
Twenty-five years ago, as a State Department speechwriter, I worked with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to secure ratification by the U.S. Senate of NATO’s first enlargement since the 1950s. Like all of us who advised Albright, I felt passionately that bringing Central Europe’s new democracies into NATO was morally right and in America’s interest. But we also believed it was vital to set the highest possible bar for aspiring members. The United States insisted on admitting only Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to NATO during that round—rejecting calls by some European allies to add more countries.
“NATO is a military alliance, not a social club”, Albright told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. New members had to be ready to contribute to its military missions and committed to its democratic values. They could not bring unresolved internal or border conflicts into NATO—the whole point of the process was to induce them to solve these problems before joining. Back in 1998, for example, we had to be confident that Hungary wouldn’t make territorial claims on neighboring countries with Hungarian minorities.
NATO kept its door open to more members after that first expansion. We expected the biggest test would be bringing in the Baltic States—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—because that would mean bringing states that had once been Soviet republics into the alliance. That Rubicon was crossed in 2004, without any serious harm to NATO-Russia relations. But I didn’t think Ukraine would ever join them. When NATO declared in 2008 that Ukraine “will become” a member, without offering a pathway for membership, I worried it was making a promise that might prove impossible to keep, even if Ukraine fixed its then-profound problems with corruption and democratic governance.
Russia’s full-scale invasion, and Ukraine’s heroic defense of NATO’s founding values, has changed all that.
At the coming NATO summit this July, NATO should offer Ukraine a Membership Action Plan—the first formal step toward membership. It should make clear that Ukraine’s ultimate accession depends solely on actions within its control, not on what Russia does or on the ultimate resolution of the war.
One reason to be serious about Ukrainian membership is that experience has validated the original argument for bringing new members into NATO. In 1997, Albright predicted NATO enlargement would “expand the area of Europe where wars do not happen”, and that turned out to be true. Since then, Russia has only attacked countries not yet protected by the alliance—Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova.
Experience has also disproved the belief that nations could gain security from Russia by foregoing their aspirations for NATO membership in deference to its concerns. It’s often forgotten that Ukraine adopted a law prohibiting joining military alliances in 2010. Russia invaded anyway in 2014, stealing Ukrainian territory and giving Ukraine’s neighbors reason to fear that their borders were no longer secure, either.
So the old reasons for Ukrainian NATO membership have become stronger; the old fears of provoking Russia have become moot. But there is also a new argument for Ukrainian membership, one that stems naturally from a question that every American and European government is now asking: How do we define Ukrainian victory and Russian defeat?
If the current war were solely about sovereignty—about upholding the principle that borders can’t be erased by tanks—then there could be only one good answer to that question. Ukraine would have to regain all of its territory. And that should remain our common goal.
But Russian President Vladimir Putin’s goal in Ukraine is clearly not just to grab land; nor is land the only thing Ukrainians are defending. U.S. President Joe Biden has said that Ukraine’s “brave resistance is part of a larger fight for democratic principles”, and if that is true—if this war is partly about preserving Ukraine’s freedom to build a democratic society and to align itself with countries that share its values—then Ukraine joining NATO as a strong, pluralistic democracy would also count as victory. It would arguably be as huge a blow to Putin as Ukraine regaining Crimea. It might thus relieve the political pressure Ukraine’s leaders feel to complete that military task more quickly than realities on the ground might allow, and focus them, constructively, on the work required to integrate seamlessly with the Western alliance.
The alternative some have proposed—offering Ukraine security “guarantees” that fall short of NATO membership, as the United States does for Israel, might help until full membership is achieved. But they are no substitute. The United States and Israel don’t have a mutual defense treaty because Israel doesn’t want one—in part because it fears a formal alliance would limit its freedom of action. Ukraine, in contrast, has been asking to assume the responsibilities of joining our alliance. It is a European country suffering exactly the kind of attack NATO was created to prevent, and it’s proving that it is ready and willing to interpose itself between the attacking nation and NATO’s other members—to defend their freedom as well as its own. How can NATO say no to such a country’s aspirations for membership without signaling hesitation to actually guarantee its security, and without validating Putin’s claim that Ukraine is part of a special Russian sphere of influence? There really is only one security guarantee that is taken seriously in Europe, and that is NATO.
That still leaves the question we posed 25 years ago: Can we bring into NATO a country with an unresolved conflict, without obligating the U.S. military to join that conflict? That is a serious and legitimate concern, especially since it is in the nature of an active conflict to expand unpredictably. But the answer cannot be to wait to admit Ukraine until the current war definitively ends. That would give Russia an incentive to never end the war—the very opposite of what NATO’s original enlargement conditions were designed to achieve.
Article 5 of the NATO treaty says that if a member is attacked, each ally must take “such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain” security. That is a serious legal obligation, even if it does not require going to war in response to every small provocation. But we would still get to define its contours in advance of Ukrainian accession.
If, for example, Russian troops were to still occupy some Ukrainian soil when Ukraine is ready for membership, allies could reach an understanding that Article 5 would not oblige them to take direct part in Ukraine’s operations to regain those remaining territories, but that they would take all feasible measures to stop a further Russian invasion. This would guarantee the security of that large part of Ukraine that its troops have protected and liberated, without committing American Marines to storm Crimea.
For those worried that Ukraine might take dangerous escalatory actions, NATO membership also would provide some insurance. Article 4 of the NATO treaty would require Ukraine and its new allies to “consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence, or security of any of the Parties is threatened”. Ukraine would have more security; it would also be more embedded in NATO’s military and political institutions, with less freedom to act independently. It would be far better to bring Ukraine into such a structure than to let it remain an extremely well-armed free agent.
Of course, there is still fighting to be done before Ukraine can fully join the alliance. All of NATO’s members will have to be convinced. And Ukraine will have to ensure it is politically and militarily ready. But that is all the more reason to start the formal process now. A democratic Ukraine joining the West is a big part of how this war ends. And Ukrainians should know what they must do to make it happen.
Tom Malinowski is a senior fellow at the McCain Institute and the former Congressman from New Jersey's 7th district. He served as U.S. assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor under President Barack Obama, from 2014 to 2017. Before that, he was Washington director for Human Rights Watch, a senior director on the National Security Council staff, President Bill Clinton’s chief foreign policy speechwriter, and a speechwriter and member of the policy planning staff at the State Department under Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Warren Christopher.