Nato’s endgame on Ukraine will need regime change in Moscow
Ukraine’s failure to secure an invitation to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) during the alliance’s annual summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, has disappointed many, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. But although the summit’s concluding statement did not offer a definitive timetable for Ukrainian accession, it did demonstrate a degree of unity and strategic foresight that would have been impossible had Donald Trump still been president of the US. To be sure, Nato leaders’ promise to extend an official invitation to Ukraine “when Allies agree and conditions are met" was somewhat nebulous, and Zelensky, angered by the ambiguity, criticized the Western position as “unprecedented and absurd." But US President Joe Biden was right to suggest that the war must end before Ukraine is allowed to join.
The fact is that Nato is a defence alliance. By definition, if one member is at war, all members are. Given the risks of a Nato-Russia war, not least the threat of nuclear escalation, Biden and Nato’s cautious approach is reassuring.
Even so, the ongoing conflict underscores the need to reassess the West’s Ukraine strategy. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis (which I have written about elsewhere) showed that strategic planning is just as crucial as firepower during war-time. Then-US President John F.
Kennedy’s success in navigating the crisis was the result of intense strategizing involving some of America’s brightest minds, including economist Thomas Schelling, who won the Nobel Prize in 2005 for his work on game theory. Unfortunately, the debate about the Ukraine war often fails to capture the conflict’s strategic complexities. While the Ukrainians might win a conventional war, as some Western commentators
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