The 2022 NATO Madrid Summit

Kerry Buck

July 3, 2023

When I was Canada’s Ambassador to NATO from 2015 to 2018, in the lead-up to every annual meeting of leaders, my colleagues and I would joke that the summit was yet another “inflection point” for NATO. We would even gain points when a leader of an allied nation happened to use those words in a speech. Every NATO Summit was an inflection point, every meeting was historic. But the NATO Summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, July 11-12 actually is historic: the summit has to define NATO’s longer-term relationship with Ukraine against the backdrop of Ukraine’s new counteroffensive and Russia’s internal upheavals.

The summit also falls one year after NATO leaders adopted a new vision for NATO’s next decade and implementation milestones start to kick in. And it is one year prior to NATO’s 75th anniversary. At this NATO Summit, allied leaders will be taking decisions that will define the future of the organization, at a time when NATO matters more to Allies’ direct security interests than it has, arguably, for the past three decades.

There is a whole menu of decisions leaders are expected to take at the summit on a range of issues, from more defence production to replace the ammunition and weaponry being rapidly used in Ukraine to Sweden’s possible accession. But there are a number of decisions that will have the greatest impact on NATO over time.

It goes without saying that the Russian war against Ukraine is the most urgent priority for this Summit. I have said since the beginning of the Russian invasion that the outcome of the war will ultimately determine NATO’s future. There will be two issues on the table at Vilnius: Ukraine’s membership in NATO and what security guarantees might be offered in advance of that happening and, second, the level of enduring and consistent allied material support for Ukraine’s war and reconstruction efforts. The overriding goal, as it has been since the beginning of the war, is to send to Russia a strong, unified message of unshakeable, sustainable NATO support for Ukraine.

On Ukraine’s NATO membership aspirations, it is clear that while the war is ongoing, the summit will not move to grant Ukraine a full seat at the NATO table. To do so would call into question the Article 5 collective defence promise of NATO — that an attack against one Ally is an attack against all.  If NATO Allies are (wisely) unwilling to enter into a direct confrontation with Russia while Ukraine is not a member of NATO, there is no chance that they would hasten Ukraine’s membership and thereby create an impossible choice for themselves: either fight Russia directly to defend Ukraine or undercut the collective security guarantee on which the alliance rests. So full membership now is off the table.

But to be credible the Vilnius Summit will have to include commitments around eventual membership that go well beyond the promise made in 2008 at NATO’s Bucharest Summit that Ukraine (and Georgia) “will become NATO members” but without any ensuing concrete steps along a path to membership.  My guess is that the language on this issue will be negotiated up until the very last minute at the Vilnius Summit and will ultimately confirm what Secretary Stoltenberg said during his visit to Kyiv in April: “Ukraine’s rightful place is in the Euro-Atlantic family. It’s rightful place is in NATO.” But after the war.

Another file to watch closely is whether the summit decides to create a NATO-Ukraine Council. There has been a NATO-Ukraine Commission in place since 1997, but the decision to create a council is of a different magnitude. (“Potayto, potahto” you might say, but words and nuance matter in international diplomacy and Russia will clearly get the message).  After the end of the Cold War, when Russia started to move closer to NATO, facilitating NATO troop movements into NATO operations, even participating in NATO exercise to a limited degree, the NATO-Russia Council was created.

At the time, in 2002, the structure and title were chosen expressly to signal that it was meant to be a council of equals making decisions together, in contradistinction to the NATO-Ukraine Commission. Now, Ukraine will be elevated while Russia has already been pushed aside. There is a kind of delicious irony: the summit decisions will put Ukraine on the same footing Russia had with NATO before it made itself a pariah. But Ukraine’s relationship will be even closer — where Putin mused to the BBC in 2000 that Russia might one day join NATO, he didn’t mean it. Whereas I am confident Ukraine will join NATO, sooner rather than later.

A related issue currently being negotiated is whether Ukraine will be required to follow the steps of a membership action plan (MAP). Throughout the 1990s, as former Soviet aligned states started to seek NATO membership, a roadmap was put in place to ensure applicant states met all of the technical requirements for membership in terms of not just defence planning, but civilian control and oversight of the military, a functioning market economy and democratic political and legal institutions. The MAP was based on the experience of three Allies who joined in 1999 and the 11 that followed.

Now, the proposal is that Ukraine bypass the Membership Action Plan in the same manner as Finland and Sweden last year.  While it is absolutely clear that Ukraine likely meets all of NATO’s military standards and more, it is also true that certain civilian reforms have been put on the back burner because of the war effort. From my perspective, whether it is called a Membership Action Plan or not is immaterial. What will be important is that Vilnius deliver the political decision now that Ukraine’s rightful place is in NATO, and spell out in advance NATO technical expectations so once the war ends, only those technical steps remain.

Having Ukraine stay half-in and half-out of NATO for any length of time would send the wrong signal to Russia (and to Ukraine) and would undercut NATO’s deterrence. Canada is particularly well-positioned to assist Ukraine in making any final reforms needed — we have a relationship of trust with Ukraine, have been assisting in areas of governance, legislative reform, the economy and security institutions since the Maidan revolution and before. Much of this work would take place outside of NATO but would directly contribute to Euro-Atlantic stability and to Ukraine securing NATO membership.

In today’s world, where security threats are complex, comprehensive and cross boundaries into domains that used to be considered purely civilian, Canada needs good friends, with whom we can share security risks and security burdens. NATO provides that.

Aside from Ukraine, from a NATO institutional perspective the most significant decision at the Vilnius summit will be the ambitious overhaul of NATO’s deterrence and defence in the Euro-Atlantic. These decisions, which started at the Madrid summit last year, will perhaps draw less attention but will have the greatest impact. They will transform the alliance of the past few decades — one designed for fighting insurgencies in expeditionary operations, with relatively few combat-capable troops armed with lighter weapons — to an alliance better suited to today’s threat environment.

The new concept would see NATO increase by three to five times the number of combat-capable troops deployed to NATO borders; enough to stop Russia in its tracks if it chose to cross into NATO territory. It would also see roughly ten-fold more troops ready for rapid deployment should the need arise, with a new command structure and new detailed military plans for NATO regions, including the European Arctic. There will also be specific detailed plans for military domains, such as space or cyber. The open question is whether Allies will be able to meet this level of ambition. One tool to ensure they have a better chance of doing so is the Defence Investment Pledge. Set at the Wales Summit in 2014, at the time Allies agreed to “aim to move towards” spending 2 percent of GDP on defence. The Vilnius summit might move this guideline from an ‘aspirational ceiling’ to a minimum floor.

For Canada in particular, this kind of transformation and this level of defence spending will be difficult. There have been years of underinvestment in defence (and diplomacy), through successive governments such that Canada now faces a structural deficit in armed forces personnel, with dated weaponry and slow procurement. Going into the Vilnius summit, Canada ranks 25th out of 29 Allies in terms of defence spending, and second to last in terms of percentage of the defence budget devoted to military equipment. Canada commands one of the forward battlegroups put in place to deter Russia and has yet to announce how it will fulfill its commitment to increase its battalion (roughly 1000 troops) to a Brigade-size force (roughly 4,000) troops. In this, as with defence spending, Canada is lagging behind other Allies. The nations commanding the battlegroups in Lithuania, Estonia and Poland, that is, Germany, the U.K. and the US, have already practiced how they could quickly scale up to Brigade size formations. Canada has not.

Without significant announcements on the eve of the Vilnius summit, perhaps through the form of the long-awaited Defence policy update and a commitment that includes at least a “path to a path” to reach 2 percent, Canada risks falling even farther behind the other Allies.  For a founding member of NATO, and a country that has prided itself on ‘punching above our weight’ internationally, this would be inconsistent with how we see ourselves. More importantly, gaps in defence spending across the Alliance will ultimately lead to gaps in capabilities, given the ambitious plans to be endorsed at Vilnius. Canada is bordered by three oceans — the Arctic, the Pacific and the Atlantic, all of which are seeing heightened tensions. The world is more dangerous and it is not in our direct national interest to have an international security alliance that can’t deliver because we and a few other Allies don’t step up.

NATO has always mattered enormously to Canada and even more so today. It matters for three reasons: first, preserving Euro-Atlantic stability is in Canada’s direct economic and political interests. Europe is our third largest trading partner, and we share an integrated Euro-Atlantic security space. Disruptions in Europe would directly affect Canadians’ prosperity and security. Second, NATO is a premiere international political and military table where Canada has leverage. This has been important to Canada from the beginning. As Lester B. Pearson said at the time of NATO’s inception, while Canada was forced to follow the US and UK’s lead during the Second World War, it was inconceivable that we would do so in the international security architecture established after the war. Or as Chrystia Freeland said in her foreign policy speech to the House of Commons in 2017, Canada doesn’t want to be a vassal state. NATO gives us a seat at the table with a voice and a veto.

Finally, in today’s world, where security threats are complex, comprehensive and cross boundaries into domains that used to be considered purely civilian, Canada needs good friends, with whom we can share security risks and security burdens. NATO provides that.

So, what more can we do? We need to spend more on defence and diplomacy. Full stop. This isn’t just about spending 2 percent of GDP on defence — in many ways, the 2 percent is a political metric not linked to actual security contributions. But it is about better procurement, more personnel and greater readiness. And it is also about steps we, as a nation, need to take to improve our international presence and our domestic understanding of the new security threat environment we face.  I would hope that the Government’s long -awaited defence policy update would come out before Vilnius, that it would include significant investments in defence but embed that defence policy in a broader foreign policy framework…. I won’t get all three of these wishes, but even one might suffice.

Kerry Buck, a career foreign service officer, was Canada’s Ambassador to NATO from 2015-2018. She is currently a Senior Fellow at the University of Ottawa and the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History at Trinity College, University of Toronto.