NATO’s false promises are encouraging misplaced Ukrainian hopes

Christopher McCallion is a fellow and Benjamin H. Friedman is policy director at Defense Priorities.

At the 2024 NATO Summit in Washington, commemorating the alliance’s 75th anniversary, leaders offered Ukraine a fresh round of false hope in its war against Russia — which is worse than doing nothing.

Whether by military commitment or intensified support, the pretension that NATO could currently deliver a Ukrainian victory, or secure one later, encourages the country’s leaders to postpone reckoning with their dire circumstances. Moreover, it threatens to further imperil NATO members without a security payoff.

This charade is nothing new, but now is an especially bad time.

After the failure of Ukraine’s counteroffensive in 2023, recognition that its forces cannot regain more of its territory has begun to sink in. Indeed, despite the flow of heavy Western aid, Kyiv may struggle to hold what it has — a circumstance that suggests it should start exploring negotiations with Moscow to end or even freeze the conflict via an armistice now, before the battlefield situation worsens and negotiating room shrinks.

But instead, Washington and European capitals are, unfortunately, doubling down — at least rhetorically — continuing to claim Ukraine will someday join NATO. In fact, after promoting a vague “bridge” to Ukraine’s eventual membership before the summit, during the gathering NATO leaders claimed Ukraine is on an “irreversible path” to entry.

In recent weeks, the U.S. also signed a 10-year security pact with Kyiv, and approved the use of U.S. weapons by Ukrainian forces on targets inside the Russian Federation. Meanwhile, seconded by leaders in the Baltics, French President Emmanuel Macron suggested NATO ground troops be sent to Ukraine, while U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff implied that the deployment of NATO trainers to Ukraine is inevitable.

But as we’ve argued previously, it would be foolish to admit Ukraine to NATO — now or ever.

Any possible scenario of Ukraine accession presents an insoluble dilemma: The country can’t be admitted while at war with Russia — most importantly because doing so would immediately throw NATO and Russia into a nuclear crisis. Moreover, any commitment to defend Ukraine in the future wouldn’t be a credible deterrent. The underwriter of the alliance, the U.S., has already clearly demonstrated it won’t fight and risk nuclear war on Ukraine’s behalf, even when the latter’s survival is at stake, as the U.S. doesn’t have a vital interest in doing so — a point former President Barack Obama made explicitly in 2016.

Simply put, the West’s promises are empty talk, and Ukraine’s NATO membership appears off the table for the moment. Macron’s suggestion seems rather unserious, and the U.S. pact is essentially symbolic. Nonetheless, even false promises can bring real danger, and this can present itself in several forms:

First, any prospect of Ukraine’s NATO membership, however dubious, preserves a key cause of the war, giving Russia incentive to prolong the conflict in order to forestall Ukraine’s accession. As with the draft treaties Russia submitted in December 2021 and the Istanbul negotiations conducted in March and April 2022, any resolution will inevitably be conditioned on Ukraine not joining NATO.

Second, false promises encourage false hope, which will only motivate Ukraine to continue following its failing strategy to regain all the territory it has lost and eschew negotiations with Moscow.

Currently, Ukraine’s best option is probably to dig in and adopt a defensive strategy, while concurrently initiating peace or at least armistice talks. Western aid may help Kyiv hold its front lines and harass Russian targets for a time, but it cannot substitute for Ukraine’s ultimate lack of manpower, particularly while the West’s own industrial base is under strain to provide sufficient firepower to match Russia’s. The war’s continuation only promises further depletion of Ukraine’s forces and the eventual possibility of either a frontline or political collapse.

The war’s continuation only promises further depletion of Ukraine’s forces and the eventual possibility of either a frontline or political collapse. | Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images

Of course, Russia might prove unwilling to even accept an armistice around the territorial status quo, and successful talks could take years. But what NATO’s rhetoric is helping postpone isn’t certain peace, rather the initial steps toward it. And these require, at minimum, a political shift toward acceptance that the war won’t end with complete justice for Ukraine and Russia surrendering all it has seized.

Ukraine isn’t a monolith of unyielding support for regaining all territory at any costs either. A growing number of Ukrainians would surely like to change course and stop throwing lives at increasingly unreachable objectives. Phony Western promises prop up the less practical alternative.

Plus, while the cost of false hope falls mostly on Ukraine, it also increases the risk for Americans and other NATO members. The longer the war drags on, the greater the threat of escalation grows. This is already evident in the “salami-slicing” approach the U.S. has taken, sending increasingly long-range weapons to Ukraine and rubber-stamping their use on targets inside Russia.

In recent weeks, Ukraine has already used its own indigenous capabilities to strike Russian radar stations, which are designed to provide early warning in case of an American nuclear attack. And last month, submunitions from a U.S.-supplied missile fired by Ukrainian forces fell on civilian beachgoers in Sevastopol, Crimea, likely after being intercepted by Russian air defense.

These events raise acute concerns. Attacking early warning systems erodes Russia’s confidence in its ability to respond in the event of a nuclear first strike from the U.S., therefore increasing the risk of Russia’s nuclear use. But a more likely outcome is that Moscow will respond to the attacks on its soil that employ U.S.-provided weapons by finding ways to directly target the U.S. or its helping parties. Ukraine’s attacks in Russia also raise questions about whether the U.S. can stop Kyiv from drawing it into direct conflict as the situation grows more dire.

Analysts who see themselves as Ukraine’s boosters often insist the West mustn’t cave to “nuclear blackmail” because escalation to nuclear war is unlikely. But the accurate name for “nuclear blackmail” is “nuclear deterrence,” and it doesn’t require assurance that disaster will occur, only fear that it might. These commentators seem to believe our ability to deter Russia relieves us of the burden of being deterred by them — like playing chicken without comprehending that the risk of collision is mutual.

This logic is deranged under any circumstances but especially in the case of Ukraine, where the balance of resolve between the U.S. and Russia is overwhelmingly in the latter’s favor. The risk of nuclear war may be low, but its apocalyptic consequences demand we labor to keep it that way.

And yet, this week NATO continued its irresponsible policy toward Ukraine: providing false hope, making peace less likely and the war more dangerous. Another kind of summit, one infused with realism, would have admitted that Ukraine can’t win in the grand sense it has defined victory, and that NATO won’t defend it.

That would have been a bridge to better prospects for a reasonable peace in Ukraine, not to mention improved security for NATO.