Daniel Treisman
U.S. President Joe Biden has said for years that Ukraine will one day become a member of NATO. In fact, he was asserting this before most Ukrainians had any desire to join the alliance. “If you choose to be part of Euro-Atlantic integration, which I believe you have, then we strongly support that,” he announced on a trip to Kyiv as vice president in 2009. In Ukraine that year, only 28 percent favored NATO membership for their country, while 51 percent opposed it. Biden has remained committed to the idea in principle. “Ukraine’s future lies at NATO,” he insisted again in Vilnius, Lithuania, last summer.
At the same time, he has made extremely clear that the United States is not prepared to go to war with Russia to defend Kyiv. Any direct involvement of U.S. troops in the current conflict could mean “World War III,” he said in 2022, and “we will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.” Biden raced to pull all U.S. troops out of the country ahead of Russia’s invasion in February 2022. And, to avoid provoking Moscow, he has delayed supplying Kyiv with advanced weapons and has restricted their use in ways that critics say have hamstrung Ukraine’s defense.
There’s no direct inconsistency in these positions. After all, Ukraine is not a NATO member yet. And Biden has said the country will not become one until after the current war is over. It is eminently reasonable for a U.S. president to worry about nuclear escalation. And at times the White House seems to have received alarming intelligence about Russian preparations to use tactical nuclear weapons.
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