A preview of the NATO summit
Leaders of NATO countries are preparing for two days of meetings starting tomorrow in Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital.
Ukraine will be a major issue. The war there has raged for more than 500 days, and the counteroffensive is moving slowly. Ukraine wants to join NATO, but President Biden said yesterday that it was “premature” to begin the process to admit the country in the middle of a war.
I spoke to Steven Erlanger, our chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe, about what we can expect from the meeting.
Amelia: What are the NATO allies hoping to achieve with this summit?
Steven: The main task of this NATO summit is to show the alliance’s unity and solidarity in support of Ukraine.
It will be full of the most gaseous rhetoric you can imagine. But it is also important because Russia believes, we think, that it can out-wait Western support for Ukraine. And truly the main task of this summit is to say to President Vladimir Putin: “That’s not going to happen.”
What will you be watching at the summit?
To me, the most important thing that will happen is political signing off on new NATO military plans to deter Russia and defend NATO territory.
After Russia annexed Crimea, in 2014, NATO set up these four enhanced forward battalions in Poland and the three Baltic countries with 1,200 or so multinational troops in each country, like a tripwire. After February 2022, when the war started, NATO then put in more along the rest of the eastern flank. In total, it’s only about 10,300 troops.
So part of the plan is to add 4,000 to 5,000 troops quickly to these countries, in case of an emergency.
There’s an open question of whether NATO will extend membership to Ukraine. Do you expect movement on that?
NATO will not offer Ukraine membership at Vilnius. That’s not going to happen.
One possible compromise, which clearly isn’t enough for the Ukrainians, is that Ukraine would be promised that like Sweden and Finland, it could get into NATO without going through a membership action plan. But that doesn’t give Ukraine a time frame for when it would become a member.
We expect Ukraine to be upgraded in its relationship with NATO in the form of a council. A council would give Ukrainians a chance to sit in on every NATO meeting that matters. That’s very important. Ukraine will be able to sit in nearly all NATO meetings and in the council will have equal status with other members.
How do you think NATO will address China?
I don’t think the communiqué will be much different from the Madrid declaration last year, when NATO labeled China a “challenge” for the first time.
In NATO terms, that’s really about trying to ensure that the alliance is aware of the threats to the trans-Atlantic relationships. That includes Arctic routes, Chinese industrial espionage and not being too dependent on China for key materials.
But NATO is not about to establish itself in Asia. The French have stated again pretty strongly that NATO is a…
2023-07-09 15:07:58
Article from www.nytimes.com
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