NATO’s Outgoing Leader Stoltenberg Reflects on Missed Opportunities in Ukraine (Part One)

Executive Summary:

• NATO’s outgoing Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, recently offered his first retrospective assessment of the Alliance’s Ukraine policy. Retrospective assessments recognize that the United States and its major allies failed to deter Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
• While member states may have provided some degree of lethal military aid, NATO as an alliance only provided non-lethal military equipment to Ukraine both before and after Russia’s 2022 invasion. The recent Washington summit has signaled that NATO would start to provide some lethal assistance, but these efforts remain mainly in the hands of member states via the Ramstein Group.
• NATO member states conducted troop training and exercises in Ukraine prior to Russia’s 2022 invasion but have not done so since then. Instead, they train Ukrainian troops on NATO territory pending an elusive “end to the war.”  

Outgoing North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is reexamining NATO’s role in Russia’s war on Ukraine as part of two valedictory statements in a recent interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (Faz.net, September 14) and a speech hosted by the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Brussels (NATO, September 19). He queried: Could NATO have done more to prevent Russia from invading Ukraine for the second time in 2022? And could NATO do more than it has thus far done to bring this war to an end favorable to Ukraine? Stoltenberg poses these questions with due political and diplomatic caution, yet at a level of candor that had not been available to the Secretary General during his decade-long service in that post. Admittedly, this pair of questions stop far short of covering the full picture of NATO’s policies toward Ukraine in recent years—and decades. Genuine introspection could help trace and explain the long track record of Western strategic failure in Ukraine.

It must, however, be borne in mind that criticism, grumbling, and perhaps exhortation should not be addressed to NATO “as NATO” (collectively and institutionally). NATO is an inter-governmental organization, not a supranational one. Member states hold full sovereign authority over their national security and defense policies as well as the corresponding budgets. The Alliance makes policy decisions by unanimous consent, which often translates to the lowest common denominator. The Secretary General is, essentially, a civil servant whose public statements are bound to express the Alliance’s political consensus on specific policy issues. The Alliance’s military and civilian staffs execute policies made by national political leaders in conclave. 

Thus, NATO policies are what national political leaders make them to be: in practice, the leaders of the most influential member states. NATO “as NATO” cannot be more strategically farsighted or more effective than the US president, German chancellor, or the French president—not to mention the Turkish president and/or Hungarian prime minister, from time to time—allow the Alliance to be.

It is against this backdrop that Stoltenberg’s outgoing questions must be pondered. 

Arming Ukraine to Defend Itself

In retrospect, Stoltenberg is asking aloud why “NATO allies and NATO itself did not do more to strengthen Ukraine earlier [than the 2022 Russian invasion]. … Now we are arming Ukraine for war, but we could have armed Ukraine earlier to prevent war.” As an example, “the United States did not want to supply anti-tank missiles to Ukraine for a long time, so as not to provoke Russia.” Allies generally “were unwilling to supply the arms that Ukraine was asking for, as this would have escalated tensions with Russia.” Stoltenberg concludes that this way of thinking turned out to be wrong. “Now, our support is massive. And NATO is coordinating the support through our new command in Germany.”

A deeper look would, however, acknowledge that NATO—a military organization, after all—confined itself to non-lethal assistance for Ukraine over many years, whether in peacetime or wartime, as did most member states. [1] Only at this year’s Washington summit did NATO collectively decide to provide some lethal assistance, but it is far from clear what and how (see EDM, July 18). The new command in Wiesbaden, Germany is planned to be composed of logistical staff, apparently facilitating the transportation of equipment, including lethal supplies, provided to Ukraine by member states in their national capacities. Those supplies continue to be coordinated by the Ramstein Group, chaired and convened by the Pentagon. They are therefore supplied from outside of NATO’s structure, though the Wiesbaden staff will now mean that the Alliance is connected to this effort in some way.

Troop Training in Ukraine

As Stoltenberg correctly points out, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada had trained Ukrainian troops at the Yavoriv base (Lviv province), “something that we as NATO did not do. Our training and equipping of Ukraine was rather limited. We could have done much more.” Similarly, “It was wrong to think that Russia would be provoked [if NATO had provided such training].”

The training program in question was a coalition-of-the-willing type of arrangement by three member states acting in their respective national capacities. This allowed the program to proceed without a NATO mandate, which would have required unanimous political approval. Similarly, the traditional annual Sea Breeze naval exercise in the Black Sea—with many NATO members and partner states participating annually—could not become a NATO exercise but was instead conducted as a US-Ukraine-hosted exercise. At present, NATO member states are training Ukrainian troops on their own territory but are ruling out training and exercises in Ukraine until “after the war ends.” A “post-war” end state seems, however, highly elusive in the age of protracted hybrid conflict, where Russia has erased the distinctions between peace and war.

Failed Deterrence

Stoltenberg implicitly acknowledges that the United States and its major Western allies failed to deter Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022. He stated, “Had Ukraine been stronger militarily, the threshold to Russia’s aggression would then have been higher, and the costs to Russia also higher. Whether these thresholds would have been high enough, one can hardly say.” He does not, however, mention resorting to any specific form of deterrence vis-à-vis Russia. Instead, “We publicized the intelligence information on Russia’s military buildup, partly to counter Russian propaganda and partly in the hope of diplomatically persuading Russia to abandon its plans. … We have done everything to bring Russia from the invasion path onto a diplomatic path.”

Both of those points echo the Joe Biden administration’s policy from late 2021 to early 2022. Publicizing alarming information about Russia’s imminent invasion (and threatening economic sanctions) could not have deterred the invasion in the absence of timely military countermeasures. Additionally, offering Russia a “diplomatic solution” clearly implied—in the White House’s messaging at that stage—political concessions in return for rolling back the invasion plans.

NATO’s outgoing leader describes the policy from 2022 to date as “supporting Ukraine’s defense against Russia while avoiding a war between NATO and Russia.” However, the United States and the Alliance collectively have not managed to bring these two policy tracks into balance. The net result has given Russia the upper hand over Ukraine thus far.

[1] NATO as an organization has only provided non-lethal assistance for Ukraine over many years, whether in peacetime or wartime, while individual member states have been providing lethal military aid throughout the war.