What opponents of Ukraine joining NATO fail to understand

Now that the NATO Summit in Washington is history and we’re back in mundane geopolitical reality, it is worth asking yet again just why Ukraine should or should not want to join the alliance.

Critics of Ukraine’s NATO aspirations argue that neither membership nor the prospect of membership serves NATO’s and Ukraine’s interests. The Ukrainians disagree, as did the Baltic States, the Poles and others before them.

A recent open letter signed by over 60 American academics makes the standard case against Ukraine’s joining NATO clearly and concisely. The letter is worth examining, as its fatal flaws, though painfully obvious, are remarkably resilient — and thus sure to structure debate for the foreseeable future.

The letter’s starting point is a claim that is both commonplace and wrong: “NATO’s Article 5 is widely considered to bind members of the alliance….to go to war to repel an attack against any member.”

One may “widely consider” anything, of course, but facts remain facts, and Article 5 says nothing of the sort: “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them…will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force.”

The language is convoluted, but the point is clear. Nowhere does the article require member states to respond with armed force. That’s only one of the many actions they may deem necessary, individually or in concert. Diplomatic protests, hand-wringing, peace conferences, diplomatic missions, open letters and so on represent equally adequate responses, precisely because each state decides on its own just which actions it deems necessary.

The Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians understand perfectly well that it is very unlikely that a Russian invasion would be met with armed force by the major NATO states. Can one seriously imagine American, German or French soldiers storming the Baltic Sea shore?

To complicate things, free-riding would inevitably kick in, as NATO states wait to see who takes the first step and suffers the greatest casualties, and whether follow-up military actions are even necessary. By the time decisions would be reached, the Balts will have been swallowed whole.

The next part of the open letter’s argument is equally flawed: “Some claim that the act of bringing Ukraine into NATO would deter Russia from ever invading Ukraine again. That is wishful thinking. Since Russia began invading Ukraine in 2014, NATO allies have demonstrated through their actions that they do not believe the stakes of the conflict, while significant, justify the price of war. If Ukraine were to join NATO, Russia would have reason to doubt the credibility of NATO’s security guarantee — and would gain an opportunity to test and potentially rupture the alliance. The result could be a direct NATO-Russia war or the unraveling of NATO itself.”

True, no NATO states have deployed or will deploy troops to Ukraine. But they have responded with weapons, ammunition and intelligence — the very same things the battle-shy NATO states would have deemed necessary, were Ukraine already a member. Once again, the argument ignores the actual substance of Article 5 and assumes that a military response is imperative.

Moreover, Russia need not invade Ukraine again to realize that doing so would have the same devastating consequences for the Russian armed forces, economy and society as it has already this time. Putin might be cognitively incapable of realizing that a second invasion could bring Russia to the verge of collapse, but other Russians are fully aware of what his adventurism has already cost their country.

Nor need the Kremlin look far to find an almost risk-free “opportunity to test and potentially rupture the alliance.” Attacking the Baltic states would do the trick. Not directly, with a massive tank assault, but indirectly, in a hybrid fashion, by staging a provocation in, say, Riga, during which local Russians are killed by some Kremlin-organized “Latvian Fascist Front.”

Mother Russia would then be compelled, by her unconditional devotion to the highest humanitarian standards, to help her children in distress — perhaps by sending in special forces, or perhaps by bombing a government building or a children’s hospital. If the NATO allies would be right to refrain from sending troops to Ukraine, they would be even more right to refrain from doing so in the Baltic case.

The final and greatest, flaw in the argument involves failing to appreciate that Russia’s war against Ukraine has little to do with its putative NATO membership at some undetermined future time — however irreversible the path toward that far-off goal may be. The war is about Russia’s unwillingness to accept the existence of a Ukrainian nation that insists on not being Russian. It is about Putin’s commitment to reviving a Russian empire and destroying the main obstacle to this goal, which is Ukraine.

Critics of Ukrainian NATO membership fetishize the alliance, as if it were all that mattered, while ignoring what matters much more: Russian imperialist ideology, its exterminationist plans for Ukraine and its expansionist drive.

So, why do Ukrainians want to join the club? Because they know things that Western analysts don’t. Ukrainians know that Russia invaded in 2014, when Ukraine was neutral and the West suffered from Ukraine “fatigue.” They know that Russia invaded again in 2022, when there was no chance whatsoever of Ukrainian NATO membership for decades, if ever. They know that Putin and his clique are driven by imperialist ideology, and not by rational calculations of material costs and benefits and will therefore stop advancing only when they are stopped.

Most important, Ukrainians and their East European supporters know that, while having none of the dire consequences its critics foresee, NATO membership will help extract Ukraine from its centuries-long captivity, accelerate the end of the fascistic Putin regime and save other parts of Europe from its horrific predations.

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”