In Vilnius, NATO Got Two Wins and One Big Loss

Three important things occurred at NATO’s Vilnius summit: a breakthrough, a little-noticed but hugely consequential success, and a disappointment. The breakthrough was Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan finally consenting to Sweden’s membership. The success—the most important outcome of the summit—was approval of more than 4,000 pages of military plans for the actual defense of NATO countries. The disappointment was that Ukraine was not given a path to NATO membership.

The breakthrough made early headlines from the meeting. President Erdoğan had been blocking Swedish accession for months, demanding that Sweden extradite about 120 alleged Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) activists and Gülenists (something the U.S. also locks horns with Turkey over); lift its embargo of arms to Turkey; and adopt friendlier legislation on terrorism, “mechanisms to prevent provocations,” and even changes to its constitution. Turkey got commitments on most of these measures. But then, on the eve of the summit, Erdoğan added yet another precondition: Turkey’s admission to the European Union. Fortunately, and somewhat surprisingly, Erdoğan assented to NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s bargain, which evidently included a bilateral meeting with President Joe Biden, U.S. delivery of F-16 fighter planes to Turkey, and the creation of a NATO “special coordinator for counterterrorism.”

But with Erdoğan, nothing is ever over, and we may yet see another round of negotiations, because Swedish courts have now (after the agreement was announced) blocked extraditions and the Turkish Parliament won’t be in session for another two months, so there is time for more demands.

The great success in Vilnius was the adoption of a comprehensive plan for meeting NATO’s fundamental responsibility—defending its members’ territory. The alliance has had no such program since 1991. Attempting to allay Russian concern about extending the security of NATO membership to former Warsaw Pact and then to former Soviet Union countries, NATO professed to have no reason to station either nuclear weapons or substantial combat forces in the new member countries. That commitment was contingent on the security environment, which has changed dramatically with Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.

The new plans adopted in Vilnius run to 4,000 pages—a testament to their seriousness—and the governments of NATO countries have agreed to them. They allow NATO military commanders to task different national forces with specific obligations, facilitating an effective common defense should a NATO ally be attacked. And the arrangement locks in a sharing of responsibilities between the United States and its European allies, which will need to reduce their reliance on Washington by increasing their military spending and providing space and cyber assets of their own.

Coalition warfare is a delicate and difficult undertaking. Understanding in advance what allies are willing to do, and where their forces’ strengths can best be matched to need, will reassure those allies most exposed to potential Russian aggression and improve the ability of all of the allies to act effectively together. Just the fact that NATO has designed, agreed to, and set aside resources for these plans should help deter attacks on its frontline states.

The Vilnius meeting did not conclude, however, without a disappointment. More than 500 days have passed since Russia invaded Ukraine. Although they have supplied Ukraine with weapons and cooperation, the United States and the United Kingdom have failed to fully honor the commitment they made to ensure Ukraine’s security, in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear arsenal, under the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. All the while, Kyiv has been agitating for a clear path to joining NATO. Ukraine acknowledged that membership wasn’t possible while the country was still at war (although NATO has in the past found creative solutions to that problem), but hoped for a pledge that once the war was over, it would become a member. Instead, President Biden said ahead of the Vilnius meeting that Ukraine wasn’t ready for NATO membership.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was incensed. He posted an enraged tweet in the face of rebuffs from both National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace; the latter suggested that Ukraine ought to show gratitude for all the support it’s been given.

NATO countries have indeed strongly backed Ukraine, but for people in safety to tell those under attack that they should be grateful is unbecoming. The Biden administration unfairly wants to benefit from its expansive rhetoric—the U.S. president has promised to support Ukraine “for as long as it takes” for Ukraine to win the war—without facing criticism for the timorousness of its decisions regarding the weapons Ukraine desperately needs. Washington is still holding back long-range munitions such as Army Tactical Missile Systems, for example, under a policy driven by what The Washington Post describes as the “conviction that a U.S. misstep in Ukraine could start World War III.”

President Biden isn’t wrong to be concerned about the risk of direct involvement in the war, nor is he wrong to be stingy about extending NATO’s Article 5 security guarantee to a country at war with Russia. But the administration is wrong, both morally and practically, to defend those choices by effectively disparaging all that Ukraine is doing. Casually dismissing Ukraine’s readiness for NATO membership feels of a piece with President Biden blaming the debacle of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan on Afghan security forces instead of on our own policies.

The standards for NATO membership have always been subjective. They were subjective when Greece and Turkey had military coups after being admitted in 1952; when a divided Germany’s western half was admitted in 1955; when a democratizing Spain was admitted in 1982. More demanding standards have been set and relaxed depending on the geostrategic circumstances, and those geostrategic circumstances argue for having given Ukraine a more morale-boosting prospect of eventual membership.

Losing his composure was one of Zelensky’s few diplomatic missteps in the course of  this war, and he quickly corrected it. The Ukrainian president’s subsequent spin was reminiscent of Winston Churchill’s after the 1941 meeting at which Britain wanted but did not get American commitments to fight Nazi Germany: closer than ever, not whether but when.

At the same time as the NATO summit, the G7 released a statement that the members would begin negotiating bilateral security arrangements with Ukraine. It was intended to be less than a NATO commitment but more than nothing. But the group’s promise was only to begin discussions—about commitments from the very countries that have been unwilling to make security commitments through NATO, and, in the case of the U.S. and the U.K., those that failed to carry out the commitments they made to Ukraine in 1994.

The best possible gloss to put on Ukraine’s continued exclusion from NATO is that the Biden White House moved next year’s 75th-anniversary NATO summit four months past the actual anniversary and closer to the 2024 presidential election in order to make a big political splash welcoming Ukraine into the NATO family at a time of maximal political value to the president. Here’s hoping the political operatives in the White House prove less timid than the national-security team.