Much attention during the NATO Summit last week was focused on the performance of President Joe Biden and on speculation about what Donald Trump’s possible return to the White House might mean for the Alliance. And when people weren’t talking about U.S. politics, eyes were trained on Britain’s new Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who emerged victorious in the recent election in the U.K., or France’s President Emmanuel Macron, weakened after parliamentary elections in his country. There were two new members in the Alliance, Sweden and Finland, both of which clamored to join following Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, bringing the total number of member States to 32.
Beyond the optics and speculation, this 75th anniversary gathering of the Alliance made significant progress in some areas. But it has lots of work to do going forward.
The Alliance remains united in its support for Ukraine and pledged more than $43 billion in military assistance over the next year to help the country defend against Putin’s forces. It also will establish a new center in Germany called NATO Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine (NSATU) with 700 personnel to coordinate military aid. While the U.S. provides the lion’s share of military aid, roughly two-thirds of all assistance to Ukraine, including humanitarian, financial, and other aid comes from Europe, contrary to falsehoods spread by some opponents of U.S. aid to Ukraine that the United States provides a disproportionate share.
And still, $43 billion over the course of a year is not enough. Support for Ukraine – both in terms of military assistance and movement on NATO membership – needs to be accelerated. Maintaining unity against Putin’s Russia will be critical, as will recognizing the threat posed by China.
More than two-thirds of allies have fulfilled their commitment to spend at least 2 percent of their GDP annually on their own defense, a pledge originally established a decade ago. This follows pressure from the current and previous U.S. administrations and Putin’s war against Ukraine. Among the laggards is America’s friendly neighbor to the north, Canada, where spending on defense stands at 1.4 percent and its leader, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, finally announced this week a specific timeframe of reaching the 2 percent level by 2032.
Ukraine has never asked NATO to send its men and women to engage directly against Russian forces pummeling its cities, villages, hospitals, and energy grids. But NATO needs to ramp up both the volume of its assistance and the speed with which it is delivered. The drip-drip approach of delivery thus far, exacerbated during the hold-up in aid from the United States late last year until this spring, has handicapped Ukraine’s ability to fight effectively.
The Urgency of Volume and Speed
That said, Ukraine has done remarkably well in battling a much larger invading force and deserves the help of the allies that also stand to benefit from the bulwark that Ukraine has created. NATO also needs to free Ukraine to use the weapons it provides wherever and whenever leaders in Kyiv deem necessary, out of the self-defense to which Ukraine is entitled under international law and to prevent Russia from hiding in sanctuaries safe from Ukrainian attack.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy joined NATO leaders at the summit and received pledges of significant military assistance, from fighter jets and long-range missiles to air defense systems and additional training. Some of this has already been delivered – and all of it should have been delivered yesterday, not tomorrow or next year. Delay on the part of the allies is deadly for Ukrainians, as evidenced by the Russian attack Monday on the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital in Kyiv that killed two adults and injured 16, including seven children. It was among multiple strikes across Ukraine that day that killed at least 43 people.
But in denying Ukraine a clear path to membership, the Alliance fell short of what Zelenskyy and the country need – a credible assurance of a security guarantee that NATO membership offers. While Putin has shown no signs of giving up his goal of destroying a sovereign European country, he’s also never launched a full-scale military attack on a country under NATO’s Article 5 protection (though he appears to be escalating his hybrid attacks, including assassination attempts). It’s difficult to see how Ukraine will be able to stop Putin absent more firm Western security guarantees.
Instead of committing to an action plan for defeating or truly deterring Putin, allies again offered fine phrases reminiscent of previous summits in this year’s Washington Summit Declaration: “We fully support Ukraine’s right to choose its own security arrangements and decide its own future, free from outside interference. Ukraine’s future is in NATO.… [W]e will continue to support it on its irreversible path to full Euro-Atlantic integration, including NATO membership. We reaffirm that we will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when allies agree and conditions are met. The Summit decisions … constitute a bridge to Ukraine’s membership in NATO.”
While stating that Ukraine’s path to membership is “irreversible” is progress, using the phrase “when allies agree and conditions are met” is not. At all. It’s rehashed from last year’s summit in Vilnius, Lithuania. This is the crux of NATO’s dilemma: Agreement of all 32 members has made a membership path a nonstarter and has thus denied the West its best tool to end the war. Some media reports got carried away in describing the use of the term “irreversible” as a “stunning development” for Ukraine and a “massive defeat” for Moscow. Both characterizations are exaggerated. In reality, nothing is irreversible in NATO-land, considering that all its decisions are political and can shift with the winds of domestic politics, though institutionalizing mechanisms such as aid coordination in the new NSATU structure and in the “Ukraine Compact” of more than 20 bilateral security agreements that Zelenskyy has signed with individual NATO allies makes these commitments at least difficult to reverse.
Still, the United States and Germany are the biggest foot draggers on support for Ukrainian membership, and continued delay shows Putin that he can sustain a prolonged effort to destroy Ukraine, while not fearing any real threat to his regime. It also risks diminishing support among Ukrainians for joining the Alliance if they see little progress since NATO in 2008 pledged that Ukraine will become a member, without specifying how or when. In fact, Georgia got that same pledge 16 years ago and now has a government that has decided appeasement of Russia and rejection of the West are surer and faster ways to hold off further Russian aggression.
Articulating the Threat from Russia and China
Despite soft views toward Moscow on the part of several NATO member governments – Hungary and Slovakia, in particular – the Alliance was united in articulating the threat posed by Russia. The Summit Declaration stated: “Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has shattered peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area and gravely undermined global security. Russia remains the most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security.”
Later in the communique, allies rightly placed “sole responsibility” on Russia for the war against Ukraine and argued there can be “no impunity for Russian forces’ and officials’ abuses and violations of human rights, war crimes, and other violations of international law.” Russia, it went on, is “responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians and has caused extensive damage to civilian infrastructure.” It called on Putin to end the war and for Russia’s full withdrawal from Ukrainian territory. It rejected Putin’s illegal annexation of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea. It also condemned Russian hybrid actions against the West.
But then it punted until next year’s summit recommendations on a “strategic approach to Russia” to “constrain and contest Russia’s aggressive actions and to counter its ability to conduct destabilizing activities towards NATO and Allies.” That is too late.
Constraining and containing Russia should have been done years ago. It starts by making crystal clear that support for Ukrainian victory and Russian defeat is the policy of NATO. Beyond helping Ukraine more and faster, this includes accelerating security in NATO States bordering Russia and Ukraine, especially the three Baltic States so that they become impossible to swallow. More assistance is also needed for non-NATO member States at risk to Russian aggression, in particular Moldova and Armenia, as well as countries in the Balkans. All are subject to hybrid attacks from Moscow and, in the case of Moldova and Armenia, direct kinetic assault. More pressure should also be applied against the dictatorial regime of Alexander Lukashenka in Belarus, from which Putin launched part of his full-scale invasion in 2022 and where he says he has placed some of his nuclear weapons, though clear evidence of that is still uncertain. Waiting a year for a NATO strategy will only produce deadly results.
This year’s NATO communique also offered the strongest words to date on China, describing it as a “decisive enabler of Russia’s war against Ukraine through its so-called ‘no limits’ partnership and its large-scale support for Russia’s defense industrial base. This increases the threat Russia poses to its neighbors and to Euro-Atlantic security.” The allies called on China’s regime to “cease all material and political support to Russia’s war effort… [China] cannot enable the largest war in Europe in recent history without this negatively impacting its interests and reputation.”
But here again, rhetoric is not enough: NATO nations and others must act to constrain China from providing this kind of indirect support for Putin’s war in Ukraine. One way to achieve this is by tightening secondary sanctions on Chinese financial institutions, as well as on dual-use technology and military manufacturers that provide a lifeline to Russia.
Overall, NATO had a decent summit, even as the questions surrounding its various current and potentially future leaders overshadowed much of it. Looking ahead, attention will zero in on the election in the United States. Meanwhile, Russia’s war against Ukraine will grind on, and Kyiv desperately needs massive assistance.
There is no room for disunity among the member States. Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and other authoritarian leaders are looking for ways to make NATO go away or become irrelevant. But NATO, the most successful defensive military alliance in history and America’s greatest force multiplier, marked its 75th anniversary this year. It must continue to serve as a bulwark for the defense of democracies and come up with better ways to deter Putin and his authoritarian comrades.