Armed Neutrality – Not NATO Membership – Is the Best Way to End the War and Preserve US Security – Ahead of next month’s annual NATO conference, French President Emmanuel Macron said on Wednesday, “I think we need to talk concrete and tangible security guarantees” for Ukraine following any end-of-war settlement. The time has now come for the West in general – and the U.S. in particular – to face a cold, hard, truth: lashing our future security guarantees to an unstable nation that has a perpetual antagonism to its nuclear-armed neighbor gambles with U.S. security and should be rejected out of hand.
NATO Membership for Ukraine?
In fact, to some European leaders, Macron doesn’t go far enough. In a May 3 interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, former NATO Deputy Supreme Commander Richard Sherriff sternly argued that at the NATO Summit in Vilnius next month, he expects “to see clear signals from NATO that Ukraine will become a full member of NATO.” That is the only long term solution to Ukraine’s security,” he said, adding he “would also add Georgia and Moldova to that.”
At Europe’s GLOBSEC security forum that ended May 31, Sherriff added urgency to his warnings, suggesting that if Zelensky’s troops fail to drive Russia out of Ukraine on their own, “we in NATO need to be prepared for the worst case, which means we might have to intervene.” At the same conference, Estonian Minister of Defense Hanno Pevkur said he would like to see NATO provide “a clear roadmap” to alliance membership for Kyiv.
Inherent in such alarmist warnings is the contention that conquering Ukraine would only increase Putin’s appetite for more. At the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said he feared that if Russia defeated Ukraine, Putin might next move against, “the Baltic states, or Finland, or Poland, or Romania or Moldova, any other country” in the region. While the fear and animosity of Eastern European states against Russia is entirely understandable, there are two main reasons why fears of any Russian conventional attack beyond Ukraine are unfounded.
First, Putin had been unambiguous and clear in his warnings for the 15 years prior to the outbreak of war that NATO membership in Georgia and Ukraine were genuine red lines for which Russia would use military power to prevent. Prior to this war, Putin never made territorial claims against any other European state and hasn’t raised even the hypothetical claim that any other territory belonged to Moscow.
Second, and perhaps most importantly, this war has exposed the graphic reality that Russia’s conventional military capacity was a mere shell of what the West feared and doesn’t have the capacity to threaten any other country, even if Putin had secret imperial ambitions. After 15 months of full-scale war, near total manpower and industrial mobilization, Putin’s army has struggled to hang on to a mere 17% of Ukrainian territory – a foe with a barely-functioning air force, navy, or missile force.
With the staggering loss of upwards of 10,000 pieces of armor and other military equipment since February 2022, the long-term harm to its economy resulting from crippling Western sanctions, and the impact of reportedly hundreds of thousands of casualties, it could be upwards of 30 years before Russia can even rebuild to its pre-war strength, much less have even the remote potential to invade an inch of a soon-to-be 32 nation military alliance.
Relations between Ukraine and Russia have been fraught with historic antagonisms which have been on display since 1991. The reason the country exploded into a civil war in 2014 was because of antagonisms between the eastern and western citizens of the country, many of which had been boiling in the background for centuries.
Eight years of war between 2014 and 2022 did not solve the problems, and events since will ensure the hatred between the two will endure for a generation or more into the future. It would be the height of folly to extend a security guarantee to a country that will continue to have an antagonistic relationship with its nuclear-armed neighbor for the foreseeable future. Rather than tie the future security of the entire NATO alliance to hoping a volatile relationship between two bitter rivals doesn’t again break into open conflict, the U.S. should pursue viable options that have a chance of preserving European and American national security long term.
Frankly stated, there is no guarantee that once this conflict has ended, by whatever means, war between Russia and Ukraine will not again break out. Given that this will remain an ever-present potential, it is crucial that the United States and Europe ensure that our territory remains free of war and Russia remains deterred from putting our security at risk. The first path to giving Kyiv its best chance to avoid future war is to support armed neutrality.
Ukraine can declare they are militarily allied with no nation – which Ukraine first floated as a possibility in March 2022 during ultimately failed peace talks with Russia – yet still retain full capacity to build its national security forces with material assistance from any nation, including NATO members. Kyiv would likewise be free to engage in any diplomatic and economic activities with any nation it chooses.
A Better Path
Ending the war based on a neutral Ukraine without express security guarantees from NATO would clearly be an unpleasant outcome for Kyiv’s leaders, but it is a viable path through which Ukraine could end the war quickly – stopping the daily death and destruction of its people and cities. That may ultimately be the best guarantor of ensuring its own security.
Finally, the cold reality of the situation should already be clear: Washington has already soberly demonstrated from the outset it will not send its troops to fight and die for Ukraine and will not risk being drawn into a direct confrontation with nuclear-armed Moscow. This position should not and will not change in the future. Continuing to hold out the hope that the U.S. will ever be willing to risk nuclear war with Russia over Ukraine gives false hope to Kyiv, inviting moral hazard and the possibility of a longer war.. It’s time we were honest both with ourselves and Ukraine’s leaders and focus on effective ways to end this war while preserving American national security indefinitely.
A 19FortyFive Contributing Editor, Daniel L. Davis is a Senior Fellow for Defense Priorities and a former Lt. Col. in the U.S. Army who deployed into combat zones four times. He is the author of “The Eleventh Hour in 2020 America.”
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