NATO at the Crossroads

Incoherent Security Architecture and the Problem of Grand Strategy

NATO Troops on Maneuvers

“The 80’s called, they want their foreign policy back.”

At the time, it was a stone cold zinger - a nice line that was typical of the celebrated personal political skills and folksy ease of President Barack Obama, and a slick little soundbite on the road to his clinical defeat of Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election. With the passage of time, however, it has entered into the dubious ranks of history’s famous last words.

When Romney argued in that debate that Russia was the chief geopolitical rival to the United States, it was easy for Obama to dismiss him, and for the country to laugh it off. At the time, America was riding the high of its great victory over the Soviet Union, Russia was crouched in a passive stance, and it seemed that the only security challenges that now remained were bush wars in the Middle East. But in 2024, who in the American political and foreign policy establishment would doubt Senator Romney’s total validation?

Since 2012, NATO has experienced a revival and a return to relevance that would make any washed up 80’s movie star turn green with envy. After languishing for years, where the only real mention of NATO in American politics were the token admonitions for European members to increase their defense spending, NATO is once again at the center of global (and domestic American) politics. NATO has been identified as one of the critical driving anima of the war in Ukraine, with debates raging over supposed American promises given to the Russians that NATO would not expand eastward, arguments over Ukrainian membership in the alliance, and a growing narrative that one of the key threats from a second Trump presidency is the possibility that The Donald would withdraw the United States from NATO or otherwise neutralize the bloc. Americans, strained by inflation and endemic institutional rot, are asked to please think of the poor, frightened North Atlantic Council when they go to vote in November.

The United States certainly does have a NATO problem on its hands. That problem, however, is not some Trumpian affinity for despotism which threatens to unhinge the alliance and hand Europe over to the Russians, nor is it a Russian plot to attack Poland. The problem, rather, is that NATO's place in broader American strategy has come untracked, even as that broader strategy becomes ever more frayed and rudderless. The tail is wagging the dog, and it is steering the dog into a bear trap.

NATO, in its original conception, was designed to resolve a very particular security dilemma in Western Europe. In the immediate wake of World War Two, Western Europe - specifically Britain and France - had to consider how it might be possible to mount a defense against the colossal Soviet forces that were now conveniently forward deployed in Central Germany. The 1948 “Western Union Defense Organization” (WUDO), which included the aforementioned Anglo-French allies along with the Netherlands and Belgium, was created with an eye to this problem. With the rapid demobilization of American armies in Europe, however, it was obvious that this threadbare European alliance had dismal prospects in the unthinkable event of war with the Soviet Union. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the supreme commander of WUDO forces, was asked what the Soviets would it would take for the Red Army to attack and push through all the way to the Atlantic, and famously replied: “Shoes.”

NATO, therefore, was an attempt to resolve the total strategic overmatch on the European continent through two expedients. The first of these, obviously was America’s membership, which brought both formal American security commitments as well as permanent American military deployments in Europe. The second strategic boost provided by NATO concerned Germany. Even after being ravaged by war and dismembered by the allied occupation, Western Germany remained the most populous and potentially powerful state in Western Europe. From the beginning, it was clear (particularly to the Americans and the British) that any sustainable strategy for deterring or fighting the Red Army would have to make use of German manpower - but this implied, axiomatically, that West Germany would have to be economically rehabilitated and rearmed. The prospect of *intentionally* rearming Germany was immensely upsetting to the French, for obvious reasons given the events of 1940-44.

The first NATO summit conference

NATO thus solved two major obstacles to a sustainable and viable defense of Western Europe, in that it formally and permanently tied the United States into the European defense architecture, and it provided a mechanism to rearm West Germany without allowing for the possibility of a truly autonomous and revanchist German foreign policy.

In many ways, NATO can be seen as a total reversal of the Versailles system which had doomed Europe after the First World War by guaranteeing the Second. The interwar period saw the Anglo-French alliance pitted against an adversarial Germany without American assistance; NATO ensured American commitment to European defense and rehabilitated Germany into a valuable partner - providing the command architecture to rearm Germany and mobilize German resources without allowing Germany to conduct an independent foreign policy.

Thus, the popular formulation, coined by the first General Secretary of NATO, Lord Hastings Ismay, that NATO existed to “keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.” This statement, however, has frequently been misinterpreted. The idea of “keeping the Americans in” was not a plot by Washington to dominate the continent, but a contrivance by the Europeans to keep America engaged in their defense. As for “keeping the Germans down”, this is pithily stated but not entirely accurate - the entire point of adding West Germany to NATO was to allow it to rebuild and rearm in the interests of collective western defense. For the United States, NATO made sense as a way to mobilize European resources and calcify the “front” in Europe, in the context of a broader geopolitical struggle with the USSR.

This is what NATO was for. It was a mechanism for formalizing an American security commitment in Europe and mobilizing German resources to deter the USSR, and it worked - the frontline of the Cold War in Europe remained static up until the collapse of the Soviet Union due to the naïve and self-destructive political visions of one Mikhail Gorbachev.

But what is NATO for now? What purpose does it serve in the context of a broader American grand strategy? More to the point, does such a grand strategy exist, and is it coherent? These are questions worth asking.

The Grand Strategy of Area Denial

Grand Strategy, as such, has become a nearly tiresome word, like geopolitics itself. In the abstract, grand strategy refers to the unifying framework for how a state leverages the full array of its powers - military, financial, economic, cultural, and diplomatic - to pursue its interests. This all sounds well and good, but of course the idea of a unified grand strategy is much harder to achieve than it sounds. States are not always easily able to define their interests clearly; in democracies, of course, there may be wide disagreements on state interest, but even within more totalizing regimes there will always be institutional interests and modes of behavior that are orthogonal to each other. We may consider, for example, the sharp vitriol between the Japanese Imperial Navy and Army, or the divide between interventionist and isolationist camps in the United States. With both the domestic framing of interests *and* the international arena in a state of flux, can a coherent grand strategy really be said to exist? Despite growing conceptual disagreement as to what exactly grand strategy is, or even whether it exists at all, there are innumerable books to be found on the grand strategies of all manner of historic or contemporary states - the Roman Empire, the Byzantines, the Hapsburgs, Singapore, South Korea, Russia, Japan, and of course China and the United States.

I rather feel that “Grand Strategy” is one of those things that we struggle to define, but we know it when we see it. Patterns and motifs of state behavior clearly emerge through history, and there are obvious interests towards which states work and coordinate their levers of power. Where these patterns and coordinated behaviors emerge, we call them grand strategy. The state becomes like a wild predator, which exhibits many different tactics and strategies for catching prey. The human observer may endlessly wring his hands, wondering about the interior life of the animal, its capacity to draft a strategy, and its ability to communicate with its pack, but the existence of coordinated and goal-oriented patterns of behavior is enough to deduce that strategy exists.

American grand strategy centers on the policy of area denial, or what we might call hegemonic denial. This is an old strategy, favored by great powers blessed with strategic standoff, and inherited from America’s British geostrategic predecessor. The “grand strategy” of the British, for many centuries, was predicated on simply denying any continental European power the opportunity to dominate the continent. The rationale was simple and sublime: Britain’s status as an island power afforded it strategic insulation via standoff from continental wars. The channel freed Britain from the burden of having to maintain a large standing army, like the powers on the continent, and invest heavily in its naval power projection. Relieved of the great expense that dangerous land borders bring, British naval power made them the grand winners of the colonial arms race. However, Britain always lived in the fearful shadow of European consolidation. If any one continental power managed to consolidate power over the European core, that power would have the resources to mount a naval challenge to the Royal Navy.

This is why, for centuries, Britain simply backed the rivals of whoever the most powerful continental state happened to be at the time. They backed the Hapsburgs and then the Prussians in wars against France, played an active and central role in the wars to prevent Napoleon from establishing hegemony in Europe, then pivoted to an alliance with France to contain Russia in the Crimean War. Finally, when Germany consolidated and became the most powerful state in Europe, Britain fought in two catastrophic World Wars to prevent German domination of the continent. The presence of Britain loitering offshore and a powerful Russian state in the east served as a natural hedge on continental hegemony, because both Russia and Britain were always guaranteed to be adversarial against any would-be European imperium. France and Germany both gave a mighty effort in their turn, but the challenge of mobilizing sufficient naval-expeditionary power to defeat Britain and the requisite land-logistical power to defeat Russia was enough to undo Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Hitler alike.

The guiding animus of British “grand strategy” was therefore very simple: maintain a cost-effective colonial footprint, and do not let anybody consolidate hegemony on the continent - the latter to be achieved through prudent intervention and the backing of anti-hegemonic coalitions. American grand strategy is much the same, except that it has a more globe-spanning scope. While Britain played hegemonic area denial in Europe, America pursues a similar containment and balancing act in Eastern Europe, the Persian Gulf, and East Asia simultaneously. This means, more practically, strategic area denial and a prevention of regional consolidation by China, Russia, and Iran - each the most powerful states within their prospective regions.

It has become a standard line, of course, to condemn this American defense strategy as fundamentally cynical and sinister, replete with language about American imperialism, its meddling in foreign governments, and complaints about the spread of a vapid American consumeristic culture which atomizes societies. America is frequently abhorred as an eternally expanding blob which is gray and featureless, yet simultaneously emblazoned with the gaudy colors of the rainbow.

Such opposition is understandable and highly sympathetic, but we must acknowledge that the core of America’s global defense strategy is not irrational, but aligned with critical American interests, at least in its highest order objectives. East Asia, in particular, is home to nearly 40% of global GDP and is by far the most populous and industrialized region in the world. While America is fundamentally secure from direct physical attack, safely sequestered behind its twin oceans, consolidated Chinese hegemony in East Asia could force American-aligned states to disaffiliate from the United States and either exclude or disfavor America in their enormous markets. While certain aspects of American foreign policy are certainly hyperbolic, disjointed, and damaging to the stability of the world, there can be little doubt that preventing hegemonic consolidation in these critical regions - East Asia, Europe, and the Persian Gulf - does serve a fundamental American interest and safeguards the possibility of a prosperous life for Americans and their allies, free of hostile coercion.

The core animus of American grand strategy, as a policy of anti-hegemonic area denial, is sound. My argument, however, is that it has become diluted by a fraying sense of strategic direction in Washington, and NATO in particular has become untracked as an element of America’s strategic architecture.

The Incredible Shrinking NATO

The fall of the Soviet Union created a unique moment in world history, as the first instance of globe-spanning unipolarity, leaving the United States as the last and unrivaled hegemon. The possibility that the USSR could disintegrate bloodlessly was hardly to be taken for granted, and the fact that the Soviet government - although armed to the teeth astride the world’s largest security apparatus - simply allowed the core Union Republics to break away remains one of the most fortunate bounces in history. Great bloodshed was averted, though much to the detriment of Soviet citizens, who were cannibalized by a decade of economic turmoil and social upheaval.

With the Red Army suddenly removed from the board, it was not clear what the strategic rationale for NATO now was. It was not immediately obvious that a strong central state would be reconstituted in Russia, and the temporary collapse of authority in Moscow left the European rim of the former Soviet empire up for grabs. But what to do with it?

In hindsight, it is clear that there were two potential paths forward for NATO, which I will call the Expand and Entrench path and the Hold and Engage model, respectively. The choice between these two models ultimately reduces to whether or not Russia was seen as an intrinsically hostile state, destined to animus with the American bloc, or whether the Russians were to be viewed as a prospective partner to be rehabilitated and engaged with on favorable terms.

If Russia was indeed a primordial adversary and a predestined hostis loitering on the perimeter of Europe, then the expansion of NATO to the east into the old Warsaw Pact countries at least made some sense, as a way to expand the west’s defensive perimeter cheaply and grow America’s footprint. Paradoxically, however, NATO expansion was facilitated by the perception that Russia did not actually pose a serious military threat. Offering defense guarantees to Russia’s neighbors appeared to be a trivial matter of extending promises that would never need to be kept, and a nearly cost free way to fence the non-threatening Russians in. Russia could be pacified with a diplomatic campaign - Obama’s famous “reset” - at the same time it was boxed in with NATO expansion.

Sergei Lavrov and Hillary Clinton celebrate the “reset” in Russo-American Relations

And so, we come to the problem with NATO expansion. The alliance rapidly expanded, fully doubling its membership from 16 to 32 members since 1989, under the illusion that this was a cheap and easy way to secure Europe’s eastern flank. In underestimating the revival of Russian power, however, NATO unwittingly created difficult new security challenges for itself at the same time that it was rapidly disarming.

This was the paradox: as NATO expanded its footprint geographically, both its existing and new members radically downsized their military readiness. In many of the keystone existing members, military spending as a share of GDP plummeted beginning in the 1990’s. In Britain, it declined from 4.3% in 1991 to 2.3% by 2020; the corresponding drop in Germany was a decrease from 2.5% to only 1.4%. Meanwhile, the new members that it added on its eastern flank were both geographically indefensible and abject military noncontributors.

The prime example, of course, would be the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Perched precariously on the Russian border, the Baltics are both highly exposed in the event of an outbreak of war *and* utterly incapable of defending themselves for even a token amount of time. The armed forces of these three states have a combined strength of fewer than 50,000 personnel and virtually no heavy equipment - at present, the Baltics do not possess a single main battle tank. NATO wargames concluded that the Baltics could be rolled by the Russian Armed Forces in a matter of days. Although the war in Ukraine has certainly sparked Baltic interest in raising military preparedness, this process is being slow walked - Latvia admits that the construction of fixed defenses on the country’s border could take up to a decade, with deliveries of new systems like HIMARs scheduled for 2027 or later.

This may sound like I am suggesting that Russia currently has some intention of invading the Baltics and starting a war with NATO. I do not believe this is the case. The problem, rather, is that the process of NATO’s expansion has been highly discombobulated and reflects a strategy that has come untracked. NATO expansion was supposed to be a cheap way to push America’s strategic footprint to the east - but now it threatens to become an enormous drain on resources.

The essence of the problem is that NATO chose to both expand and disarm at the same time, to the effect that the post-Cold War expansion has raised the probability of a conflict with Russia, increasing America’s geopolitical exposure while simultaneously degrading the American bloc’s preparedness for such a contingency. Washington saw NATO expansion as a cheap way to expand its strategic footprint deep into the old Soviet strategic space - penetrating into former Union Republics, even. Unfortunately, most of those new members viewed NATO membership as a substitute for their own military readiness - trusting in the differentiated deterrent credibility of American security guarantees as a panacea for their defense. The military readiness of the European bloc was allowed to substantially deteriorate in the face of an apparently dormant Russian adversary, with new members trusting that American security guarantees held a unique and uncontested deterrent value.

A military alliance like NATO at some point requires military power

Ultimately, this reflects internal incoherence as to the nature and scope of the threat posed by Russia. If Russia is indeed deemed to be an existential threat to NATO’s flank, expansion might have made sense in the context of a clearly defined plan to defend that flank. It does not make sense in the context of systemic disarmament across Europe at the same time that America faces the prospect of escalating military commitments in East Asia.

This is why, despite the alliance’s confident and inexorable expansion to the east, it finds itself paradoxically grappling with a sense of crisis and vulnerability. There has emerged a clear and gripping sense that a Russian attack on the Baltics is on the table in the coming years, as the point where Russia may attempt to test NATO’s commitment to collective defense. Baltic leadership, which tends to be the bloc’s most hawkish, seems frustrated that NATO’s more westerly members are not taking the prospect of a Russian attack seriously. Washington think tanks like the Institute for the Study of War now write earnestly of a looming war with Russia.

This is all very odd, for several reasons. First and foremost, the central idea of the entire modern NATO project is America’s differentiated deterrent credibility: the notion that an American security guarantee (like the tripwire Article 5) precludes the possibility of war. Mounting fears among Baltic leadership that Russia intends to test the alliance indicate an implicit worry that this differentiated American credibility is waning, due to either a real or perceived decline in American willingness to fight in Eastern Europe. In part, this would seem to reflect a dilution of Article 5’s strength as NATO expanded eastward. In the Cold War, America’s willingness to fight (or even use nuclear weapons) to defend Bonn, Paris, Amsterdam, and London was never really in doubt. In 2024, there are real reasons to question America’s appetite for a full scale continental war over Riga or Tallinn. Perhaps the Baltics sense that they really have never mattered to Americans.

The other strange aspect of the mounting Russia scare is the apparent lethargy and scattered stance of Europe’s response. The military leadership of Europe’s three most powerful nations - France, Germany, and the United Kingdom - are all open about their unreadiness to fight a high intensity continental war. Despite such warnings, efforts to jump start military readiness are lagging. Germany is not only drastically cutting its aid to Ukraine, but is also rejecting requests from its own military to scale up spending. The UK is dragging its feet when it comes to covering gaps in its procurement plan; French defense investments continue to prioritize domains like space, cybersecurity, and nuclear deterrents at the expense of conventional forces - indicating little interest in a land based slugfest like the one playing out in Ukraine. On the whole, there appears to be little urgency to ramp up force generation or systematically rejuvenate Europe’s expensive and scale constrained armaments production.

So while many European states have made much of their success reaching NATO’s spending target at 2% of GDP, this has become a totem number that does not directly correlate to military readiness. This is a natural consequence of Europe’s degraded armaments industry, which has steadily deteriorated due to low spending, piecemeal orders, a lack of export markets, and competition from American systems. While Europe has shown at least some sense that it must nurture indigenous armaments production, the difficulty of inter-government coordination and lack of scale (with individual states placing small and sporadic orders) make this difficult.

As a result, despite lofty rhetoric about a rejuvenation of the European defense base, Europe lags far behind on its production targets for critical items like shells for Ukraine. When it comes to building out its own stockpiles, Europe still shows a preference for American systems - choosing, for example, to order Patriot air defense systems rather than the indigenous European SAMP-T. Poland, embarking on a buying spree of rocket artillery, is splitting its money between Korean and American systems. On the whole, European spending has simply contributed to a surge in American exports. Less than half of Europeans armaments purchases are actually manufactured within the EU.

This matters a great deal. It’s not, particularly, that there is anything wrong with American systems. American armaments are world class, despite their hit or miss track record in Ukraine (which has a great deal to do with the unique use case of the AFU). The issue with reliance on American systems is availability and sustainment. The Ukraine War has already demonstrated that America cannot be a universal and bottomless arsenal for its satellites; already, we have seen orders deferred and shipments rerouted as the United States is forced to make difficult calls on the priority of various theaters, and Ukraine has served as a sort of perfect case study of the difficulties that Europe might face trying to sustain a ground war on its own. In any event of a general European war involving Russia - let alone kinetic action in the South China Sea - European industry would be called on for heavy lift, and the returns so far are not encouraging. Nor are munitions and weapons the only strategic shortcoming; Europe’s “critical enablers”, like ISR, logistics, airborne transit, and other support elements are far below satisfactory readiness.

All of this is to say, there are roiling contradictions at the heart of NATO. The alliance chose to expand rapidly at the same time that it systematically disarmed, striking a provocative and adversarial stance vis a vis Russia while it simultaneously downgraded its military readiness, making itself both hostile and unprepared. Now there is increasing alarm that a confrontation between NATO and Russia may be on the horizon, but the alliance’s European members are dragging their feet on rearmament. Ultimately, NATO transformed itself into a bloc that is geopolitically stanced against Russia, but unwilling to materially prepare itself for the potential consequences - projecting its footprint directly up to Russia’s border without considering what might come next.

The decision to expand the alliance while allowing its military readiness to deteriorate dovetails nicely with the ongoing crisis in Ukraine - indeed, Ukraine has become the locus and archetype of NATO’s current state of strategic disorder.

Ukrainian Quagmire

The war in Ukraine is now nearly two and a half years old. That is more than enough time to mull over the broader strategic logic of the conflict. Nonetheless, western leadership continues to give contradictory responses to a very elementary question: is the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian War existential for NATO? Depending on who and when you ask, NATO’s (or, more specifically America’s) interests in Ukraine are presented in various ways, and generally run along three different tracks.

In the more tactical, cynical variant of the story, the west has backed Ukraine because it is an opportunity to attrit an adversary without putting western soldiers in harm’s way. This is the mercenary version of the story, where the AFU can propped up in the field to destroy as many Russian vehicles and kill as many Russian personnel as possible. This has a certain opportunistic and cold strategic calculus to it, but it certainly does not frame Ukraine as an existential battleground for the west. Another version of the story reframes Ukraine as an extension of the old Cold War theory of containment. It is the duty of the west, evidently, to defend “democracies” against a perceived bloc of totalitarian states, in a show of deterrence.

The third answer is the most interesting, and the most phantasmagorical. This is the story that describes Ukraine as a forward bulwark and barrier state for NATO. Russia must be stopped in Ukraine, it is argued, because if Russia succeeds in conquering much (or all) of Ukraine, it will surely attack NATO next. That’s bad news, because if NATO and Russia get into an open war it will probably go nuclear. Therefore, Ukrainian victory is existential not just for the Ukrainians themselves, or even just for NATO, but for all of humanity. Ukraine is the last line of defense preventing a likely nuclear war. This is an argument that has been repeated in earnest by many figures in both western leadership and the analytics sphere, including ISW and the internet’s favorite talking head, Peter Zeihan. This is the argument which underlies all the rhetoric comparing Putin to Hitler - the notion is that “Putler” will continue his rampage if he is not stopped in Ukraine, but unlike Hitler he possesses a nuclear arsenal, so that when he goes down into the bunker, he can take the world with him. Or something.

Joe Biden and “President Putin”

It’s all a bit blasé, of course. But the confusion when it comes down to actually characterizing NATO’s interests in Ukraine (are they trying to save the world, or simply degrade an adversary’s military?) speaks to a larger contradictory pattern when it comes to Ukraine’s role vis a vis the alliance. Two elements in particular stand out - namely, the continued promises of a Ukrainian path to membership in NATO, and the unwillingness to negotiate a settlement which cedes territory to the Russians. Let’s review them in turn.

At the recent NATO summit in Washington DC, most attention was directed to President Biden’s characteristically incoherent babble, mispeaks, and inability to properly form recognizable English sentences - particularly his introduction of Ukrainian President Zelensky as “President Putin”, to thunderous and befuddled applause. But amid the babble, the summit reconfirmed NATO’s commitment to Ukraine’s eventual and inevitable membership in the bloc.

At some level, this is understandable. Ukrainian membership in NATO has been a consistent element of Russia’s war aims, and Moscow has consistently sought a guarantee against Ukrainian membership as a condition for peace. It is not hard to see how NATO would wish to emphasize its commitment to Ukraine, to avoid the impression that they can be easily deterred by Russia.

On a more pragmatic level, however, the logic of Ukrainian NATO membership is badly garbled. At this point in the war, the United States has crossed virtually all of the red lines that it had set for itself at prior points: it sent Abrams tanks after the Pentagon initially ruled it out, it has cleared the way for F-16s, and delivered ATACMS. The pattern is clearly one of slowly (slower than the Ukrainians would like) but surely checking off all the items on Ukraine’s wish list, after an initial period of refusal and foot dragging.

The one red line that Washington has consistently hewed to, however, is direct and formal American involvement on the ground (various undeclared American trainers, advisers, and contractors notwithstanding). Biden has been particularly clearsighted about the fact that America cannot justify “fighting the Third World War” in Ukraine. The problem here is a contradictory and undefined sense of the stakes at play. NATO has communicated, in fairly unequivocal terms, that it is not willing to fight an open war with Russia and risk annihilatory nuclear exchange over Ukraine. But by pledging eventual NATO membership for Kiev, they are signaling that they would be willing to do so in the future.

It’s not clear how to reconcile these positions. America has essentially pledged that it is willing to link nuclear escalation calculus to Kiev and commit to a hypothetical future war with Russia by bringing Ukraine under the umbrella of Article 5, while simultaneously insisting that it is not willing to fight such a war now, while there is an immediate kinetic threat to Ukraine. It’s not obvious why Ukraine might be worth fighting a catastrophic war tomorrow, but not today. If defeating Russia in Ukraine and holding the line at Ukraine’s 1991 borders are indeed an existential American interest, then why is America holding back now?

Furthermore, insisting on Ukraine’s postwar path to NATO membership alters the calculus of the current war, in myriad ways. Insisting on Ukraine’s future membership encourages Russian maximalism - if Moscow resigns itself to the idea that whatever is left of Ukraine after the war will eventually join NATO, it will likely conclude that it ought to leave the most wrecked and neutered Ukrainian rump state that it possibly can. Since NATO membership requires prospective candidates to resolve all their active territorial disputes before entry into the alliance, Russia has a direct lever to scuttle and delay Ukraine’s path to membership by keeping the conflict burning.

In effect, the repeated pledges of postwar Ukrainian NATO membership create a host of strategic incentives that are bad for Ukraine and bad for NATO, since it is hard to see precisely why the western bloc would be so eager to admit a shattered Ukrainian trashcanistan with intractable anti-Russian revanchist tendencies. In addition, Moscow would be sure to see this rump Ukraine as the frontline weak spot in NATO, and an ideal place to probe and test America’s commitment to Article 5.

NATO has put itself in this bind through its overly eager and careless expansionary mindset - having prematurely promised Ukraine NATO membership as early as 2008, the west cannot formally withdraw its pledges without undermining its own credibility, to say nothing of the backlash from a betrayed and ruined Ukraine, which would likely exit western orbit altogether.

And so, we arrive at the current Ukrainian crisis. NATO frivolously spread to the east, handing out cheap security assurances and pushing right up to the Russian border - intaking the Baltics and making promises to Ukraine at the same time that it systematically disarmed itself. Now, in the face of a counterstroke by the Russians, the west - but America more particularly - cannot seem to decide if these places are actually worth fighting for. NATO expansion as a low cost mechanism to push the American footprint deep into the old Soviet space made sense; NATO expansion as a burden which requires America and Western Europe to prepare for a land war in Ukraine and the Baltics makes no sense at all.

Washington is caught in a bind of its own making, created by decades of writing checks that it would prefer not to cash It has pledged to fight the “Third World War” for Tallinn and Riga, should the need arise, and has promised in no uncertain terms to extend that guarantee to Kiev as well at some point in the future. But faced with a high intensity continental war in the Donbas, there are increasing reasons to doubt American willingness to actually risk it all for these remote and strategically tenuous positions, particular as China’s swelling power promises to suck in ever more of America’s constrained military power to the East Asian theater, and the keystone European partners drag their feet on military preparedness.

In the end, Ukraine becomes the poster child and archetype for the mismatch between NATO’s promises and its material basis of power. It has now been 16 years since Kiev was first enticed with the prospect of NATO membership. But what did they actually get? A wrecked power grid, the loss of 20% of their territory (so far), and hundreds of thousands dead, wounded, or missing. The 45 million strong Ukraine that received those lofty promises so long ago is now a shattered and battered husk with perhaps 25 million citizens left. From NATO, they receive too many words and far too few shells, vehicles, and air defense interceptors.

NATO is, after all, a military alliance. When it was originally created, the hard calculus of divisions, manpower, and operational minutia were a foundational element of its construction. West Germany was brought into the alliance not due to lofty rhetoric about democracy and friendship, but due to the need to mobilize West German manpower and industrial capacity, and the desire to defend forward of the Rhine - a far cry from the induction of the Baltics, which brought no strategic advantage whatsoever. What NATO needs now is not another member, another noncontributing security commitment deep in the Russian strategic space, but a hearty dose of realism.