The forthcoming Nato summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, will present the alliance with a series of questions that will require judicious and responsible statesmanship in light of the recent upheaval in Russia and the ongoing, grinding war of attrition in Ukraine.
As of now, it appears that the overwhelming sentiment among key political and military leaders and western media is to take advantage of what they view as the weakened position of the Russian government and its leader, Vladimir Putin, in the wake of the failed coup attempt by the Wagner leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Understandably, the temptation will be for Nato to redouble its support for Ukraine. The conventional wisdom seems to be that while the Ukrainian counteroffensive hasn’t gone as well as might have been hoped, Nato need only provide more arms, more money and more political support to move Ukraine closer to victory. This line of thinking becomes all the more attractive when one considers the resiliency of the Ukrainian armed forces over the past 18 months.
Indeed, in light of the events of late June, US president Joe Biden is facing renewed calls to send Ukraine long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) which have a range of up to 300km (190 miles). That Biden is now considering doing so shows how much the goalposts have moved in the debate over arming Ukraine. After all, only a year ago, Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan had warned that sending ATACMS to Ukraine might spark “a third world war”.
A further danger of sending such long-range weapons, particularly during the Nato summit, is that Russia sees itself as fighting a proxy war with the US and Nato. It is a reasonable view, given that the vast majority of funding for the Ukrainian war effort comes from Washington.
Meanwhile, the risks of nuclear escalation grow by the day. In June, Putin announced Russia would be placing tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. Yet the nuclear risk runs both ways. Nato would be wise to also be on guard against seeming to encourage reckless actions with regard to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant by Kyiv – which, if recent media reports are to be believed, acted on its own accord in sabotaging a principal piece of energy infrastructure, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, of one of Nato’s core members, Germany.
Which brings us back to the forthcoming summit and the question of Ukrainian accession via a Membership Action Plan (MAP). Here, the leaders of the alliance would do well to recall the warning of the journalist and grand strategist Walter Lippmann that “an alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it.” The offer of a MAP to Ukraine in Vilnius would also contravene Nato’s own principles regarding accession, which state, in part:
States which have ethnic disputes or external territorial disputes, including irredentist claims, or internal jurisdictional disputes must settle those disputes by peaceful means in accordance with OSCE principles. Resolution of such disputes would be a factor in determining whether to invite a state to join the Alliance.
The territorial dispute in question predates the Russian war by eight years, starting in 2014 when Russia took Crimea (which Ukraine disputes) and when it assisted in helping the rebels in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and the Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) declare themselves independent of Kiev. As such, there is no case for Ukrainian accession at this time. There is, however, given the high rate of casualties on the Ukrainian side and the mounting economic and political fallout from the war in Europe, a serious case for pursuing negotiations.
What may unfold in Vilnius is a public division between what might be termed Nato’s core and periphery. Two members of Nato’s core, France and Germany, spent seven years (2015-2022) as members of the Normandy format which sought to bring a peaceful end to the Ukraine crisis through the Minsk Accords.
At Vilnius, the alliance will find itself under immense pressure from Ukraine’s most stalwart supporters in central and eastern Europe, including Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Czech Republic. In our view, the interests of Ukraine and of regional security lie in Biden and the core Nato states not yielding to the understandable yet deeply misplaced enthusiasm of the eastern periphery for a victory over Moscow.
We view the escalatory risks - including nuclear - as perilous and unacceptable. We also view the prolongation of the war as contrary to true US national security interests which (and we realize this is unpopular and heretical) depend on stable and predictable relations between the US and Russia and Russia and Europe. The periphery has, because of its history, its own agenda. But it should not (as it currently does) serve as a substitute for our own.
What is needed now more than ever is a conception of statesmanship that goes beyond the narrow parameters of the battlefield and instead seeks to lay the foundations of a sovereign and prosperous Ukraine. And although we expect it will not, the alliance ought to take the opportunity at Vilnius to focus on the costs of reconstruction and the creation of an inclusive European security architecture. Such an architecture would seek to overcome the old cold war east-west divide rather than exacerbate and normalize it. After all, it was the lack of such policies that brought us to this tragic point in the first place.
Katrina vanden Heuvel is editorial director and publisher of the Nation
James W Carden is a journalist and former adviser to the US state department