Did Biden Blow the Best Chance of Preventing War in Ukraine?
The Trump administration caused a shock on both sides of the Atlantic last week by claiming that North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) membership for Ukraine is not “a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement” for the war there. European countries said that they were still committed to having Ukraine in NATO. European Union chief diplomat Kaja Kallas said today that there should be no agreement “about Ukraine without Ukraine.”
Former U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton even claimed that President Donald Trump has “effectively surrendered” to Russian demands. If so, it’s a surrender that former President Joe Biden reportedly made before the war even began. While publicly insisting on NATO’s “open door” policy, and refusing to negotiate with Russia on the issue, Biden privately told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2021 that Ukraine wouldn’t join the alliance, Zelenskyy revealed on Friday.
“My first phone call with President Biden and my first question, will we be in NATO? He said, no, no. And I said, we will see,” Zelenskyy said at the Munich Security Conference in Germany last week, referring to his first conversation with Biden in April 2021. “But to be very honest, United States, they never saw us in NATO. They just spoke about it. But they really didn’t want us in NATO. It’s true.”
Biden himself told CNN in 2023 that there is no “unanimity in NATO about whether or not to bring Ukraine into the NATO family now, at this moment, in the middle of a war.” (German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said something similar last year.) But Biden also said in the CNN interview that there must be “a rational path for Ukraine to be able to qualify to be able to get into NATO” and that he refused Russian demands to close the open door policy on principle.
By Zelenskyy’s account, the door was never really open, and Biden was sticking to NATO’s right to do something it never really intended to do. That approach may have been the worst of both worlds. The Russian government was convinced that NATO intended to use Ukraine as a weapon against Russia, while Ukrainians themselves were left in limbo. In fact, the invitation for Ukraine to join the alliance—just not now—may have given Russia an incentive to attack as quickly as it could and drag the war out as long as possible.
“We hear that Ukraine is not ready to join NATO; we know that. At the same time, they say it’s not going to join tomorrow,” Russian President Vladimir Putin told reporters a week before the invasion. “But by the time they get ready for it, it may be too late for us. So
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