing, including what are clearly war
crimes. And it is necessary, not just for Ukraine but also for the
future of European security, that Russia not prevail and that any
settlement of the conflict, even short-term, must include withdrawal of
all Russian forces from Ukraine. Indeed, the “will become members”
statement, repeated over and over, created a political and moral
commitment to Ukraine (and to Georgia), raising legitimate expectations
but with no honest intention of fulfilling them, while providing no
deterrence of possible (now actual) Russian aggression: for these two
countries the worst of all worlds.
By extension, the failure of
NATO, especially its leader, the United States, at least so far to honor
the full meaning of the “will become members” pledge is creating a deep
crisis of credibility for both NATO and the US. This is not to argue
that the United States should have risked major escalation by Biden’s
not declaring at the outset of Russia’s current invasion of Ukraine that
the US would not become directly involved militarily. (He had valid
reasons: both because the American people want no new wars where the
United States is not itself attacked; and Biden could see that most
allies would take time to step up to the mark, even on imposing
sanctions, much less on providing military aid to Ukraine.)
But
even with these plausible arguments, thoughtful European leaders are
beginning to ponder whether the US Article 5 commitment to the security
of NATO countries remains sacrosanct. Reflecting on the war in Ukraine,
even though it is not formally a member of NATO, would the United States
really go to war for a European ally if the US itself were not under
attack?
Doubts fostered by President Donald Trump, because of his
erratic behavior toward European security and relations with Russia,
were supposedly redeemed by Biden’s becoming US president. But now
doubts are reemerging. They have several sources. Most pertinent: if
Putin were to get away with crushing Ukraine, would the three Baltic
states feel safe if he moved militarily in their direction? Everyone
knows that they are militarily indefensible, like West Berlin in the
Cold War. But the “correlation of forces” and shared risks of
escalation do not this time provide a basis for deterring the Russians
as the Soviet Union was deterred then. Second, if Ukraine from 2008
onward was judged to be sufficiently important strategically to “will
become” a member of NATO, what does that say for countries which, while
having formal NATO membership, have less strategic value? On the Eastern
edges of NATO, only Poland has first-line strategic importance.
The
European allies are dependent on the role of the United States in
dealing with any challenge from Russia: this has been clear since the
late 1940s. That mostly explains why the European allies invoked NATO’s
Article 5 for the United States the day after 9/11 (Washington didn’t
ask for it); and why they sent troops to Afghanistan: primarily so that
the United States would not be heavily distracted from its critical role
in dealing with Russia.
No one in the Alliance has yet wondered
out loud whether the US commitment to NATO security is any longer
sufficiently credible. But the analysis already exists, based on
America’s failing to understand the geopolitical folly of pressing for a
MAP for Ukraine (and Georgia) in 2008 and still being committed to the
“open door” right up to the eve of this year’s war. European doubts
about US credibility have also stemmed from US emphasis on a “pivot” to
Asia, the muddled withdrawal from Afghanistan last year (though
withdrawing itself gained approval), and what has seemed to many
Europeans to be a lower American priority for several years for
relations with Europe, including in security terms.
Restoring US
(and hence NATO) credibility to the level it must have is a tall order.
(US credibility in Europe is also important for East Asian allies and
partners.) It has to begin at the Brussels NATO summit, beyond actions
against Russia’s invasion that focus on radical increases in military
support to Ukraine, plus steps to bolster security of exposed NATO
members and an end to misleading Kyiv that Ukraine will be able to join
NATO. The alliance, and particularly the United States, must also
recognize, if only sotto voce for now, how serious the credibility
problem has become and the need for it to rise to the top of the
long-term US and NATO foreign policy agenda.