The final rejection of Vladimir Putin's imperialist designs
National Post, 14 July 2023
NATO came to Russia’s doorstep to make a point
KRAKOW, Poland — The NATO summit was a strategic success, committing to Ukraine the resources it needs without escalation into a direct NATO-Russia war. Ukraine understandably desired to be given a clear timeline for joining NATO while still at war with Russia, but U.S. President Joe Biden, who has managed the war admirably with only a few missteps, was right to resist.
Ukraine was given security assurances from the G7, a kind of “observer” membership through a NATO-Kyiv council, and an accelerated path to membership after the end of the war. While President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is obliged to argue for more, what Ukraine got was significant. And after this war is concluded, the architecture of post-Soviet Europe will finally be set.
That the NATO summit took place in Vilnius, Lithuania, was already a signal of that. NATO came to Russia’s doorstep to make a point. The point was that NATO could meet there, and Russia could not invade there, precisely because NATO got there first.
Watching the summit unfold from Krakow is an exercise in historic astonishment. After the Great War, Poland regained independence and from 1921-1930, Vilnius (Wilno) was part of Poland, a union with some roots in the grand Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth of the 17th century. After the Second World War, Poland was shifted westward on the map of Europe, Vilnius became the capital of Lithuania, and all three Baltic countries were absorbed into the Soviet Union. In 1990, with the Soviet empire entering the last phases of its evil existence, Lithuania was the first of the Soviet republics to declare its independence.
In January 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev authorized the Soviet armed forces to forcibly suppress pro-independence and democracy protests in Vilnius, killing about a dozen people. Moscow’s imperial death rattle in Vilnius is known there as Bloody Sunday.
Holding the NATO summit in Vilnius for the first time was thus a demonstration that any resuscitation of Moscow’s imperial ambitions will be resisted.
Since the invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014, the concurrent and enduring occupation of eastern Ukraine and then the full-scale invasion of 2022, there have been voices that have wanted to blame NATO for Vladimir Putin’s aggression. NATO was “barking at Russia’s door” in the phrasing, for example, of Pope Francis.
In Ukraine, only barking may have been the problem. Certainly when Putin decided to reconstitute Russia’s empire, it would have been easier to take any or all of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The strategic justification for Lithuania would have been easiest to make, providing contiguous access to Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave on Lithuania’s western border.
Yet NATO got there first, admitting the Baltic states in 2004, after expanding in 1999 to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. The Baltic States knew that without NATO membership they were more vulnerable to Russian aggression, not less. Ukraine learned that lesson in the most painful way possible.
It was not feasible at the time, but if somehow Ukraine had been admitted to NATO in 1999 or 2004, Putin’s 2014 and 2022 invasions would not have happened. That was what the summit setting in Vilnius was intended to convey.
That is why Sweden and Finland, another Russian border state, are now part of NATO after decades of demurring to Russian displeasure. Better a frosty Russia at the border while inside NATO than Russians inside a Finland that is outside of NATO.
After the liberation of the external Soviet empire in 1989, the reunification of Germany in 1990 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself in 1991, Europe faced a cultural question. Would the future be built on a vision of pan-European unity, the two notable institutional expressions of which were the European Union and NATO?
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