This op-ed is the pro-argument for admitting Ukraine into NATO. Read the con-side here.
BONN, Germany – In July, the 2024 NATO Summit in Washington DC commemorated the transatlantic alliance’s contribution to seven decades of peace in Europe. It was a fitting celebration of NATO’s 75th anniversary.
In setting its strategic direction, NATO must contend with the Russian war in Ukraine — and the threat to peace it poses. NATO members’ support for Ukraine will determine the outcome of the war and, consequently, the future of European security. At the summit, they supported Ukraine's "irreversible path to full Euro-Atlantic integration, including NATO membership."
NATO members must stay on that path. Allowing Russia to attack its neighbors, seize other countries' territory, kill their civilians, and seek to eliminate their sovereignty is not a basis for peace in Europe. Against that backdrop, the western alliance is the only international institution with the credibility to counter that threat. Ukraine’s membership in the alliance is the only way to assure peace and stability — for Ukraine and the entire Euro-Atlantic area.
NATO's security guarantees are critical
US President Harry Truman set America’s post-war policy toward Europe when he abandoned the Morgenthau Plan, which would have deindustrialized Germany. Instead, he chose to make West Germany the industrial engine of a new, integrated western Europe and a key part of European security in the face of the new Soviet threat. West Germany would join NATO in 1955.
American security guarantees paved the way for keeping US forces in Europe, giving the US a permanent stabilizing presence. Pushing for the creation of NATO in 1949 was essential to reestablishing peace in Europe. Without NATO’s credible security guarantees, the Marshall Plan could not have succeeded in helping western Europe recover from the destruction of the Second World War.
Those guarantees remained just as relevant when the Cold War ended and the Iron Curtain came down across Europe. Volker Rühe, the first defense minister of unified Germany, called for the opening of NATO membership. He argued that the Poles deserved the same security as the Germans and the French. Rühe worked closely with then US ambassador to Germany, Richard Holbrooke, to help convince President Bill Clinton to support that goal.
Several former Warsaw Pact members went on to join the alliance. It was the security NATO provided that allowed them to develop their newly established democracies.
Opening NATO's doors
For a quarter century after the Cold War, NATO's security guarantees kept the peace in Europe. Russia also benefited, thanks to the NATO-Russia Council, Partnership for Peace and the NATO-Russia Founding Act.
That all changed in 2007. At that year’s Munich Security Conference, Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to establish a revisionist history, which portrayed NATO's opening as a threat to Russia. He grounded this view on a non-existent Western promise to keep NATO out of eastern Europe. Putin expanded on that falsehood in 2021 when he outlined an imperial claim to Ukraine, which was a de facto declaration of war against its neighbour.
NATO has dangled membership over Ukraine since 2008. It had a chance to make good on that offer in 2014, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and takeover of the Donbas in eastern Ukraine. Instead, Ukraine received an OSCE observer mission, which documented ceasefire violations but did not name culprits.
European attempts to resolve those initial attacks on Ukrainian sovereignty, with its Minsk Plans that lacked security guarantees, failed. Consequently, Russia's leaders felt that their view of a weak and unviable Ukraine was correct — and Western governments lacked the spine for a drawn-out confrontation.
Bridge to Ukraine's membership in NATO
Ukraine needs absolute security guarantees, not promises like the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Ukraine abandoned its Soviet-era nuclear weapons in exchange for protections that turned out to be nothing but paper. Now, the West must make the defense of Ukrainian sovereignty the unambiguous premise of its security policy.
Protecting the sanctity of Ukraine's sovereignty is doable with a concerted delivery of long-range weapons, fighter bombers, drones, tanks, mines, ammunition, electronic warfare capabilities, and supporting arms production and maintenance capacity in Ukraine. If Ukraine can bring the war to Russian military sites, Putin will not be able to sustain his image as the protector of the Russian homeland.
Outside Ukraine, NATO can commit to a permanent stationing of alliance troops on its eastern flank, which would tie up Russian forces otherwise deployable to fighting in Ukraine.
NATO must make clear that Russian use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine would end heretofore self-imposed restraint in supporting Ukrainian defense. It would put the deployment of military forces in Ukraine, and other measures, on the table. In any case, NATO should signal its willingness to contribute to a robust peacekeeping mission as a co-guarantor of a peace agreement.
All these steps are essential to NATO’s strategic goal: To prevent Russia from attacking Ukraine again. Deterrence can only be guaranteed if the door to NATO membership, essential for Ukrainian and European security, remains open.