Last week, NATO held a summit in Washington celebrating its 75th anniversary. As at other recent summits, the alliance reaffirmed its promise that Ukraine will become a member of NATO at some undisclosed future date. While Ukrainians have shown admirable courage resisting Russia’s invasion of their country, NATO’s insistence that Ukraine will one day join the alliance only incentivizes Russia to continue its aggression. Rather than working to bring about a negotiated settlement, NATO’s policy, driven largely by the Biden administration, will ensure the slaughter in Ukraine continues.

For decades, Russian officials made clear that putting Ukraine in NATO would cross a red line. William J. Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Russia and the current CIA director, candidly asserted in 2008 that,

Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.

Yet U.S. officials ignored Burns’s astute observation. Despite strong Russian protestations, NATO allies agreed at the 2008 Bucharest summit that both Ukraine and Georgia would become members of the alliance. That fateful decision fundamentally altered Moscow’s threat perception of the United States and NATO. The Washington foreign policy establishment may scoff at the idea that expanding NATO to include Ukraine and Georgia poses a threat to Russia; nevertheless, prudent statecraft requires one to consider how adversaries will perceive and react to your actions.

Adding new countries to NATO should not be an end in itself. Countries should only be invited to join the alliance when doing so improves the security of current members. Ukraine’s addition would do the exact opposite and heighten the risk of a direct NATO–Russia war. The Biden administration’s support of NATO’s promise to bring Ukraine into the alliance at some future date presents a clear logical inconsistency. If Biden believes it is in the U.S. national interest to send American troops to fight and die for Ukraine in the future, why is it not in the U.S. national interest to do so now while Ukraine is being actively attacked?

The simple answer is because it is not in America’s interest to fight a war against Russia—a country that possesses over 5,000 nuclear weapons— on behalf of Ukraine, either now or in the future. Dangling NATO membership to Ukraine is the worst of both worlds. It reinforces Russia’s aggression, provides the hardliners in Moscow with an easy propaganda victory that Russia’s fight is actually with NATO, and leads Ukraine further down a path of false promises and destruction of their country. 

Despite estimates that both sides have suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties, neither Russia nor Ukraine has been able to achieve a decisive victory on the battlefield. As Ukraine’s former Army Commander in Chief Valery Zaluzhny observed in late 2023, the war has reached a stalemate. While Ukraine has proven that it is capable of inflicting significant damage on Russian forces, basic battlefield dynamics as well as the realities of manpower and industrial capacity suggest that Ukraine is unlikely to achieve its stated objective to expel all Russian troops and reclaim all occupied territory, including Crimea. Yet, Russia too, has failed to achieve its objective of regime change in Ukraine, and Moscow has been unable to consolidate control over the four Ukrainian oblasts it annexed in 2022.

History teaches us that most wars end at the negotiating table. For Ukraine, the principal bargaining chip it possesses is a commitment to forgo its NATO aspirations and adopt a policy of neutrality. Indeed, before the war, Moscow proposed a list of security guarantees to lower tensions in Europe which included ruling out Ukraine’s accession into NATO. After the war broke out, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators met in April 2022 to discuss a peace deal, with the Ukrainian side offering to pledge that it would never join NATO. Although the talks did not result in a conclusive peace treaty, probably due in part to Western pressure on Kiev, the reality is that Ukraine was prepared to trade its unlikely NATO hopes for neutrality and peace. This offer remains the key to negotiating an end to the conflict.   

The Washington NATO summit was a prime opportunity for the alliance and Ukraine to work in tandem to develop a serious diplomatic proposal to end the war, rather than encourage further suffering, death, and devastation. For its part, the Biden administration should have found the courage to lead the alliance to this conclusion. Unfortunately, the meat grinder in Ukraine can be expected to continue.