When Should Ukraine Join NATO?

Ukraine has been waiting for an invitation to join the Atlantic Alliance for years. It won't get one at the next Summit. But when NATO leaders meet in July, they should clarify when Ukraine can join

NATO promised that Ukraine “will become a member” in 2008 and said the country’s “future is in NATO” last year. At this July’s NATO Summit meeting in Washington, Kyiv expects NATO leaders to act on these promises and invite Ukraine to join the Alliance. It will be disappointed.

There is no consensus among the 32 NATO members on when Ukraine should join, and President Biden has told President Zelenskyy repeatedly in the past few months that no invitation will be forthcoming in Washington.

But NATO cannot leave it at that. It needs to set forth a clear path for Ukraine on when the long-promised invitation to join the Alliance will be forthcoming. That is the argument Karen Donfried and I make in a new article in Foreign Affairs. I urge you to read the entire article; comments of course always welcome.

Let me try to put the argument we make on what NATO should do in some historical context.

Why NATO? Why Enlargement?

NATO was created 75 years ago to prevent the recurrence of war on a continent that had originated and been wrecked by two World Wars. The North Atlantic Alliance sought to prevent the Soviet Union from spreading its military and political dominance any further, ensure America’s permanent security engagement in Europe, and suppress any incentive among European members to resort to force to settle disputes among them (as they had done for centuries). Or, as its first Secretary General Lord Ismay so memorably put it, NATO existed “to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

The Alliance proved to be a historic success. The Soviet Union not only was kept out; it lost dominion over Central and Eastern Europe and ultimately collapsed—without a shot being fired. The Americans became deeply entrenched in Europe, providing a security blanket for the restoration of strong democracies and rebuilding of strong market economies. And the Germans turned their energy from War to Wirtschaft (economy) and reunified peacefully in 1991.

After the Cold War, NATO set out to expand the stability it had provided for Western Europe during the past 40 years to Central and Eastern Europe. It created a Partnership for Peace that included all European countries, including the former republics of the Soviet Union that were now independent nations and members of the the Warsaw Pact. And in 1997, it invited Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to join the Alliance. Ultimately, NATO would double in size, from 16 members at the end of the Cold War to 32 today.

What About the former Soviet States?

With much of the former Warsaw Pact joining NATO, the next question was whether any of the countries that had gained their independence with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 should join. The three Baltic States, whose illegal incorporation into the Soviet Union in 1941 had never been recognized, felt the urge to join NATO most strongly and did so in 2004.

Next came Georgia and Ukraine, which in 2003 and 2004 respectively had undergone democratic revolutions that brought to power governments that were committed to joining the West—including NATO and the European Union. In the run-up to the Bucharest Summit in 2008, NATO countries had debated whether to encourage both nations to work towards joining NATO. But the Alliance was deeply divided, with the United States and many of the newer members pushing to approve a Membership Action Plan (MAP) for both as a first step towards joining, and others led by Germany and France vehemently opposing these steps, fearing that these countries were far from being prepared to join NATO and that doing so would needlessly provoke Moscow.

Rather than deferring the issue until a consensus could be reached, however, NATO leaders in Bucharest devised a compromise formula that satisfied no one. Georgia and Ukraine were denied a MAP, which was the necessary first step to joining the Alliance, but the Allies did promise that both “will become members of NATO.” The compromise, James Goldgeier and I noted at the time, shattered the Alliance consensus on enlargement—and consensus that still needs to be restored when it comes to Ukraine.

Ukraine and NATO

Ever since 2008, NATO has repeatedly stated that Ukraine “will become a member of NATO.” But it never took any practical or specific steps to turn that promise into a reality. With war raging in Ukraine and public sentiment of joining NATO reaching 90 percent, Kyiv pressed the Alliance for an invitation in the run-up to last year’s Summit in NATO. To no avail.

The Alliance remains divided between those who favor moving quickly on membership for Ukraine and those who are not prepared to do so at this time. In Vilnius, NATO leaders did agree that Ukraine no longer requires a MAP and that it’s “future is in NATO.” But an invitation to join would come only “when Allies agree and conditions are met,” thus leaving the question of when Ukraine will join NATO unresolved.

While no invitation will be forthcoming in Washington, Karen and I argue that the Vilnius language does provide a suggests a way forward—by clarifying that “conditions” must be be met for Ukraine to join the Alliance:

To create consensus among allies, NATO leaders should agree on two conditions that must be met before they formally invite Ukraine to join the alliance. First, Ukraine should complete the democratic, anticorruption, and security sector reforms outlined in Ukraine’s Annual National Program, the formal structure that prepares Ukraine for membership. At the Washington summit, NATO leaders should commit to working together to help Kyiv finalize these reforms within a year. Second, the fighting in Ukraine must end. As long as there is an active military conflict in Ukraine, Ukraine’s membership in the alliance could lead to a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia—a gamble most NATO members are not prepared to take.

Before the second condition can be met, NATO must stipulate what it would consider a satisfactory end to the fighting. It cannot be an end to the war, for that presupposes a peace agreement, which would be exceedingly difficult to accomplish any time soon. The common belief that all wars end through negotiations is wrong. Most wars end through mutual exhaustion or one-sided victory; very few end with a negotiated peace. For the foreseeable future, the most that can be hoped for is a frozen conflict—a cessation of hostilities without a political solution.

At the Washington summit, NATO leaders should agree to invite Ukraine when the fighting has effectively ended, either through an unlikely Ukrainian victory or through a durable cease-fire or armistice. At the conclusion of active conflict, Kyiv need not accept any loss of territory to Russia as permanent, only that any change to the status quo would need to be achieved politically, not militarily.

After Ukraine joins NATO, the alliance’s collective defense commitment under Article 5 would apply only to the territories under Kyiv’s control. This condition would be painful for Kyiv to accept, as Ukrainians will fear a lasting division of the country. But the reality of a frozen conflict may lead Kyiv to decide to consolidate the territory it controls and lock in NATO membership. Alliance leaders may want to make clear that if fighting were to resume because of military actions taken by Ukraine, Article 5 would not apply.

There are important historical precedents for extending security guarantees to only a part of a country’s territory. For example, the US security guarantee to Japan extends only to “the territories under the administration of Japan,” not to the Northern Territories seized by the Soviet Union at the conclusion of World War II (and occupied by Russia to this day). West Germany joined NATO in 1955 with the explicit understanding that Article 5 would only apply to its territory and not to East Germany or West Berlin, over which it still had sovereignty. Before being granted membership, Bonn had to agree “never to have recourse to force to achieve the reunification of Germany or the modification of the present boundaries of the Federal Republic of Germany.”

This, then, is how NATO should move forward in Washington. As Karen and I conclude:

At last year’s NATO summit in Vilnius, Ukrainian officials were understandably concerned that “conditions” was code for ever-moving goalposts. If NATO never defined the conditions, it could always add hurdles for Ukraine to clear. Ukraine deserves clarity, and NATO needs to define the term for its own internal unity and cohesion. At this year’s summit, all 32 members must coalesce around a shared understanding of Ukraine’s path to NATO membership.