NATO’s Bridge to Nowhere
Formalizing Ukraine’s NATO-ward trajectory is a recipe for continued disaster.
If anything positive can be said to have resulted from this week’s NATO summit in Washington, it is that it occasioned a series of thoughtful critiques from the few remaining citadels of dissent within the U.S. foreign policy community.
The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft published a symposium, “to reflect on the past and future of the alliance.” The scholar and author Anatol Lieven who convened the symposium writes,
NATO likes to describe itself as “the most successful alliance in history”…. What is too often forgotten, however, is that war was prevented not just by NATO solidarity, but also by NATO caution. Successive U.S. administrations—fully backed by their European allies—rejected calls for aggressive policies aimed at “rolling back” Soviet power in Eastern Europe.
A statement published on Monday by the American Committee for US–Russia Accord (which I co-authored with the editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel) expressed the wish that NATO might use the opportunity of this week’s summit “to take a cold-eyed look at itself; at its record; and at its mission—and begin the hard work of self-evaluation.”
And yet another statement issued by a constellation of foreign policy experts warned against another round of expansion: “Admitting Ukraine would reduce the security of the United States and NATO Allies, at considerable risk to all.”
Yet, as far as NATO was concerned: Message delivered, message ignored. This week’s summit showed that NATO is bound and determined to continue on as though the alliance operates in a world shaped by its successes—manifesting a blind insistence that the alliance is not only necessary but has been right all along.
NATO’s principal institutional prerogative at this point is not the defeat of Russia nor the collective defense of the West—whatever that means. It is its own survival—and as such, in Washington the alliance kept busy inventing ever-more reasons to justify its relevance, and ultimately its very existence.
The chief justification revolves, naturally, around the war in Ukraine. And for some months, little by little, American and European officials and government-funded strategists have been laying the groundwork for what has come to be known as Ukraine’s “Bridge to NATO.”
In late June, James O’Brien, a protege of the late secretary of state Madeleine Albright now serving as assistant secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs (the office from which Victoria Nuland managed to do so much damage), told reportersthat he saw the NATO summit as “an opportunity to note that Ukraine is integrating fully into the Western structures that its government and its people have said they want.” O’Brien went on to say that he expects the U.S. and EU member states to offer “a clear bridge laid out for Ukraine to join NATO. That includes a number of commitments for reforms by Ukraine as well as for continued engagement from the West.”
Around the time O’Brien was laying out this roadmap to another round of NATO expansion, RAND Corporation policy researcher Ann Marie Daley said, “Regardless of whether the war ends with Ukraine in control of its 1991 borders or Kyiv settles for something short of that, troops from NATO nations will need to be stationed on Ukrainian soil to provide the time, space, and security necessary to complete the bridge into NATO.”
And indeed, a draft of the communique the alliance plans to release obtained by CNN shows that these plans will be codified in short order.
Yet does it not seem as though the people who say and write these sorts of things are whistling past the graveyard? The war is lost, Ukraine is ruined for at least a generation, and Russia and the West are inching closer and closer to direct, possibly nuclear, confrontation—yet the answer, as always with these people, is more NATO.
In fact the very opposite is true—peace and stability in eastern Europe will come with the recognition that NATO’s plan to expand to Ukraine lies at the heart of the current crisis. Recall that just shy of a month ago, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin laid out several conditions—including Ukrainian neutrality—that would, in his words, “immediately” bring about a ceasefire and the start of negotiations. An “irreversible” pledge of (or “bridge” to) NATO membership for Ukraine drives a stake through the heart of any peace settlement acceptable to Moscow.
But perhaps that’s the point.