On Saturday, 158 academics signed an open letter to the Guardian calling on NATO to admit Ukraine. “Inviting Ukraine to join Nato would mark a definitive step away from the politics of appeasement,” the letter states. “A decision to extend security guarantees to Ukraine would not only safeguard the Ukrainian state … but would also reassert Nato and the western democracies as effective political agents on the world stage”.
These academics are by no means the first Western commentators to call for Ukrainian membership of NATO. Before his death last year, Henry Kissinger stated that such membership “would be an appropriate outcome” because “the idea of a neutral Ukraine” is “no longer meaningful”. (He had previously opposed Ukrainian membership of NATO on the grounds that “it would start exactly the process we are seeing now”.)
Despite such illustrious company, the academics have some questions to answer. Most importantly: should Ukraine be admitted to NATO now, or only once the fighting has stopped? (They do not address this crucial point anywhere in their letter.)
If the answer is “now”, the academics need to explain how we avoid nuclear war.
Suppose we wake up tomorrow and Ukraine has been admitted to NATO. The other members of the alliance would then be under significant pressure to enter the war on Ukraine’s side. (Not doing so would completely undermine the deterrent effect of NATO’s Article 5.) If they did enter the war, Russia would suddenly find itself massively outgunned. It couldn’t possibly defeat all of NATO in a conventional war, so would have to resort to nuclear weapons to have any chance of winning. It’s possible that Russia would back down instead, but there are no guarantees. If Russia used a tactical nuke in an effort to deter NATO, the alliance would face a choice between destroying its credibility and risking nuclear war.
And the game theory doesn’t favour NATO. Russia knows that the US is reluctant to enter the war on Ukraine’s side, based on the fact that the US could have done so already but hasn’t. And the US knows that Russia knows, and Russia knows that the US knows that Russia knows, and so on. (It is common knowledge, in the technical parlance.) The Russians would therefore have a strong incentive to launch the tactical nuke.
If the answer to the question above is “only once the fighting has stopped”, the academics need to explain how we actually stop the fighting.
Suppose NATO announces that Ukraine will become a member of the alliance, but only once the war is over. Since the Russians plainly do not want Ukraine to become a member, this would give them an incentive to drag out the war for as long as possible. They might try to keep it going indefinitely at a low level of intensity. Even if they couldn’t make any further gains, they might dig in to defensive positions and then periodically launch raids or aerial strikes against Ukrainian positions. Needless to say, this would not be a good outcome for Ukraine.
Barring a total Ukrainian victory, the only way the country is likely to join NATO is via formal peace negotiations in which Russia gets significant concessions, such as recognition of the regions it has illegally annexed. And even this possibility seems remote, given how much emphasis the Russians have placed on Ukrainian neutrality.
Calling for Ukrainian membership of NATO without specifying when or how this would be achieved doesn’t seem very constructive. The same goes for Western leaders’ current policy of insisting that Ukraine will join the alliance at some unspecified time in the future. As Christopher McCallion and Benjamin Friedman note in a recent article, giving false hope is arguably worse than saying nothing.
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