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European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen speaks to the press in Brussels, Sept. 28.
Photo:
stephanie lecocq/Shutterstock
European Commission President
Ursula von der Leyen
has expressed optimism in recent weeks about Ukraine’s progress toward membership in the European Union. While such prospects are important to the country’s postwar reconstruction, they are secondary to questions concerning its security, sovereignty and survival. On that score, however, Ms. von der Leyen and other European leaders have been largely quiet. To confront those matters would force them to entertain a more consequential development—namely, Ukrainian membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Ukraine is a midsize power targeted by a nuclear-armed neighbor. No amount of institutional reform will change that grim reality. Europeans are wasting valuable time by focusing primarily on Ukraine’s accession to the EU instead of pushing for a debate about how to bring the country into NATO—or at least how to ensure its security short of full membership.
Such deliberations are necessary because the future of NATO depends on what happens in Ukraine. With few exceptions, member states have significantly disarmed since the end of the Cold War. At present, it would take at least a decade to restore a semblance of real military power across the Continent. Ukraine arguably has Europe’s strongest military with combat-tested soldiers and a proven ability to operate jointly against the Russian military even without all the necessary weapons and equipment.
Brussels’ focus on Ukraine joining the EU increasingly looks like a way of avoiding hard security questions confronting the West. To remain viable, institutions need to reflect the power realities on the ground. If they don’t, they become irrelevant—no matter how many senior meetings they convene, or how many declarations they publish.
NATO has been on autopilot for the past three decades because the threat environment no longer required it to be the premier vehicle for collective Western defense. That has changed significantly since February. According to its new “strategic concept,” unveiled at its June summit in Madrid, the alliance is back in the business of deterrence and defense. How, then, can it not join arms with the one country on the forefront of the fight?
NATO leaders didn’t worry about alienating Moscow in 1955, when West Germany joined the alliance a decade after World War II. They understood Germany was essential to deterrence and defense in Europe. The same dynamic applies today, as Ukraine stands in the doorway, preventing a Russian intruder from entering Europe.
Until and unless European governments have a serious conversation about what path they can offer Ukraine to become an integral part of NATO’s defensive perimeter—if not of the alliance itself—we will be talking about secondary issues, avoiding the principal challenge staring us in the face.
Mr. Michta is dean of the College of International and Security Studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch, Germany, and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.
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Appeared in the October 6, 2022, print edition as ‘Ukraine Needs a Guarantee From NATO.’
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