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NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg at the 2023 NATO summit on July 11, 2023, in Vilnius, Lithuania. (Petras Malukas/AFP via Getty Images)
As the Russian military continued to unravel this week, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) met in Vilnius, Lithuania, to discuss the next steps for Ukraine—and potential new members of the alliance.
Below are three key takeaways from Hudson’s expert analysis of the summit.
Key Insights
1. The Vilnius summit sent mixed signals.
On the positive side, Ukraine has managed to secure a faster track to full alliance membership by skipping the Membership Action Plan (MAP), a critical diplomatic threshold for becoming a NATO nation. Likewise, the establishment of a NATO-Ukraine Council has been marked as a promising step.
On the negative side, the summit signaled that as long as the war continues, there will likely be no practical membership agenda for Kyiv. The communique also obliquely highlighted the challenges posed by Wagner’s likely move to Belarus, as well as the growing integration between the Belarusian and Russian armed forces.
2. NATO’s defense spending remains pathetic.
In 2022, the 2-percent benchmark was met by only seven of the group’s then-30 members. This is one country fewer than in 2021. There is no easy answer to the defense-spending crisis, but one new approach the alliance should take is getting the finance ministers, or their equivalent, involved. In most parliamentary democracies in Europe, the purse strings are held by the finance minister. While getting finance ministers involved in the NATO process is not a silver bullet to increasing defense spending, it can only help.
3. Non-NATO countries have realized they are safer as a part of the alliance.
The Russia-Ukraine War was a wake-up call for many Swedish politicians and also for the Swedish people. They realize that they are better off inside NATO as a security alliance than they are outside. And Sweden has a very capable military and a good defense industry. Bringing it into the alliance makes sense from a US point of view. The Nordic country will be a net contributor to NATO’s security.
Quotes may be edited for clarity and length.
Go Deeper
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If Ukraine fends off Russia now, it is barely a question whether Kyiv would come to the defense of Poland, Lithuania, or Finland in the future. In the Wall Street Journal, Hudson Senior Fellow Tod Lindberg writes that Ukraine is effectively a member of NATO—it just needs to complete the paperwork. |
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Joe Biden Is No Longer Discussing Victory for Ukraine Though the summit offered many encouraging signals for Ukraine, the fact that Joe Biden has ceased to discuss victory is not one of them. On Fox News, Hudson Senior Fellow Rebeccah Heinrichs explained why the US and its allies should give Kyiv what it needs to end the war—and begin Ukraine’s official accession to NATO—sooner rather than later. |
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Indo-Pacific Security at the 2023 NATO Summit On this week’s China Insider, Hudson China Center Director Miles Yu and Program Manager Shane Leary discuss why, as the Moscow-Beijing axis grows closer, NATO should consider how to strengthen its ability to respond to threats around the world, not merely in the North Atlantic. |
