Should Ukraine Join NATO? Don't Kid Yourself: It Already Has | Opinion

As NATO members gather in Lithuania this week with traditional Eastern European fanfare, the chief focus of their deliberations is whether to extend formal membership to Ukraine amid the ongoing war. But the question of whether Ukraine officially joins NATO may have turned into something of a red herring. The truth is Ukraine has already been unofficially incorporated into NATO. As University of Chicago international relations professor Paul Poast, a passionate advocate for NATO's swift admittance of Ukraine, aptly put it, "NATO has already expanded into the war zone. The allies should just acknowledge that reality."

A year and a half into the war, it can hardly be denied that NATO forces have gained substantially more than the mere "foothold" in Ukraine that Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed to have launched his invasion of Ukraine to preempt. With the U.S. effectively assuming financial, material, political, strategic, and operational dominion over Ukrainian state warfare, the "foothold" has turned into a heavily-fortified bridgehead. Rockets lobbed at Russian troop positions are ultimately the product of U.S. commanders "controlling every shot," as Ukrainian officials have occasionally acknowledged. A great deal of American engineering ingenuity is currently being harnessed to pulverize Russians.

But as Putin is keenly aware, much of this U.S. and NATO "infrastructure" had been well-established long before any invasion was launched. For example, exactly two years earlier to the day of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, on February 24, 2020, the nascent government of Volodmyr Zelensky decreed what was hailed as being Ukraine's first "comprehensive and systematic" framework to achieve "the full Euro-Atlantic integration of the state" with particular emphasis on "deepening cooperation with NATO." Almost exactly one year before that, in February 2019, an amendment to the Ukrainian Constitution was passed proclaiming that it was a non-negotiable national priority for Ukraine to pursue "full-fledged" NATO membership at the earliest possible opportunity.

By June of 2019, Ukraine received an unusual prize: certification for one of its more seasoned Special Forces units to join the "NATO Response Force," a specialized "rapid deployment" alliance formation which had been nurtured to life in 2002 by the famously foresighted Donald Rumsfeld. The summer before the invasion started, U.S. and Ukraine special forces convened their largest-ever joint "multinational maritime exercise" in the Black Sea.

Given all of this, who needs the bother of formal NATO membership anyway, when you can sneak in through the back door? Steady incremental assimilation seems like much less of a headache than the customary slog of conventional ratification. And then when the question of full membership does arise, proponents have been handed an argument on a platter: With NATO irreversibly entrenched in Ukraine already, it may as well just dispense with the niceties and go all the way.

Oleksii Reznikov, the Ukrainian Defense Minister, is fond of declaring that Ukraine has already "de facto joined the Alliance," given the massive surge in joint war-planning activity. And no existing alliance member seemed compelled to dispute Reznikov's characterization—which is perfectly intuitive, given that Ukraine has been furnished over the past year and a half with what is essentially a brand new military, conveniently up to NATO specifications fresh out the box.

Instead of deliberating whether Ukraine should be absorbed fully or only partially into NATO, here's a better proposition for the NATO Summit participants to take up: Whatever happened to all those high-minded mantras extolling the virtues of democratic governance, the kind frequently touted as NATO's self-rationalizing creed, if Ukraine could be smuggled seamlessly into the alliance without anybody ever being asked to vote on it? No civilian populace need be consulted? Where did all the vaunted liberal rules-based accountability go, in which expansions of military power like expanding an alliance into an active war zone must go through extensive debate and deliberation, rather than merely sink into the morass of military-industrial inertia?

Whether it's formal membership or some other sub-species of "security guarantee," the momentum from the Summit this week will almost certainly continue trending in the same general direction—toward a widening of the Russia/Ukraine war, as opposed to limiting it.

Which is basically what the U.S. policy approach has been all along. Incorporating Ukraine into NATO by whatever official or semi-official mechanism could only further heighten the existential stakes, which are becoming even more mutually irreconcilable.

Some have taken the inverted logic of war-fever to twisted new heights, with one Ukrainian think tank operation (itself with a long lineage of U.S. government funding) trying to make the claim that extending Ukraine an invitation to join NATO would actually "accelerate the end of the war." It's the same snow-job employed in the endless calls for flooding the war zone with additional shipments of heavy-grade weaponry: Intentionally exacerbating the warfare, it's claimed, will actually lessen the warfare. The Biden Administration's latest move to supply Ukraine with primitively indiscriminate cluster munitions is just one especially crude manifestation of this logic.

Which gets to one last proposition the Summit-goers might deliberate: How many more thousands of corpses need to pile up for proponents of this war-expanding logic to consider a course-correction?

Michael Tracey is an independent reporter with Substack. Follow him on Twitter @mtracey.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.