Close the Door on Ukraine’s NATO Membership

Ukraine won’t be getting any closer to NATO membership at this week’s summit:

NATO leaders will unveil new steps to train and arm Ukraine at an alliance summit this week but will stop short of concrete advances toward its membership in the Western bloc, underscoring questions about how Kyiv can prevail in its grinding war against Russia.

Ukraine shouldn’t be in NATO, and the alliance has been wrong to keep stringing the Ukrainians along with the promise of a future membership that will always be deferred. The original promise made to Ukraine and Georgia in 2008 was one of the alliance’s biggest blunders in the post-Cold War era, but refusing to take back that promise has been an even bigger mistake. Keeping the door open to Ukrainian membership in the alliance has been destabilizing and irresponsible, especially when the alliance wasn’t ever going to let them pass through the door.

Leaving Ukraine in limbo between the alliance and neutrality has obviously not made them or the rest of Europe more secure. Given that there is not going to be a consensus in favor of their membership for the foreseeable future, it is both cruel and dangerous to keep the door open. It gives Ukraine false hope that membership will eventually be theirs when it won’t, and it antagonizes Russia without bolstering Ukraine’s security.

According to the report, there is talk of making Ukraine an offer of an “irreversible” path to membership. It remains to be seen if all members will agree to that language, but if the alliance does this it will be compounding the error it made at Bucharest sixteen years ago. The alliance needs to be walking back its foolish promise instead of reaffirming it in even stronger language.

The alliance has previously said that Ukraine will join “when allies agree and conditions are met,” which is another way of saying that it will never happen. Some of the allies will never be on board with Ukrainian membership because they do not want the increased risk of conflict that comes with it. As long as Ukraine and Russia have an ongoing territorial dispute, the conditions for membership won’t be met. NATO leaders will say that Russia doesn’t get a veto, but in practice they have already conceded that it does. They just won’t say so explicitly.

Most NATO leaders probably know that adding Ukraine to the alliance doesn’t make sense now or in the future, but no one wants to be on the hook for canceling a pledge that should never have been made. It is politically easier to leave Ukraine stuck in the proverbial no man’s land than it is to admit publicly that the alliance got it wrong back in the Bush era and hasn’t had the courage to correct the error since then. Closing the door to future alliance membership would be better for Ukraine and the alliance than continuing to keep up the pretense that NATO will take them in some day.