Did Biden Blow the Best Chance of Preventing War in Ukraine?

While the U.S. publicly insisted on an “open door” policy, Zelenskyy says he was privately told that Ukraine couldn’t join NATO.

The Trump administration caused a shock on both sides of the Atlantic last week by claiming that North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) membership for Ukraine is not "a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement" for the war there. European countries said that they were still committed to having Ukraine in NATO. European Union chief diplomat Kaja Kallas said today that there should be no agreement "about Ukraine without Ukraine."

Former U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton even claimed that President Donald Trump has "effectively surrendered" to Russian demands. If so, it's a surrender that former President Joe Biden reportedly made before the war even began. While publicly insisting on NATO's "open door" policy, and refusing to negotiate with Russia on the issue, Biden privately told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2021 that Ukraine wouldn't join the alliance, Zelenskyy revealed on Friday.

"My first phone call with President Biden and my first question, will we be in NATO? He said, no, no. And I said, we will see," Zelenskyy said at the Munich Security Conference in Germany last week, referring to his first conversation with Biden in April 2021. "But to be very honest, United States, they never saw us in NATO. They just spoke about it. But they really didn't want us in NATO. It's true."

Biden himself told CNN in 2023 that there is no "unanimity in NATO about whether or not to bring Ukraine into the NATO family now, at this moment, in the middle of a war." (German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said something similar last year.) But Biden also said in the CNN interview that there must be "a rational path for Ukraine to be able to qualify to be able to get into NATO" and that he refused Russian demands to close the open door policy on principle.

By Zelenskyy's account, the door was never really open, and Biden was sticking to NATO's right to do something it never really intended to do. That approach may have been the worst of both worlds. The Russian government was convinced that NATO intended to use Ukraine as a weapon against Russia, while Ukrainians themselves were left in limbo. In fact, the invitation for Ukraine to join the alliance—just not now—may have given Russia an incentive to attack as quickly as it could and drag the war out as long as possible.

"We hear that Ukraine is not ready to join NATO; we know that. At the same time, they say it's not going to join tomorrow," Russian President Vladimir Putin told reporters a week before the invasion. "But by the time they get ready for it, it may be too late for us. So we have to decide this question now, right now, in the very near future."

At the time, the Biden administration insisted that there was no need to negotiate on NATO membership, because it was irrelevant to Russian security.

"We made clear to the Russians that we were willing to talk to them on issues that we thought were genuine concerns they have that were legitimate in some way, I mean arms control type things of that nature," Biden administration official Derek Chollet said in an April 2022 interview, two months after the invasion began. He argued that the war "was not about NATO" and "NATO is not a threat to Russia."

Officials on both sides of the Atlantic later admitted that Ukraine in NATO really was Putin's issue. U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told Congress in May 2023 that Russia's "immediate ambitions" were "ensuring that Ukraine will never become a NATO ally." NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told the European Parliament in September 2023 that Putin had sent him a document asking for "no more NATO enlargement" as "a pre-condition for not invade [sic] Ukraine" a few months before the war.

NATO leaders have argued that closing the open door would infringe on Ukraine's sovereign right to "choose its own destiny." But an alliance is a two-way street. Every NATO member is committed to defending every other NATO member, which is why accepting new members requires a unanimous vote within the alliance. Committing French or American troops to defend Ukraine was never a Ukrainian decision alone.

After three years of war, Ukraine is less independent than it ever had been. Russia has not only conquered but also formally annexed large chunks of Ukrainian land. Ukraine is now dependent on foreign aid just to keep the state running, not to mention an estimated $486 billion in future reconstruction costs. Although the U.S. and European countries are planning to provide Ukraine with a "security guarantee" after the war, it would come in the form of foreign peacekeeping troops rather than NATO membership on equal terms.

The war has not really been a victory for Russia, either. The possibility of having a friendly, docile Ukraine on Russia's borders is gone for good. With NATO countries' help, Ukraine has bombed inside Russia (including today) and even captured Russian territory. Putin's warnings became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Across the region, Finland and Sweden have both joined NATO in response to the war.

Of course, the greatest cost comes in the scores of Ukrainians and Russians who were killed or permanently maimed. Casualty rates are a state secret in both countries, but independent estimates show that around 100,000 Ukrainians and 150,000 Russians had been killed by the end of November 2024. Every one of those deaths was a tragedy and a waste.

Putting Ukraine's future NATO membership on the table might not have been enough to avert war. Russia's demands on NATO and Ukraine may have proven impossible to satisfy in the end. But refusing to even discuss the central issue—essentially giving up before even trying—guaranteed that the war would break out. The fact that the United States did not even want Ukraine in NATO makes this stubbornness all the more wasteful.