NATO, another name for peace – 07/14/2023 – Demétrio Magnoli

Ukraine will join “when allies agree and conditions permit,” NATO said. “A window of opportunity is being missed in order to bargain Ukraine’s entry into negotiations with Russia,” replied a disgruntled Zelensky. And he added: “Uncertainty is weakness”.

No one, not even Ukraine, expected immediate entry. The fifth article of the Atlantic Alliance treaty defines the obligation of mutual defense. Admitting Ukraine during ongoing hostilities would entail the unthinkable: a NATO declaration of war on Russia. But Zelensky pressed for a specific deadline for admission. NATO’s rejection has good reason.

The decision to admit Ukraine, without doing so now, would eliminate a possible solution in a complex diplomatic equation. However, the solution feared by Zelensky — the neutralization of Ukraine — has already been expelled from the realm of realistic options.

After 500 days of war, the US and its allies can no longer afford to negotiate Ukraine’s military status with Russia. The nation won on the battlefield, in heroic resistance, its place in NATO. Closing the doors of the alliance, imposing on the invaded nation a neutrality abandoned even by Finland and Sweden, would demoralize NATO. In practice, it would mean condemning her to “brain death”, diagnosed too early by French Macron.

The bargain that emerges as a realistic hypothesis is not between NATO and Russia, but between NATO and Ukraine. In a scenario in which the Ukrainian counter-offensive proves to be incapable of ensuring a strategic defeat for Russia, joining the alliance would work as a decisive argument to persuade Ukraine to sign an armistice based on territorial concessions. Zelenski knows this – and, precisely because he knows it, he deviates from the topic, speculating about an unfeasible bargain.

During the Cold War, the USSR invaded two nations that were experiencing “socialism with a human face”: Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968). However, the security offered by the fifth article preserved the countries of Western Europe.

In the postwar decades, under the umbrella of NATO, the nations of Europe’s most fortunate part rebuilt their economies and perfected their democracies. In them, communist and social-democratic parties were able to contest free elections, while the trade union movement conquered social rights. There is, in the left’s barrage of curses against NATO, a sad (and illuminating) irony.

Since 1999, NATO has expanded into Central-Eastern Europe, incorporating the former Soviet bloc nations. Eastward enlargement did not derive primarily from a US power project, but from the search for security by countries that experienced the imperial impulse of the USSR. It worked: Russia invaded Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014 and 2022), but bowed to the sovereignty of the new NATO members, including the former Soviet republics of the Baltic.

At the Bucharest summit in 2008, Ukraine’s push for NATO membership was unsuccessful. An empty statement about the future admission of the country foreshadowed the effective freezing of the Ukrainian claim. The Atlantic Alliance imagined that a perennial ambiguity would serve to appease Moscow. The retrospective verdict, always easy, shows the mistake.

The German precedent points to a solution for Ukraine. West Germany was admitted to NATO in 1955, with a commitment to seek national reunification exclusively through diplomatic channels. In the bitter hypothesis that an armistice covers the price of Ukrainian territorial cessions, joining the alliance would protect the amputated nation from a renewed Russian invasion, providing the conditions for reconstruction. Lula and Celso Amorim refuse to understand a historical lesson: in the necklace of countries around Russia, NATO is the other name of peace.

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