This is the Kito Daily Podcast for Saturday, July 29th, 2003. I'm Kila Brown.

The entry of Sweden and Finland into NATO is raising the question for many people, why shouldn't Ukraine

be a NATO member?

Cato's Justin Logan explains precisely why not Ukraine.

There was a real ambiguity, especially after the Cold War, particularly in the 1990s, I think by the Bush administration

it was quite clear that the Americans had closed the door, as it were, to Russia. But during the 1990s especially there was a real provocation

I guess you could say particularly from the Russian side about hey why don't we join NATO But it became clear that there was very little appetite to

fudge NATO's criteria for membership enough to allow Russia to join. So NATO's purpose in the modern age.

Well, that's...

How long do we have here, Caleb?

Look, I mean, if you want to go all the way back to the founding of NATO,

General Lionel Pug Ismay famously quipped that the purpose of NATO was to keep the

Americans in the Soviets out and the Germans down.

So now the question you have is how difficult are those tasks, right?

The Americans seem terribly disinclined to leave Europe.

The Germans, if anything, are too disinclined to step up. They're too eager to stay down.

And if we think about the Russians in the place of the Soviets here, they're having a hell of a time bullying a much smaller, much weaker neighbor in the form of Ukraine.

So if we think about the American point of view, right?

We engaged in a war against Vilhelmin Germany, a war against Nazi Germany, and then a protracted

security competition with the Soviet Union in the form of the Cold War, to prevent one country from dominating Europe, right?

We thought that if one country dominated Europe it would pose a threat to the United States,

justifiably in my view.

...