The US administration believes that inviting Ukraine to join NATO is meaningless and will therefore not be taken at the Washington summit in July. “Much better to say under what conditions we will all agree to move forward,” Ivo H. Daalder, head of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, told LRT.lt in an exclusive interview.
The author of dozens of books and articles on US and European security, Daalder served in the administration of US President Bill Clinton and was US ambassador to NATO in 2009–2013. LRT.lt spoke to him at the Lennart Meri Conference in Tallinn.
What’s your current assessment of the war in Ukraine, from the military and political point of view?
Politically, I’m more optimistic about where Europe is than where the United States is. The debate we had over the last six months demonstrates that there is a significant issue, particularly in the Republican Party, with regard to America’s role in the world at large, focused on the willingness to support Ukraine.
I don’t think that’s going to change. If Donald Trump gets elected, it will have a negative impact on the likely future aid. But even if he isn’t elected, we’re still going to have a debate.
I’m impressed by the fact that Europe is stepping up, there are some differences within the EU, but not large differences. The problem is less political will than military capability – it’s going to take a long time to regenerate defence production and the financial resources necessary to support the will.
That reality has an impact on what’s happening on the ground in Ukraine. I think we will look back at the last six months as a significant setback for Ukraine because of uncertainty about where the United States was, the lack of ammunition and air defence capability. It had a negative impact on Ukrainian morale, at the same time that it had a positive impact on Russian morale. One reason the war is going as it is now is because Russians are willing to take more risks, they think they’re winning or at least they’re no longer losing. And Ukraine is worried that it doesn’t have the manpower and the energy to win the war.
So, we’re in for a very tough few months. I don’t know where it ends but there’s a 75-percent chance of it ending with the line having moved again a little bit, a 15-percent chance that the line moves an awful lot in the wrong way. And I don’t know what the other 10 percent is, perhaps the lines will move in a different way. I don’t think that’s going to happen in the next few months, maybe sometime in 2025, but it’s going to be very hard to hold where we are.
Do you believe that the NATO summit in Washington will present any significant changes in the alliance’s position on Ukraine?
I think it will be the first time the alliance will come together to start looking at how we are doing in the implementation of the defence plans that were agreed in Vilnius. What you will see is a commitment by all NATO countries to bolster the eastern flank of NATO. Greater defence spending, movement of forces. The changes that were started in Madrid moved forward in Vilnius, and I think in Washington you’ll see that NATO is becoming a serious military alliance for the defence of NATO members.
With regard to Ukraine, there won’t be an invitation to accession talks or anything else. I think there is still a debate going on about how to demonstrate NATO’s long-term commitment to Ukraine’s integration and that’s really taking place on two levels. One is how much the current structure for supporting Ukraine in the field and the longer-term effort to build a future force should continue to be done bilaterally by individual countries and how much should be overseen by NATO.
Secondly, a number of nations have now finished the bilateral security agreements that were committed to in Vilnius. The US will have made its bilateral security commitment, and there’s some thought of putting all those commitments together into something called the Ukraine Compact.
Those are the two things we’re going to look for, not membership. This is not what I want, which is defining the conditions under which we would move towards membership. There’s too much political disagreement, the US election is interfering.
The only thing that will change all of that is if the situation on the ground falls in that 15-percent category, where there is a serious debate about whether Ukraine will actually be able to hold the line in July. Then we’ll have a debate about what more we need to do, including some countries saying it’s time for us to directly intervene. Lithuania has said it publicly, the French president has put it on the table, as has the Finnish president. And I can see a number of countries coming to Washington and saying, yes, NATO membership tomorrow is not going to happen because the process takes too long but we cannot afford Ukraine losing this war and therefore we need to think about what more we can do directly. And I think that’s a real possibility.
What would be Russia’s reaction? Would it escalate?
No, I think Russia will say a lot of things, but it won’t make any difference. The reality is that the Russians know that if they use a nuclear weapon in any form, which is the basic means of escalation they have left, they will have difficulties with China, which has publicly made clear that this is not something they want. I assume that Xi [Jinping] and [Vladimir] Putin are having that conversation.
Secondly, it is the one thing that will create consensus within NATO on the need to respond much more forcefully. I think the US privately has made clear to the Russians what to expect and has publicly said that the response will be overwhelming. And I expect that to be the case.
I don’t see a lot of incentives for Russia to try to enlarge the conflict. They’re already having enough difficulty dealing with Ukraine, let alone escalating the conflict by using nuclear weapons rather than talking about it.
Where does the hesitation in certain Western countries, like the US and Germany, come from about Ukraine’s deeper integration or invitation to join NATO under certain conditions?
Right now, the US administration’s position is one I share – that an invitation is meaningless. What matters is Ukraine being a member of NATO. It takes time, as we saw with Sweden and Finland, even under the best of circumstances. For Ukraine, it will take much more time under the current circumstances.
The problem Ukraine has is that it is at war. There is no consensus on bringing Ukraine into NATO while it is at war because doing so would make NATO a party to the war.
So, the invitation is actually a political cop-out. It says, yes, we want you closer, but it doesn’t change anything in the actual way in which the conflict is going to be conducted.
What I have suggested together with Karen Donfried in a recent article in Foreign Affairs is that NATO should agree on conditions under which it will move towards NATO membership. And I think the one condition that NATO hasn’t said, but actually believes is necessary, is that the fighting in Ukraine will have to end before they become a member of NATO. I don’t know whether Lithuania is prepared to bring Ukraine into NATO while there is still active fighting, but 32 countries in NATO don’t agree on that. And since NATO can only move if there’s consensus – and we have to deal with countries like Hungary, which are going to be difficult enough no matter what – to try to force an agreement on something that actually doesn’t mean anything strikes me as not particularly useful.
It would be much better to say under what conditions we will all agree to move forward. Well, we may not get an agreement on that either, but it would basically tell the German and US governments to think and state publicly something they haven’t really done since Bucharest [summit in 2008], which is when this will be allowed to happen.
In the US, given that the candidate running against the president is not a friend of NATO, if the US now moves forward even with a symbolic thing like an invitation to NATO, it will be accused of dragging the United States into a war with Russia. And no one wants that debate. The election does that, it’s unfortunate, but it’s the case and that’s not going to change.
Are you worried that if Donald Trump gets elected, the US military aid to Ukraine might stop? Can the US withdraw from NATO?
I’m very worried about it. Stopping aid to Ukraine is the least of my concerns. I think Donald Trump does not believe in alliances, and he does not believe in NATO. You can spend more money [on defence], but that’s not going to lead him to fulfil the security commitment because he doesn’t believe in security commitments.
Alliances are in their nature a win-win organisation. I do this for you, so you do this for me. Lithuania sent troops to Afghanistan not because there was a threat to Lithuania’s security there but because it wanted to be a good ally of NATO and the US in particular in the expectation that if Lithuania needed help, the US and other allies would be good allies of Lithuania. That entire concept is alien to Donald Trump.
So yes, he can withdraw from NATO under the treaty Article 13 giving a year’s notice, Congress can’t prevent him from doing that. But it doesn’t really matter. What matters is how Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Poles, Germans, French, Italians, Scots, Brits, and others think about whether the US is going to come to their aid. Everything that Donald Trump has said should concern people about whether in fact, he would do that.
There’s also a growing movement within the Republican Party that is anti-NATO. The latest opinion poll from PEW shows that among MAGA conservative Republicans, 59 percent have an unfavourable and 39 percent have a favourable opinion of NATO. Among all Americans, it’s exactly the opposite: 38 percent unfavourable and 58 percent favourable.
Within the Republican Party – and even to some extent the Democratic Party, which is much more positive about NATO – NATO is becoming a political problem. That’s new. It has never happened before, and NATO has always had strong bipartisan support. Politicians drive public opinion and reflect public opinion, this is a worrisome trend.
There is an argument that Europe should become more strategically autonomous and militarily capable. Is this possible and doable? And could this change the perception in the US?
Yes and yes. It is vitally important for Europe to strengthen its own capacity for action, irrespective of what the United States will or will not do. I prefer that it be happening within NATO rather than in the European Union because there are Canada, Britain, and Norway, the latter two critical in building a European pillar.
It should be a United States goal to encourage their collaboration – not say you do it so that we can do everything else, but you do it so together we can be stronger. The US has historically not encouraged that, not in the way it needs to be encouraged.
Whether Trump is elected or Biden, the number one requirement for Europe is to become strategically stronger and a bigger strategic actor, which means more military capability, a greater strategic vision of where they want to go together, both in terms of the competition with China and defending itself against threats to their security.
I do think that has a positive influence on the US debate. It becomes more difficult to say NATO doesn’t matter to us if you have a stronger European pillar. So, I think it’s a win-win. I don’t think it would change anything about Donald Trump, but one day we will be living in the country without Donald Trump and Europe will still be around. So yes, a strong European pillar within NATO is also the best protection against the possibility that the United States leaves NATO or gets disentangled from Europe.
There are Republican supporters who believe that Europe should take care of Europe so that the United States can focus on China. I think they’re wrong, I think you can and must do both. But I don’t know how politics is going to evolve, so Europe being ready is a good idea.
How can we deter Russia from future aggression against Ukraine? Only by having Ukraine as a NATO member?
Yes, or a member of whatever European pillar one creates. It is the only way, just like the only way how Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia are going to be secure as members of an integrated Western security alliance.
The core problem is that Russia historically has believed that its security depended on the insecurity of its neighbours. Before Russia understands that its security depends on the security of its neighbours, it will be a threat. And that’s true not just in the last five years, It’s been true for the last five centuries.
I don’t think that an end to the fighting or even an end to the war will mean that conflict between Russia and Ukraine will never happen again. I don’t believe there will be a negotiated peace between Russia and Ukraine, they want something different. Russia wants to determine Ukraine’s future and Ukraine wants to determine its own future. And that’s going to be the case no matter what. I don’t think it’s particular to Vladimir Putin, it’s particular to Russia, which, for historical geographic and geostrategic reasons believes that it can only be secure if it dominates its neighbours.
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