Meloni’s NATO-Lite Ukraine Plan Is Worth Trying

There is both desperation and brilliance to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s proposal to provide Ukraine with postwar security by offering to cover it with the umbrella of NATO’s Article 5 Security guarantee, but not membership itself.

It’s loopy, because it would commit the US and Europe to precisely the risk of direct military engagement with Russia, a nuclear superpower, that they’ve been trying to avoid ever since President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Georgia in 2008. It seems as unlikely that Donald Trump would agree to such a move as his predecessor, Joe Biden, who meticulously (and for Ukraine disastrously) drip fed the provision of arms to avoid an assessed nuclear escalation risk.

But Meloni’s idea also has a kind of genius. She has thought this through at least as clearly as France and the UK, with their troubled proposal to put troops on the ground as behind-the-lines peacekeepers. That’s a hard to understand concept and faces a plethora of challenges, from a dearth of the airlift, troops and artillery needed sustain a war-fighting force big enough to deter Russia, to an over-dependence on the US for critical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets, or ISR. And that's if the Kremlin agreed and the US provided the necessary backstop should Russia decide to attack the peacekeepers. Neither seems likely.

The cleverness of Meloni’s proposal lies in the way it would test to destruction Putin’s rationale for his invasion of a sovereign neighbor, one that so many in the West – including Trump – have swallowed whole. This is that Putin acted to counter a threat posed to Russia by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s eastward expansion.

There’s no question that Putin attacked Ukraine in significant part in response to NATO’s open-door policy — the alliance hadn’t actually done any expanding toward Russia since 2004; subsequent additions were to the south, in the Western Balkans, while Finland and Sweden joined only after the Ukraine invasion. The important question – the one that Meloni’s proposal would test – is the nature of the threat Putin saw.

Was it that Putin felt NATO would be able to use newly acquired bases to attack Russia? This is what Kremlin officials routinely say or imply, and NATO’s critics assume. Or was it because even the promise of NATO, and, equally, European Union membership threatened his plans to force those neighbors into a renewed sphere of control? This was the belief, born of centuries of experience with Russian domination and expansion, of the countries that began pounding on NATO’s door for admission as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed.

The evidence all points to the latter, as I’ve argued in detail here. Indeed, when Putin annexed Crimea in 2014, Ukraine’s constitution excluded joining any military alliance and NATO had stood by the terms of the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act. This committed the alliance to not station nuclear weapons, bases or troops on the territories of its new members. It wasn’t until 2017 that the first NATO soldiers moved to Poland, for example.