The moral failure of considering Ukraine for NATO

Vladimir Putin and President Biden.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock)

Russian President Vladimir Putin's brutal invasion of Ukraine is fundamentally unjust, as wars of choice invariably are. The civilized world is correct to condemn the subjugation of a weaker country by a stronger one.

But morality in foreign policy isn't confined to alignment with the proper values and abstract principles, however important those are. Putin has no right to be doing what he is doing and bears the ultimate responsibility for the ensuing bloodshed. Yet he does have the power to do it. Policies designed to help Ukraine must be judged not only by their intentions, but by their real-world consequences.

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What good does it do Ukraine for the U.S. and its allies to defend the principle that it can join an alliance, yet not confer upon it any of the benefits of this alliance, at the risk of a Russian invasion? This principle may be right and Russia wrong in a cosmic sense. But what moral good is achieved if Ukraine's exposure to a bloody war is heightened instead? Even if Putin has expansionist designs beyond simply keeping the West away from his doorstep, which he clearly does, NATO expansion or half-hearted talk thereof does not automatically become a good idea if there's no real willingness to defend Ukraine from a Kremlin attack.

Foreign policy can be informed by what is good and true, but it can never be truly moral if it cannot realistically accomplish its objectives. Predictably setting people up for death and destruction can never be moral, even with the right intentions in contrast with Putin's murderous ones.

It's a lesson a superpower with 20 years of wars that either failed or yielded ambiguous outcomes should learn. Sadly, Ukraine may learn it instead.

W. James Antle III

W. James Antle III is the politics editor of the Washington Examiner, the former editor of The American Conservative, and author of Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped?.