Should Ukraine be part of NATO? It already is
One by one the lines have all been crossed. Patriot missile-defence systems. Bradley armoured fighting vehicles. Leopard and Abrams tanks. Weapons that NATO had previously balked at providing Ukraine, for fear of “provoking” Russia, are now being supplied in abundance, if not in haste. The latest Ukrainian request to give NATO pause is for F-16 fighter jets, though France and Italy are already talking of going ahead with these.
Hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers are reported to be massing for a new assault, possibly as early as this month. This makes the issue more urgent: Ukraine must be supplied with the weaponry it needs as quickly as possible. The gradualist strategy cannot be sustained any longer. Ukraine’s early success in repelling the Russians helped to rally Western support, at a time when many had written it off as a lost cause. Now the risk is complacency, at a moment of great peril.
If Russia were to succeed, not only against Ukraine but against all the combined might of NATO, it would not only embolden Mr. Putin, who has not been shy in advertising his ambitions of a restored Russian empire, to further conquest. It would send the same message to China, with regard to Taiwan, and to every other expansionist dictatorship around the world. The lesson would be: The West is weak, the democracies have no stomach to defend themselves, the whole international order is a fraud.
For it would be a Western defeat. Let us not kid ourselves. This is our war, nearly as much as it is Ukraine’s. The question on everyone’s lips before the war – should Ukraine be part of NATO – has now been answered: It already is. Whatever obligation NATO might have to come to Ukraine’s defence, Ukraine has clearly been coming to ours.
Certainly the line of causation did not run the other way: that Russia attacked Ukraine and Georgia because they applied to join NATO – as if Ukraine posed a threat to Russia, rather than the other way around. That gem of wisdom, for which we are indebted to the “realist” school, might have induced some caution, before Russia invaded, or rather before it invaded a second time, and a third, even as NATO was signalling it had no intent of admitting Ukraine any time soon.
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