With NATO's 75th anniversary summit concluded, it's worth taking stock of Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg's comment about an "irreversible path to NATO membership" for Ukraine. It was a bad idea two years ago for Ukraine to seek the NATO mantle for its own sake, which played directly into the Russian narrative of an external threat—a narrative critical for Russian President Vladimir Putin to maintain internal stability and his grip on power—and it's a bad idea now. Ukraine should stay out of NATO, not only because Ukraine is better off independent but also because a formal alliance will only delay Russian disintegration.
To be clear, this is not a "don't poke the Bear" argument commonly made from dismayingly pro-Kremlin quarters. Rather, the argument here is that the fastest way to see an end to the bloody Ukraine-Russia war is by absolutely crippling the Russian Bear. And the best way to do that—counterintuitive as it may seem—is not through expanding Western alliances but by supporting the significant internal discord within the Russian Federation itself. Give the Kremlin the fewest possible reasons to project a common foe and instead lend a hand to the common people of its fraying association of independence-hungry republics.
