Eurasia Press & News
Why the German Model Won’t Solve a Problem of the Alliance’s Own Making
As NATO states meet in Vilnius this week, they are confronting, yet again, the accession question: that is, whether to turn rhetoric about Ukrainian membership into reality. Ever since the coalition’s 2008 summit in Bucharest, where the allies issued a declaration stating that both Georgia and Ukraine “will become members of NATO” at some undefined point in the future, member states have debated how (or whether) to implement that pledge. Yet despite the passage of 15 years, neither Georgia nor Ukraine has joined the alliance.
Kyiv has made it clear that after years of fighting Russia, it is tired of waiting. The government wants to see a clear path to membership laid out at the Vilnius summit. Many allies are inclined to accede to Ukraine’s wishes—despite the war raging within its borders. To fulfill Ukraine’s hopes, a growing list of former policymakers are floating a proposal for partial membership. Stephen Biegun, a former deputy secretary of state; Ian Brzezinski, a former deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Defense; Evelyn Farkas, the executive director of the McCain Institute; Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former secretary-general of NATO; Randy Scheunemann, strategic counselor at the Halifax International Security Forum; and Alexander Vershbow, a former NATO deputy secretary-general, have all recently argued that the current de facto Russian control over many parts of Ukraine should not block Kyiv’s swift accession. Rather, they say, the alliance should treat Ukraine as it did the divided Cold War–era Germany, where only the western portion of the country was able to join NATO until the two Germanys reunified in 1990.
This model has since gained broader traction. On July 8, The Washington Post published an op-ed calling for NATO to use the German model with Ukraine at Vilnius—echoing The New York Times, which had previously run a piece entitled, “If a Divided Germany Could Enter NATO, Why Not Ukraine?” The idea also arose at a public event in late June featuring Ihor Zhovkva, the deputy head of the office of the president of Ukraine, and Eric Ciaramella, the former National Security Council director for Ukraine. And in a podcast hosted by the Center for a New American Security, Vershbow said that Washington should immediately begin “engaging allies” on this model, specifically on “providing a security guarantee for territories that are fully under Ukrainian government control—right now, even before there’s a cease-fire or armistice.” Failing to do so, he said, would give Moscow the ability to “hold the situation hostage indefinitely.”
To many of its proponents, adopting such a proposal might also feel like a form of atonement—a way to make up for 15 years without accession and the damaging consequences. By pledging to give Georgia and Ukraine membership but not following through, NATO left those states in the worst of all possible worlds. The Bucharest declaration gave both Georgia and Ukraine a misleading sense of how much NATO support they would have in dealing with Russia, leading them to make decisions based on assumptions later proven false. And since it is well known that NATO abhors adding members engaged in conflicts, both became targets of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who realized that giving vent to his desire to restore Moscow’s control over former Soviet areas would have the added benefit of impeding accession. After Mikheil Saakashvili, then Georgia’s president, sent troops in August 2008 into the breakaway region of South Ossetia, recognized internationally as part of Georgia, Putin invaded the country in response. Russian troops remain in Georgia to this day. And when a pro-Western popular revolt toppled Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, the Kremlin responded by seizing Crimea and attacking Ukraine’s eastern regions. Putin subsequently elevated the Ukrainian conflict to a major land war in February 2022.
Supporters of using the German model have admirable motives and are rightly outraged at what has happened to Georgia and Ukraine. But trying to use Cold War Germany as a precedent for Ukraine risks repeating the damaging mistake of 2008: misleading Kyiv about the difficulty of its path to accession. The German precedent would make it harder, not easier, for Ukraine to reestablish its territorial integrity; weaken NATO’s deterrent power; and undermine the alliance’s unity at a time when Ukraine needs it most. It could, in other words, create yet another worst-of-all-worlds scenario—something neither Ukrainians nor the alliance can afford during a major land war.
HIGH RISK, LOW REWARD
Advocates of the German model for Ukraine misread history. Saying that a divided Germany entered NATO, as The New York Times headline does, is inaccurate. What became a member of NATO was a rump state called the Federal Republic of Germany, also known as West Germany, which emerged from the combination of the British, French, and U.S. post–World War II occupation zones. In a copycat move, the Soviet Union recast its occupation zone into a state called the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, which Moscow then made part of its involuntary alliance, the Warsaw Pact.
Advocates of applying this history to Ukraine are, consciously or unconsciously, proposing accession in mutually exclusive ways. Either they seek to draw a new NATO border within Ukraine, dividing Russian-held from Ukrainian-held territory, or they argue that its membership should include no fixed border at all, allowing Ukraine’s battlefield performance to determine which territory falls under NATO’s protection right away and which territories join later. Each scenario might seem appealing to some advocates, but neither would end well for anyone outside the Kremlin.
Consider, for example, the first option. Expressed in practical terms, it would mean that NATO’s security guarantee—known as Article 5, after the provision in the alliance’s 1949 Washington Treaty specifying that NATO states should treat an attack on one member as an attack on all—would extend only to a specific dividing line, presumably close to the current front. But this line would consign eastern Ukrainians to the fate of East Germans—extended subordination to Moscow—and create a de facto West Ukraine and East Ukraine. Worse, this outcome would roughly parallel one proposed by the former Russian president Dmitri Medvedev, who has called for Ukraine to be partitioned.
Advocates of using the German model for Ukraine misread history.
Nor would Kyiv have many options for aiding its fellow citizens on the wrong side of that line once established. To gain Article 5 protection in 1955, West Germany had to forswear all “recourse to force” to achieve national reunification or even any “modification of the present boundaries.” Kyiv would face similar pressure to abjure all military attempts to retake lost territory because if it did so, it would put not just itself but all allies at risk.
In short, this model would compel Ukraine to wrestle with a bitter question during a brutal war: Which is more important, NATO membership or holding out hope for retaking territory? Given the tragic nature and long-lasting consequences of this choice—the division of Germany lasted over 40 years—it is not one that Ukrainians or outsiders should be eager to make.
There’s another way supporters of this view are misreading history. In the aftermath of World War II, European neighbors scarred by memories of Nazis were understandably hesitant to let Germans rearm. But the combination of Soviet strength and a divided Germany’s weakness at the frontline trumped bitter memories. European neighbors could live with a rump portion of divided Germany rearming as a NATO ally in the face of the Soviet threat. Put bluntly, German division enabled West German accession to NATO. Today the opposite would unfold: Ukrainian accession to NATO would enable Ukrainian division.
Now consider the second option: avoiding Ukrainian division by, as Brzezinski and Vershbow have suggested, providing a fluid security guarantee for territories that are under Ukrainian control and, as Rasmussen said, adding others later. In theory, this option need not partition Ukraine, since the Article 5 coverage area could and would evolve over time.
Ukrainian membership is being held up by countries with diverse motivations.
But this option would undermine Article 5’s credibility. Security guarantees are, for better or worse, inseparable from fixed borders. West Germany could become part of NATO because its eastern border represented a clear line of division—one emerging from occupation zones that predated NATO’s creation. By contrast, Ukraine’s line of control is constantly in motion. It would be difficult to ascertain what land Article 5 would cover at any given minute or hour, let alone on any given day. Article 5 would become a matter of debate rather than a deterrent—and that debate could become a violent and risky one in the face of Russian aggression.
To reassure allies worried about such risks, Scheunemann and Farkas have called attention to Article 5’s flexibility. They point out, rightly, that the article does not “mandate a specific response by member states,” such as a military attack. As a result, if Ukraine became a fellow member state, allies would not be dragged into participating in a full-scale war, because they could respond to Russian aggression in what Scheunemann and Farkas term “a minimal manner.” But other allies would then be left to wonder whether their Article 5 guarantee was similarly minimal. In a worst-case scenario, Putin might finally feel emboldened enough to attack Estonia or Poland, since Article 5 would apparently no longer guarantee a NATO military response.
Under all these scenarios, the consequences for the alliance would be enormous. At the core of NATO is the credible threat of a strong, united response to aggression. Calling Article 5 into question—either in terms of its jurisdiction or the severity of its implementation—would fundamentally call NATO as an institution into question. That would help neither its current member states nor Ukraine.
PAST AND PRESENT
The debate over whether to add Ukraine to the alliance now by following the German model ignores another basic fact. NATO operates by consensus. Every existing member needs to approve the admission of a new country. The sad reality is that there is no consensus for taking immediate, practical steps toward Ukrainian accession at Vilnius (to say nothing of Georgian accession).
It is hard to see that changing, at least in the near term: unlike Sweden’s candidacy, Ukrainian membership is being held up by countries with a diverse set of motivations. They include Hungary, which has closer ties to Russia than most other NATO members. But they also include Germany and the United States. These countries worry about the difficulty of implementing Ukrainian membership under current conditions and are understandably hesitant to become material parties to the war by taking that step.
This reluctance is another reason that forcing an answer to the accession question at Vilnius would come at a cost. The alliance has yet to resolve the much less controversial question of Swedish membership. Adding a new fight over Ukrainian accession “right now,” in Vershbow’s words, would exacerbate tensions between allies even more. As Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan rightly argued in Foreign Affairs in April, “Neither Ukraine nor its NATO supporters can take Western unity for granted.”
NATO must avoid making vague pledges without substance.
In an ideal world, NATO would not need to risk anything to admit Ukraine because the country would already be a member. Declassified American evidence shows speculation about that prospect occurring at least as early as the fall of 1994. On October 13 of that year, Anthony Lake, the national security adviser, wrote to his boss, President Bill Clinton, about the “possibility of NATO membership for Ukraine and Baltic States.” Clinton drew two vertical lines next to a recommendation to “keep the membership door open for Ukraine, Baltic States, Romania and Bulgaria (countering Allied inclinations to ‘tilt’ in favor of the Visegrad countries).” In Lake’s view, Washington should not simply “consign them to a gray zone or a Russian sphere of influence.” Clinton drew a large check mark on the cover page of Lake’s recommendations and wrote, “Looks good.”
Although that speculation did not yield membership for Ukraine, in contrast to the Baltics, in an ideal future Kyiv will become a NATO member. For that to happen without misleading Ukraine again, it is essential for the alliance to avoid making vague pledges without substance. NATO should avoid phrases such as “after the war” or “after the fighting” and follow the one component of the Cold War German model that is applicable. The alliance should confirm that Ukraine can and will accede when it once again has what West Germany had: fixed borders. But in today’s tragic world, adding Ukraine to NATO while its boundaries are sites of active conflict with Russia would come at a high cost.
Considering this cost, rather than conduct a divisive debate over membership now, the alliance should instead focus in Vilnius on determining what Ukrainians need to succeed in their counteroffensive—and then getting that support to them swiftly. Put simply, NATO should give Kyiv what it needs to accomplish, as soon as possible, what truly matters: the restoration of fixed borders. They are, after all, the answer to the accession question. Once Ukrainians have those, the alliance should hasten to welcome the country as an ally. Like West Germany, Ukraine can then serve as a clear and strong frontline against Moscow.
