Again, I agree. Putin is a bully and an aggressor, and needs no provocation to menace or attack. He only understands deterrence, expressed in the language of power and martial prowess. That, as it happens, is why NATO exists.
A SLIDE INTO WORLD WAR III
The proper argument against admitting Ukraine is different. It’s that you can’t promise to defend a new member already under attack without simultaneously and directly entering that same war. As long as Putin’s troops are shooting at Ukrainians, all the other allies would be obliged to help – that is, to return fire. The escalation scenarios are impossible to predict. But they include a slide into World War III.
In that sense, the mutual-defense clause of Article 5 implies an automaticity not unlike that of the more complex alliance configurations leading up to World War I. Back then, in ways Europe’s leaders didn’t fully understand, a cascade of treaty obligations turned a dispute between Austria-Hungary and Serbia into a continental, and then almost global, inferno.
There is no plausible way, moreover, to define Ukrainian membership in a way that forestalls such risks. NATO cannot, for example, extend Article 5 just over those territories currently held by the Ukrainians.
First, that exclusion would already amount to exactly the concessions the Ukrainians rightly refuse to make, in effect ceding much of Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea.
Second, such technicalities wouldn’t reflect the actual frontline, which is fluid. Ukrainians and Russians will keep shooting at each other throughout the nation. Except that the Russians would then be gunning at Ukrainian NATO soldiers.
As soon as the alliance becomes a war party in this hypothetical situation, the allies would therefore have a legitimate stake in Kyiv’s strategy. Their primary goal would necessarily be to keep the war from spreading to the Baltic, the Arctic, outer space and nuclear silos – from becoming World War III.
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