In today’s article about last week’s NATO summit at Vilnius, Boris Johnson demands that “the West end the mealy-mouthed procrastination and get Ukraine into NATO as fast as we can.”
Before I say anything else, I must mention that right from the start of the war Mr Johnson has been the most consistent and vociferous supporter of the Ukrainian cause among Western politicians.
When he was prime minister, he did all he could to supply up-to-date weapons to the Ukraine, and his personal contribution to denying Putin the blitzkrieg he sought was significant. Hence every Ukrainian and Russian supporter of the Ukraine’s cause I know (and I know quite a few) treats Mr Johnson as a demigod; President Zelensky has said many complimentary things about him and meant them.
However, Mr Johnson is a Western politician, meaning that he knows all the tricks of the trade and deploys them with the same élan as those mealy-mouthed procrastinators he so justly deplores.
Here I’d like to draw your attention to his phrase “as fast as we can”. One could drive the entire Ukrainian armour through a loophole this size. “As fast as we can” means whenever we feel like it, which may be next year, 10 years from now or in the next millennium.
Sensing that, later in the article Mr Johnson tries to narrow the loophole, but without quite succeeding:
“All the Alliance needed to do was to set out a timetable – not for instant membership; that makes no sense as long as the war is live… All we needed was words to the effect that accession could begin as soon as the war was over, on the understanding that this could be as early as next year.”
Instant membership would mean NATO’s instant declaration of war on Russia – Article 5 of the NATO Charter is unequivocal in this respect. Yet every poll in every major NATO country I’ve seen shows that the public overwhelmingly opposes entering the war as combatants.
Many opponents of the Ukraine’s NATO membership use this information as an argument clincher. It isn’t, not by itself.
None of the NATO countries is run by direct, plebiscitarian democracy. All of them practise representative democracy, wherein people elect their representatives and trust them to govern in what they see as the country’s best interests.
In theory, if a politician’s intellect and conscience demand a certain course of action, he ought to pursue it even against recent poll numbers. That’s how it would be if our elected representatives were statesmen, rather than spivocratic vote canvassers. But they aren’t and it isn’t.
To the best of my knowledge, no Western politician this side of the Baltics is in favour of sending troops to the Ukraine, which is what “instant membership” would mean. Neither, incidentally, is Mr Johnson, for all his principled attachment to the Ukraine’s cause (“that makes no sense as long as the war is live…”).
If not now, when? Mr Johnson says exactly the same thing all those mealy-mouthed procrastinators said at Vilnius: “accession could begin as soon as the war was over, on the understanding that this could be as early as next year.” Or it could be in 10 years – all sorts of thing could be.
President Biden expressed himself more forthrightly: when a reporter asked him how long after the Ukraine’s victory that accession would begin, Mr Biden gave what seemed to be a precise reply: “Within 20 minutes”.
I see several problems with such seeming precision. The first problem is to define what exactly would constitute the Ukraine’s victory. Messrs Zelensky and Zaluzhny entering the Kremlin on the armour of a Ukrainian Leopard? That’s clearly not on the cards.
Driving the Russian forces back to the 1991 borders? That, as Mr Johnson correctly states, would be problematic without the Ukraine gaining air supremacy, or at least superiority. That means arming the country with Western warplanes, such as the F-16 multirole fighter.
Even so, Russia has the wherewithal to prolong the war indefinitely – and Putin will have a strong incentive to do just that. If he knows that the moment the Ukraine declares victory (however it’s defined) he’ll have NATO troops on his doorstep, he has a vested interest in keeping the war going – or even in using nuclear weapons.
Hence, in common with those mealy-mouthed procrastinators, Mr Johnson says all the right things that upon close examination turn out to mean next to nothing, if that much. But he did say a few things that were most commendable.
First, he wrote that: “NATO countries know – and constantly say – that the Ukrainians are fighting for all of us.” When it comes to politicians, ‘know’ and ‘constantly say’ are nearer to being opposite than the same, but that’s a minor quibble.
Yet Mr Johnson is right: the Ukraine’s cause is ours as well, and her defeat would also be ours. It would be a triumph of evil on the march, and the march might gain unstoppable momentum. At stake is whatever little is left of decency and legality in the conduct of foreign policy, two commodities protecting the world from calamitous holocaust.
I think that the best course of action would be for NATO to concentrate on giving the Ukraine the tools to do the job, while putting off all talk about NATO membership. It’s not just ships that can be sunk by loose lips, and the best way to stop Putin is to enable the Ukraine to do so. Tittle-tattle about membership, instant or otherwise, is counterproductive.
Mr Johnson is also right when saying that Putin’s aggression was completely unprovoked. Here he is at odds with his Mail colleague who repeats, in a monotonous and, one hopes, disinterested fashion, Putin’s lies about his having been provoked by NATO expansion.
But I agree with that Putin puppet: NATO was at fault, although not in the way Putin and his Western admirers claim. Mr Johnson puts it in a nutshell:
“When will we learn the lesson of the past 20 years of handling Putin? It is our very ambiguity, our vacillation, our sucking-and-blowing-at-once, which has prompted him to invade. As long as he thinks there is a chance that he can wrest Ukraine back into the orbit of Moscow – as long as he thinks he can recreate the Soviet Union – he will try.”
So he will, and I couldn’t agree more. And yes, it’s the West’s wishy-washy vacillation that allowed that monster to grow to maturity and emboldened him to pounce.
Yet that wasn’t the first time and it won’t be the last. History does teach valuable lessons, but we insist on playing truant.
While dissecting Mr. Johnson’s words you may find them nearly meaningless (and I might tend to agree), at least he is speaking up and saying things most politicians will not. That puts pressure on both media and politicians to respond. When their responses are filled with their all too common idiocy and repetition, the public may begin to spot holes. Small hope, but hope nonetheless.