NATO Is in Good Shape and Set to Grow Further
This is a remarkable turnaround of events from just a few years ago
If there ever was any real prospect that Ukraine’s membership invitation to NATO would be fast-tracked anytime soon, it was already clear the weekend before the July 11th-12th NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, that there was not unanimous support for the idea.
U.S. President Joe Biden had already poured cold water over the idea in an interview with Fareed Zakaria on CNN, saying that he didn’t think Ukraine was ready for NATO. He also said that he didn’t “think there is unanimity in NATO about whether or not to bring Ukraine into the NATO family now, at this moment, in the middle of a war…if the war is going on, then we're all in a war. You know, we're in a war with Russia if that were the case.”
Joining the military alliance while in the middle of fighting a war with Russia was never going to fly; that frankly would have made the prospect of World War III much more likely. NATO is a rational defence organisation; it doesn’t make decisions based on sentiment. So, as expected, with the war ongoing, Ukraine didn’t get an invitation or even an exact timeline of when it could expect to join NATO.