Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday that NATO’s July summit in Washington will be “highly focused” on admitting Ukraine because starting World War III is something he likes to do right after breakfast.
Kyiv pressed for NATO admission during last year’s summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, but all they got was some talk. Now that NATO foreign ministers — including SecState Blinken — are meeting in Brussels on Wednesday and Thursday of this week, the discussion is about how Ukraine “will be a member of NATO.”
“For us, the issue is having a good and clear roadmap to reach this conclusion,” Blinken told reporters at a joint press conference with French Foreign Minister Stephane Sejourne in Paris on Tuesday. “And I believe that the NATO summit for the 75th anniversary will indeed be highly focused, and quite concretely, as to how we can establish this roadmap.”
Let’s bust some myths and lay out some facts.
The first myth is that NATO is a threat to Russia. The idea of NATO as an offensive force is a joke, for starters. Three of its most powerful members — France, Germany, and the UK — have dangerously undersized and underfunded militaries. And the political reality is that even during the height of Cold War tensions there were serious doubts as to whether NATO would fully function as a defensive wartime alliance — I’m looking at you, France, Greece, Turkey, and maybe Italy.
The second myth is that despite what you might have heard from various Kremlin apologists and propagandists, there was never a promise made to not expand NATO eastward. The details were complicated, never formalized, and revolved around settling “the German question” in the brief period between our victory in the Cold War in 1989 and the final dissolution of the Soviet Union two years later. You can read them here.
(I am, however, on the record for 20-plus years here at VodkaPundit that NATO expansion was unwise.)
But the fact is that NATO never conquered a square inch of territory. Expansion is entirely due to former unwilling clients of Moscow that practically banged down NATO’s door to get in. Russian occupation was cruel and memories are long.
Russia, on the other hand, has spent the last 16 years expanding through force of arms.
Russia seized Georgia’s Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions in 2008, then illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in 2014. Russia continues to fund and support armed separatists in Moldova. In 2022, Russia tried to conquer Ukraine in toto but has had to settle for a long war of attrition to take Ukraine’s eastern and southern provinces.
Then there’s poor Belarus, just as corrupt as Ukraine and even more authoritarian. Vladimir Putin has bullied and bribed the country back into Mother Russia, de facto if not quite de jure.
I’m sure Kazakhstan, another country once “lucky” enough to have been ruled from Moscow, looks nervously to its northern regions where Moscow settled a couple million Russian colonizers from the 19th century on.
So yes, there are very good reasons why Ukraine wants desperately to become a NATO member, and they all begin in the Kremlin.
There is, however, one inescapable reason — and one lesser reason — why inviting Ukraine to NATO is insanity.
The lesser reason is that Kyiv is just too corrupt. The country in no way measures up to Western standards for admission to NATO. (Neither does Turkey but they’re grandfathered in by the geopolitical necessities of 1949.)
Here’s the big reason: NATO does not import wars. Period.
Moldova can’t join NATO, as much as it’d like to, because of a never-ending, low-level conflict with separatist Russian colonists. Georgia would love to join, too, but it’s been unofficially at war since at least 2008. Ukraine is in the same situation — and was even before 2014 — but on a much grander scale.
NATO does not import wars. A country must be fully at peace with itself and its neighbors before admission can even be considered. But there’s Antony Blinken and the rest of the NATO foreign ministers, blithely and dangerously talking about bringing wartorn Ukraine into the alliance.
It’s madness.
The West should help keep Ukraine armed and in the fight for as long as they’re willing to fight. Since Russia is back in Imperial Expansion Mode, it’s better to have a non-NATO member keeping Russia at bay on the Dnipro, rather than NATO doing the job on the Vistula, the Rhine, or the Seine. (Although we should leave it up to the Euros to keep Kyiv’s government afloat. That ought to be their business, not ours — or especially the Bidens’.)
I’d finish by reminding you that, ideally, Russia would be a NATO member, cementing the peace in Europe and forming a vital part of the bloc against Communist Chinese imperialism. Moscow chose a different path — and the bloody results are their responsibility.
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