Anders Fogh Rasmussen: ‘Putin Has Exploited Our Hesitation’

Last weekend marked 500 days since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine—a grim landmark that will hang over Vilnius, Lithuania, as leaders of 31 NATO countries assemble for the security alliance’s annual summit. While some member states, especially in Eastern Europe, continue to lobby for Ukraine’s accession to NATO, the United States has already made clear such a move is far-fetched while war remains underway. Even Sweden’s membership is up in the air, with Turkey playing spoiler once again: Ankara says the European Union should create a pathway for it to join the bloc before it agrees to support Stockholm’s bid.

Beyond the fraught questions of membership, however, other issues of consequence will be up for discussion this week. It’s likely that NATO will update its defense posture and begin talks on offering Kyiv security commitments. Some of those plans have originated from the alliance’s former chief, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who has informally advised Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Rasmussen is also a contributor to FP’s collection of essays exploring the future of NATO—a roundup that includes takes from Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and Russia experts Angela Stent and Liana Fix. I spoke with Rasmussen about his proposals on FP Live. Subscribers can watch the full, 40-minute discussion in the video box atop this page. What follows is a condensed and edited transcript, exclusive for FP Insiders.

Ravi Agrawal: Let’s start with your essay in FP. You say the best path to admit Ukraine into NATO is by focusing on security guarantees in the short term, which you likened to U.S. military support for Israel. Expand on that.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen: Regardless of all the discussions about Ukraine’s future in NATO, it will need security guarantees. Last summer, I prepared a set of proposals called the Kyiv Security Compact that I handed to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The essence of it is to make Kyiv capable of defending itself—by helping Ukraine build a strong military that can withstand any future Russian attack; by enhancing exchange of intelligence between Ukraine and its allies; by sustaining joint training and exercises under NATO and European Union flags; and by building a strong Ukrainian defense industry so it can produce military equipment and ammunition by itself.

RA: You also wrote that it would be a mistake to not make commitments to Ukraine while the war is ongoing. But NATO’s current secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, as well as leaders of several NATO member countries have said they won’t consider those things while the war in ongoing. How do you square that? And aren’t you worried about Russia exploiting differences among member states here?

AFR: The worst thing that could happen at the Vilnius summit is a split within the alliance and a split between NATO and Ukraine. First and foremost, we have to ensure that we keep the unprecedented unity we have seen within the alliance and across the Atlantic during the last couple of years. To square the circle, we would need three things. Firstly, to offer Ukraine an accelerated path toward NATO membership, just like Finland and Sweden. Secondly, to establish a NATO-Ukraine council to determine exactly which conditions should be fulfilled for Ukraine to join NATO. And thirdly, to review this question next year, when NATO meets in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the 75th anniversary of NATO.

RA: There is some distance between what you are proposing and what seems to be the NATO consensus, especially given some of the divisions among member states. You informally advise Zelensky. Do you think he will be satisfied with what’s currently on the table from NATO?

AFR: Negotiations are continuing until the very last minute. We are not able to determine the final outcome yet, but I’m quite optimistic regarding security guarantees. It seems a number of allies will sign an umbrella document under which individual allies can agree to bilateral security agreements with Ukraine.

It remains to be seen how far we can go when it comes to the Ukrainian membership. Back in 2008, NATO decided Ukraine would become a member. Ukraine has been in the waiting room for 15 years, so we have to go beyond the language from the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008.

One possibility would be to agree that Ukraine does not need to fulfill the conditions in a membership action plan. We didn’t require Finland and Sweden to join in a membership action plan before we invited them. Ukraine has demonstrated on the battlefield that they fulfilled all the necessary criteria.

RA: Could NATO ever realistically accept Ukraine as a full-fledged member if some of its territory is still occupied by Russia? I ask this because Moscow has maintained breakaway states in Georgia and Moldova, which has made it so much harder for them to ever join NATO.

AFR: Exactly. That’s a goal of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s many maneuvers: to keep his neighbors weak and dependent on the Kremlin and prevent them from joining NATO and the European Union. He’s done this by freezing countries—in Georgia, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia, and then in Ukraine by taking Crimea and de facto occupying parts of the Donbas region. But if we declare publicly that Ukraine cannot join NATO as long as [the war is] going on, we are de facto providing Putin with an argument to continue the conflict to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO.

My answer to your question is, yes, we could invite Ukraine to join NATO even if a war is still going on. Obviously, there would be practical issues to sort out, including how Article 5 could and should apply to a member state actually in war. But where there is a will, there is also a way.

RA: Which NATO and Western countries are experiencing donor fatigue or domestic pressures that could prevent them from supporting Kyiv in the longer term?

AFR: I’ve been pretty surprised to learn about the resilience both in Europe and the United States when it comes to continuing supporting Ukraine. Obviously, everybody is now watching developments in the United States as we are approaching elections next year. That speaks in favor of pushing even harder to make sure that weapons deliveries and additional assistance to Ukraine are accelerated.

The good news is, from my summer visits to D.C., where I spoke with both the administration and members of Congress, there seems to be a broad bipartisan support for continuing the assistance to Ukraine, apart from small minorities in both parties.

RA: I’ll just say I’m not so sure—the two top contenders for the Republican nomination, Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, are hardly signaling they’d want to continue assistance to Ukraine.

But on Friday, the Biden administration announced that it will allow cluster bombs to be delivered to Ukraine. The United States has previously been against this, partly because cluster bombs often leave duds behind, which can hurt civilians. There are many human rights groups that are critical of the use of cluster munitions. Where do you come down on this? Is desperation to win the war now leading to decisions that could have other harmful ramifications?

AFR: Let me be clear on cluster bombs: I don’t like them. They are brutal weapons, and there is a reason why countries around the world have banned them. However, they have been used already by both sides in the war. The difference is Ukraine used them to defend its territory. Russia used them as an aggressor.

It underlines the need for delivering heavier weapons to the Ukrainians to get the upper hand in the battlefield and not only the longer-range missiles, heavy battle tanks, but also fighter jets. That’s exactly what the Ukrainians need most right now.

RA: Indeed, and we published an essay in May by Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba arguing why Ukraine should get fighter jets.

I want to talk about Turkey because it often looms large every time there’s a NATO summit. The last time you were on FP Live, we spoke about this, and it seems to me there hasn’t really been that much movement since then. Finland has joined, sure, but Turkey was an obstacle then, and now it’s once again proving to be a hurdle for Sweden’s accession. How are you thinking about Turkey, especially with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan returning to power rejuvenated? What kind of leverage does NATO have over him?

AFR: All decisions in NATO are made unanimously. We need consensus. That is both our strength and weakness—weakness because it may take endless time and effort, not least by the secretary-general to try to work out a sustainable compromise. But once we have achieved a consensus, it’s also a strength because the alliance moves in unity.

Regarding Sweden, I’m still optimistic. Eventually, we will get to a decision that Sweden will join NATO and foresee that it will happen in the not-too-distant future. If a political decision could be taken at the summit in Vilnius, I would consider that a great success. I’m hopeful that might happen.

RA: Should there be talks to expel Turkey from NATO? Has this ever come up when you were secretary-general or in the years since?

AFR: No, and I don’t think it would be a wise decision to go down that road. Obviously, I’m concerned about Turkey. I’m concerned about the purges of Russian military equipment. I’m concerned about Erdogan cozying up with Putin. I’m concerned about the domestic and political developments in Turkey, the repression of the opposition and lack of respect for the rule of law, human rights, etc. We have a lot to be concerned about when it comes to Turkey.

But we also need Turkey as an ally, as a bridge between the East and the West. I’m concerned that if we try to kick Turkey out of NATO, Turkey would be even more Eastern-oriented and even less reform-oriented. I prefer to maintain critical dialogue with Ankara. Half of the Turkish population has shown in the elections that they want political change. I think we owe it to them to continue to maintain links with Ankara. By the way, NATO doesn’t have a mechanism to kick members out, so it would be a very complicated process if we decided to do so.

RA: Something you just said really stuck with me. You said we need Turkey, and that strikes me as realism, which is often in conflict with the rhetoric of values. You run a group called the Alliance of Democracies. NATO leaders often pride themselves in being an alliance of democracies. But what do you do, then, when your own member states, let’s say Turkey or Hungary, exhibit clear signs of democratic recession? What happens to NATO’s values then? How do you square that with the realism that you seem to be exhibiting right now?

AFR: I am a realistic idealist and think we should consider what would be the alternative if we kick out Hungary from the European Union or Turkey from NATO. Would that improve the whole situation? Would that strengthen the alliance of democracies? No.

If we look at this from a helicopter perspective, we have bigger fish to fry. We have seen how the world’s autocracies have advanced during recent years. We have seen a decline in global freedom and democracy for the 17th consecutive year. That’s the real challenge. We have to improve the cooperation between the world’s democracies to counter the world’s autocracies. In that respect, I consider Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, and Bashar al-Assad bigger enemies than Erdogan or Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

RA: The reality, as you’ve just described, it tends to be gray. But then when you hear U.S. President Joe Biden, who has tried to align democracies against autocracies, it sounds much more black and white than the gray that you’re describing. That rhetoric often seems to backfire when he has to fist-bump Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman or when he’s unable to call out India’s Narendra Modi for problems with human rights or freedom of the press. Isn’t there a problem, then, with groups such as NATO or with countries in the West that talk in a certain way about democracies versus autocracies but then when it comes to choosing between values and interests, they end up choosing interests?

AFR: You’re right. It isn’t black and white. We are approaching a new world order with two camps: an autocratic camp led by China and the democratic camp led by the United States. In between, there is a gray zone. There are nonaligned democracies, such as India, and nonaligned autocracies, such as the Gulf kingdoms, for example.

The democratic countries should invest much more effort in anchoring, for instance, India firmly in the democratic camp, encourage them to cut ties with Russia, and provide India with weapons and whatever else they get from Russia. That is a realistic idealism. To gang up against the autocrats and invest efforts in ensuring that some of the countries in the gray zone will be firmly anchored in the democratic camp—this is much more important than going into details about Erdogan and Orban.

RA: Japan, South Korea, and Australia are attending the NATO summit this year. What kind of signal do you think that’s sending to Beijing?

AFR: It’s sending a clear signal to Beijing that although NATO is a North Atlantic Treaty Organization, it is also focused on what is going on in Southeast Asia. It is also a clear signal to Beijing to not try to change the status quo when it comes to Taiwan. I visited Taiwan at the beginning of this year, and they are preparing for all eventualities, and I understand them. We should not repeat the mistakes we made with Putin. The United States and Europe reacted much too mildly when Putin attacked Georgia and since then Ukraine, and he miscalculated that as a weakness he could exploit. We should be very clear with China that if they dare attack, they’ll be met with severe consequences. We will help Taiwan militarily, and you’ll be exposed to the sanctions.

RA: The problem with sanctioning China is that we’ve seen them coming back, just this week, with restrictions on gallium and germanium, two significant metals that go into the creation of semiconductors. China controls 80 percent of that market. China is not Russia. It’s the second-biggest economy in the world. We were discussing earlier some of the differences among European countries when it comes to Ukraine. I would argue there are even greater differences among European countries and NATO countries when it comes to China. The United States is probably the most hawkish. France has often made the case for strategic autonomy. President Emmanuel Macron even took dozens of CEOs with him on a visit to Beijing in April. And then you have Eastern European countries, which certainly need China more than richer European countries do. Aren’t you worried about Beijing exploiting these differences?

AFR: You’re quite right. China is a different beast than Russia. We are much more dependent on China. It’s a reminder that we should reduce our dependance on autocratic countries. When it comes to semiconductors, for instance, we should as fast as possible build up our own capacity. We should extract rare earths and critical minerals at a much faster pace than we have done in the past. We cannot reduce our dependance on Russian oil just to get addicted to Chinese rare earths and critical minerals. So we have a great challenge. But even in Europe, China’s behavior is an eye-opener, and you have seen a lot of European steps like de facto banning Huawei and through a new EU Commission proposal to strengthen economic security, including investment screening mechanisms, stricter controls, etc., so Europe is actually following suit.

RA: Isn’t there a risk of overreach on NATO’s part? Isn’t there a risk that Beijing will, in turn, react in ways that won’t help NATO or Europe?

AFR: We should not forget that NATO is an abbreviation of North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO would remain focused on the North Atlantic area; however, the United States, Canada, and certainly also France consider themselves Pacific nations, and that’s why NATO is now focused on the security challenges posed by China. But I don’t foresee active NATO engagement in military conflicts in and around the South China Sea or between China and Taiwan. However, I think the United States would expect important NATO allies to be helpful if it came to a military conflict between the United States and China. To deter China from moving in that direction, it is important that NATO allies discuss it so that China knows in advance there is a clear risk if they engage in military adventures.

RA: It has been two weeks now since the Wagner rebellion. Do you think there’s still a threat to Putin’s stranglehold on power?

AFR: Yes. Putin has been significantly weakened by the mutiny of the Wagner Group. It’s mysterious where Yevgeny Prigozhin resides right now. We don’t know the full contents of the deal between Putin, Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko, and Prigozhin. The whole affair has weakened Putin, which also adds a new strategic perspective to the war in Ukraine.

Putin has calculated that time isn’t on his side. He thought he could outlast Europe and the United States, by our populations being tired of war, tired of assisting Ukraine. But now he has to realize that the longer the war drags out, the bigger the risk of fragmentation and conflicts within Russian society. Now, time is not necessarily on Putin’s side. That’s a big strategic change.

RA: You speak with senior Ukrainian officials very often. Are you able to tell us whether they are disappointed by the counteroffensive so far and what it has been able to achieve? Are you disappointed?

AFR: We have to be realistic that our hesitation to deliver heavy weapons to the Ukrainians in due time has made the counteroffensive very complicated, and much more difficult than we had expected, because Putin has exploited our hesitation to fortify the Russian defenses in the occupied territories. It just underlines the need to deliver all the weapons the Ukrainians need as fast as possible. I’ve never understood why we have self-imposed restrictions on all weapon deliveries. We should have used the big hammer right from the start. We have a clear interest in putting this conflict to a quick end.

RA: Well, there are nuclear weapons. Aren’t you concerned about that?

AFR: No, I’m not concerned about the nuclear issue. I don’t think Putin dares to push the nuclear button. First of all, because the Russian military is aware that if they were to use nuclear weapons, it would have devastating consequences for the Russian military. The response from the United States and its allies would be very harsh and the rest of the world would turn its back to Russia, including China and India. So I think an attempt to use nuclear weapons would be the end of the Putin regime. For that reason, he will not use nuclear weapons.

Having said that, I would also stress we should never, ever give in to nuclear blackmail.