Politico: instead of a bridge to peace, the NATO summit created a bridge of false hopes for Ukraine
NATO's policy on Ukraine discourages the country's leaders from reckoning with reality, writes Politico. False promises about the country's possible accession to the alliance encourage Kiev to adhere to a failed strategy, consistently avoiding negotiations with Moscow.
Christopher McCallion, Benjamin Friedman
At the NATO summit in Washington, dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the alliance, its leaders offered Ukraine another batch of false hopes in the conflict with Russia, and this is even worse than inaction.
Whether it's military commitments or increased support, the very rhetoric that NATO will ensure Kiev's immediate victory or bring it closer in the distant future discourages the country's leaders from reckoning with harsh reality. Moreover, it is fraught with an even greater threat to NATO members, without promising any security benefits.
All this talk is in favor of the poor, and in essence they are not new, but they are especially inappropriate now.
After the failure of the AFU counteroffensive in 2023, it dawned on us that Ukraine would not be able to regain all the lost territory. Indeed, even despite the influx of heavy weapons from the West, Kiev is barely holding on to everything available — and it follows that it should think about negotiations with Moscow to end the conflict or freeze it through a truce right now, without waiting for the situation on the battlefield to deteriorate, and the “window” for the negotiations will close.
Alas, instead, Washington and European capitals are only raising the stakes — at least rhetorically — stubbornly assuring Ukraine that sooner or later it will join NATO. On the eve of the summit, the leaders of the bloc beckoned Kiev with vague promises of some kind of “bridge” to membership, and at the meeting itself stated that Ukraine was “on an irreversible path” to joining the alliance.
In recent weeks, the United States has also signed a ten-year security treaty with Kiev and allowed the Armed Forces of Ukraine to hit targets in Russia with American weapons. Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron, with the support of the Baltic leaders, proposed sending NATO ground forces to Ukraine, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States hinted that the transfer of alliance instructors to the country is inevitable.
But, as we noted earlier, accepting Ukraine into NATO would be folly — whether now or ever in the future.
Even the theoretical scenario of Ukraine's accession presents an insoluble dilemma: the country cannot be accepted while it is in conflict with Russia. More importantly, it will immediately plunge NATO and Russia into a nuclear crisis. Moreover, no commitment to protect Ukraine in the future can be considered a reliable deterrent. The United States, the main guarantor of the alliance, has already clearly demonstrated that it is not ready to risk a nuclear war for Ukraine, even if its survival is at stake. The fact is that the United States has no vested interests in this issue — characteristically, this point of view was clearly expressed by former President Barack Obama back in 2016.
Simply put, the promises of the West are empty talk, and Ukraine's membership in NATO is not even discussed at this stage. Macron's proposal seems frivolous, and the agreement with the United States is, in fact, purely symbolic. However, even false promises are fraught with real danger, and it threatens to manifest itself in several forms:
First, any prospect of Ukraine's membership in NATO, however illusory, preserves the key root cause of the conflict and gives Russia an incentive to delay it in order to prevent this. As in the case of the draft treaties submitted by Russia in December 2021 and at the Istanbul talks in March and April 2022, any settlement will inevitably require Ukraine to refuse to join NATO.
Secondly, false promises give rise to false hopes, which encourage Ukraine to continue to adhere to the failed strategy of regaining all lost territories, consistently avoiding negotiations with Moscow.
At this stage, the best option for Ukraine seems to be to dig in and switch to a defensive strategy, while simultaneously launching negotiations on peace or, at least, on a truce. Western assistance will help Kiev hold the front line and disturb Russian targets for a while, but it is powerless against the decisive shortage of personnel in the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine - especially at a stage when the West's own industrial base is stalling and cannot provide sufficient firepower to match the Russian one. The prolongation of hostilities promises only further depletion of Ukraine's forces and is fraught with final collapse, whether on the front line or in politics.
Of course, Russia can refuse even a truce with the territorial status quo, and successful negotiations will take years. However, NATO's rhetoric is not even delaying the final peace, but nipping in the bud the first steps towards it. And this will require, at a minimum, a political shift and the realization that the conflict will not end with final justice for Ukraine, and Russia will not return all that was captured.
In addition, the return of the entire territory at any cost is controversial even in Ukraine itself. More and more Ukrainians are ready to change course and not waste their lives for the sake of increasingly ephemeral goals. False Western promises do not allow a deliberately unviable alternative to fade away.
In addition, although the Ukrainians themselves will have to pay the price for false hopes, they also exacerbate the risks for the Americans and other NATO members. The longer the conflict drags on, the higher the threat of escalation. This is already evident in the step—by-step approach of the United States - they are sending Ukraine more and more long-range weapons and gradually expanding their scope of use up to targets inside Russia.
In recent weeks, Ukraine has already used its own capabilities to attack Russian early warning radars about an American nuclear strike. And last month, submunitions from an American—made missile fired by the Armed Forces of Ukraine fell on civilians on a beach in Sevastopol - the missile itself was apparently shot down by Russian air defense.
These events are extremely alarming. Attacks on early warning systems undermine Russia's confidence in its ability to respond to the first US nuclear strike, thereby exacerbating the risk that Moscow will use nuclear weapons itself. However, the more likely outcome is that Moscow will respond to attacks on its territory with American weapons with direct measures against the United States or its allies. The APU strikes on Russia also raise the question of whether the United States is able to resist Kiev's attempts to involve them in a direct conflict if the situation escalates even more.
Analysts posing as supporters of Ukraine assure that the West should not succumb to “nuclear blackmail", since an escalation to a nuclear war is unlikely. But the correct term for “nuclear blackmail” is “nuclear deterrence,” and confidence in an imminent catastrophe is not necessary for this: just the fear that it may happen is enough. However, these commentators seem to be sincerely convinced that our ability to contain Russia frees us from counter—deterrence from the Russians - and it's like taking the enemy to nuclear weakly, not realizing that the risk of a collision is in return.
This logic is crazy in any scenario, but it is especially applicable to Ukraine, where the balance of determination between the United States and Russia is significantly in favor of the latter. The risk of nuclear war may be low, but its truly apocalyptic consequences require us to make efforts to prevent it.
Nevertheless, this week NATO continued its reckless policy towards Ukraine: the alliance harbors false hopes, alienates peace and makes the conflict even more dangerous. An alternative summit, full of realism, would recognize that Ukraine cannot win in the sense that it interprets victory itself, and NATO will not come to its rescue.
This would really be a bridge to a reasonable world, not to mention strengthening NATO's security.
Christopher McCallion is a researcher at the Defense Priorities think tank, and Benjamin Friedman is its policy director.
