President Joe Biden is on a multiday swing through Europe, a continent that continues to host its deadliest war in 80 years. After he wraps up his meetings with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and King Charles III, Biden will fly to Vilnius, Lithuania, for the main event: the annual meeting of NATO heads of state.
Typically, NATO summits are highly scripted affairs. Leaders pose for group pictures, smiles planted on their faces. Officials exchange handshakes, and individual members meet in side conferences. Mundane speeches that robotically emphasize NATO’s strength, unity and potential are delivered by pretty much everyone in attendance. And at the end, a lengthy joint communique is released, riddled with highly bureaucratic language that could put you to sleep after a few minutes of reading it.
This week’s summit, however, is different. Biden and colleagues such as Sunak, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron have been careful to project a sense of resolve heading into the meetings, which will be held about 90 miles from Russia. But behind closed doors, there are substantive differences among members on a variety of issues, from the alliance’s future relationship with Ukraine to the perennially thorny subject of defense spending obligations. With 31 members at the table and unanimity required for all decisions, it’s hard to envision the meetings ending with all of these disputes resolved. To expect otherwise is almost delusional.
The biggest item on the agenda is what NATO’s partnership with Ukraine will look like after the war ends. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has spent the last week jetting to European capitals and making the case that his country deserves to become the alliance’s 32nd member after being in limbo for 15 years. In 2008, NATO declared that Ukraine would eventually become a full member state at some point in the future, a commitment the alliance reiterated during a gathering of its foreign ministers in November.
The Ukrainians have run out of patience, as have some members of the alliance. While proponents such as Sunak and Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas recognize that membership for Kyiv is not going to happen as long as Ukraine is fighting a war with Russia, they hope the summit provides the Ukrainian government with more clarity about its prospects.
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Yet bringing another member into the alliance, particularly one that will always share a large land and sea border with Russia, is no small matter. Membership entails significant responsibilities, for the member coming in and for the alliance that is on the hook for its defense. For the United States, by far the most powerful member of the alliance and one frequently expected to do most of the legwork, this means signing up to be Ukraine’s perpetual guardian against future Russian aggression. Some high-profile figures in the U.S. don’t have a problem with this. If anything, some argue, Ukraine’s impressive, steadfast resistance against the numerically superior Russian army earns it the right to join. But this line of argumentation oversimplifies the debate.
NATO membership is deadly serious business with deadly serious strings attached. NATO is a military alliance, not a country club; decisions on who or even whether to admit a new country shouldn’t be based on feelings but on an impartial, emotion-free cost-benefit analysis. And here is an honest query: Practically speaking, does NATO really need Ukraine to strengthen its collective military capacity?
There’s another membership question on the table as well. Sweden’s application has been stalled for more than a year courtesy of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has used his veto power to extract a series of concessions from Stockholm. Erdogan posed a similar obstacle to Finland’s bid, only to relent months after Helsinki signed a memorandum with Turkey last summer addressing its concerns over what Erdogan viewed as Kurdish separatist activities on Finnish soil.
Sweden was part of that deal as well. The Nordic country went as far as changing its constitution to strengthen anti-terrorism laws, all in an attempt to assuage the Turkish leader’s gripes. Erdogan, though, continued to use his veto power until the day before the summit officially opened, relenting only after he scored additional assurances from the Swedes. The Turkish president also reportedly won an assurance from the European Union about accelerating Turkey’s decadeslong bid to join the bloc, a last-minute concession after Erdogan tied Sweden’s NATO application to the EU accession process hours earlier.
Defense spending will also be a thorn in the alliance’s side, as it has since the earliest days of NATO’s existence. While NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has suggested that all member states will come to an agreement on spending a minimum of 2% of gross domestic product on the military, similar promises in past communiqués have gone unheeded.
A decade after NATO codified the 2% figure alliancewide, only 11 of NATO’s 31 members have met the benchmark. U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are tired of the spending disparity between the U.S. and the rest.
“The lack of sufficient progress is politically and economically unsustainable,” a bipartisan group of senators wrote in a recent letter to Biden. “American citizens rightly question why our government disproportionately bears the burden — decade after decade — for Europe’s defense.”
Will the NATO summit deliver? Even if it does, expect disagreements to linger under the surface.
Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist for the baiduhai.
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