NATO’s summit in Washington, DC will be full of pomp and circumstance. The gathering, from July 9-11, is intended in part to celebrate the Alliance’s seventy-fifth anniversary, a symbolic and emotional event for the leaders in attendance. You can expect the red carpet to cover the entire city. Dozens of speeches will be given about how NATO is the oldest and most successful military alliance in history and why the bloc remains a crucial check on Russian expansionism. Some will even claim matter-of-factly that NATO enlargement over the last twenty-five years—NATO has doubled…
In the sixteen years since, NATO members have deliberated among themselves about when—or if we’re totally honest, if—Ukraine should join. France, one of the holdouts in 2008, is now far more supportive of Ukraine becoming NATO’s thirty-third member. Germany, Europe’s economic engine and biggest military spender, remains hesitant. The United States, too, isn’t exactly gung-ho about the prospect, even if senior US officials like secretary of state Antony Blinken and defense secretary Lloyd Austin repeat the refrain that Ukraine’s future is in NATO. “Ukraine will become a member of NATO,” Blinken insisted back in April. “Our purpose of the summit is to help build a bridge to that membership and to create a clear pathway for Ukraine moving forward.”
For Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, preparing for yet another summer of war, these statements aren’t much consolation. It’s no secret that the actor-turned-wartime commander-in-chief isn’t thrilled with the way the alliance has conducted itself on this issue. He would have preferred NATO offered membership to his country yesterday and hasn’t been sky in expressing it. Last summer, Zelensky lashed out at NATO heads of state for refusing to set a concrete date for Ukrainian membership, calling it “unprecedented and absurd.” The histrionics cast a cloud over the entire meeting. Jake Sullivan, Biden’s loyal national security advisor, gave Zelensky a stern rebuttal, rightly telling the Ukrainians that the United States deserved gratitude, not lectures (he was even more forthright to Zelensky’s aides behind the scenes).
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