FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
July 11, 2024
Contact: press@defensepriorities.org
WASHINGTON, DC—Today, the NATO summit in Washington, DC, will conclude. Defense Priorities Policy Director Benjamin H. Friedman issued the following statement in response:
“NATO’s summit continued several bad habits. The first is to increasingly lose focus on NATO’s core task, which is to balance against Russian power, in favor of vague talk about global missions. The summit communique goes on about various problems in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, as if the alliance doesn’t have its hands full with Russia and can repair internal trouble in distant places. It complains that China ‘continues to pose systemic challenges to Euro-Atlantic security,’ a cloudy assertion that falsely implies China is a military threat to Europe that NATO should contain.
“Second, the summit, while celebrating the arrival of new members, ignores the need to defend them. In particular, this summit marks another missed opportunity to determine how to defend Finland, which has an 800-plus mile border with Russia and fewer than 25,000 active troops in its military. That is a serious defense liability and a massive bill that could come due, especially once the war in Ukraine ends.
“Third, the summit offers Ukraine false hope of membership that is worse than useless. The communique bills the summit as a ‘bridge’ to Ukraine’s eventual NATO membership, and also declares that Ukraine is on an ‘irreversible path’ to entry. But these metaphors have no substance. They do not change the fact that NATO states, especially the United States, which undergirds the alliance with nuclear weapons, have shown they will not fight for Ukraine and risk destruction. That refusal to fight reflects an immutable lack of interests worthy of such risks. Formal security guarantees, whether through NATO or not, can’t change that and thus may never be credible.
“NATO is in fact providing Ukraine a bridge to nowhere, or worse. False promises of eventual membership and statements of unyielding commitment to its cause actually imperil Ukraine. Promising future NATO membership preserves a cause of the war and incentivizes Russia to continue fighting to prevent that point from arriving. Further, pretending NATO will defend Ukraine at some point in the future or that Kyiv can win back all its territory encourages Ukraine to continue a war strategy that is not working, one that seeks to regain all lost territory rather than going on defense and accommodating the inevitably unjust peace where Russia withdraws from little of Ukraine’s land, or less.”
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