One of the biggest challenges that a superpower faces is figuring out what it can and cannot do. When you are a global hegemon, you might believe that you can micromanage wars, orchestrate foreign countries’ diplomatic relations and internal politics, and precisely calibrate how others perceive you. That tendency is evident in the American approach to Ukraine. Although the U.S. has provided Ukraine some strong diplomatic support and a significant amount of modern weaponry, it has done so with a catch. To avoid provoking Russia too much, it seems, the Biden administration has been very restrained in offering additional types of weaponry—and therefore additional military capabilities—to Ukraine. Until recently, the U.S. has given noticeably mixed signals about when or even whether NATO, the West’s preeminent military alliance, might accept Ukraine into its ranks. 

The overall presumption seems to be that the U.S. can give Ukraine just enough help—without going too far. Lesser powers than the United States tend to make simpler calculations: Pick a side and do whatever you can to help it win.

The twists and turns at last week’s NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, revealed American strategy making at its worst and best. The opening day could have been disastrous. The alliance’s official communiqué—which the U.S. presumably played a major role in shaping—said up front that Russia “is the most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security and to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area.” Yet the statement included a word salad of qualifications and obfuscations about whether Ukraine—the country now actually at war with Russia, and thus protecting many NATO states—would be allowed into the alliance. Though the statement said “Ukraine’s future is in NATO,” it offered only the vaguest idea of when even the process bringing about that future might start. The key paragraph puzzlingly concluded that NATO “will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met.” So Ukraine seemed to be being offered a deeply conditional chance to receive an invitation to possibly join NATO sometime in the unknown future. The implication was: We view Ukraine as a partner, but only up to a point.

Ukrainian leaders were not happy. President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is usually extremely complimentary of the U.S. and NATO, publicly blasted the statement after its wording became known. Describing its language as “unprecedented” and “absurd,” he expressed the reasonable fear that NATO was leaving open a “window of opportunity” to bargain away Ukraine’s membership in future negotiations with Russia. The hostility and intensity of the Ukrainian reaction seemed (strangely) to take the Biden administration by surprise—so much so that, according to The Washington Post, U.S. officials considered striking back by further watering down the statement’s support for Ukraine. This would have been a catastrophic blunder.