WTH Did Biden Blow It on NATO and Ukraine? Ambassador Kurt Volker Explains
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 19 July 2023
⏱️ 54 minutes
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Summary
Last week at the NATO summit in Lithuania, the world watched as Ukraine was denied an actionable plan for membership in the alliance. It was almost a rinse and repeat from 2008, when Ukraine and Georgia pushed for membership, and were offered a similarly passive statement – save for one major exception: today, Ukraine is actively fighting for its life. In fact, Ukraine is doing NATO’s job for it: defending Europe, upholding sovereignty, and keeping Russia’s imperialist ambitions at bay. And, notwithstanding the ire of National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan – who has labeled Ukraine ungrateful -- nobody (much less Zelensky) is arguing for membership during a hot war. Ukrainians want a secure plan forward, not a vague and gauzy set of commitments that amount to “maybe.” A roadmap is not actually hard to formulate (Marc and former Deputy Secretary of State Steve Biegun wrote one for Washington Post) so what is the hold-up? Are we really going to let Putin bully 31 (soon to be 32) countries into icing out a staunch ally?
Ambassador Kurt Volker is the former U.S. Ambassador to NATO, the former U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine. He's now a distinguished fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis and a founding partner of the American University in Kyiv.
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 0:03.1 | If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell he's talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. Hotels gone on. |
| 0:01.0 | Who in God's name knows what it's all about. |
| 0:23.6 | Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka. |
| 0:28.6 | And I'm Mark Thiessen. |
| 0:30.6 | Welcome to our podcast. |
| 0:32.6 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:34.6 | Mark, what the hell is actually going on? What the hell is going on is Mark, what the hell is actually going on? |
| 0:38.3 | What the hell is going on is we just finished last week, the NATO summit in Vilnius, where |
| 0:44.3 | Ukraine was kept at arm's length again. |
| 0:47.3 | In 2008, I went to the summit with President Bush at NATO summit in Bucharest, where Bush |
| 0:52.3 | made a big push to bring Ukraine and Georgia into the |
| 0:57.0 | NATO alliance and to give them an invitation to join the membership action plan, which at the time |
| 1:01.4 | was the path to joining NATO and would have sent a clear signal to Russia that Ukraine was coming |
| 1:06.4 | into the alliance. And the European allies refused. And they issued a very watered down statement |
| 1:12.5 | that basically was taken by Putin as a green light. And it's no surprise that the two countries |
| 1:18.5 | that he invaded since the 2008 Bucharest summit are Georgia and Ukraine. And he invaded Ukraine |
| 1:24.3 | not once but twice. In 2014, we didn't respond in any effective manner, and he |
| 1:30.0 | reinvated in 2022 with the goal of decapitating the regime and taking Kiev and incorporating |
| 1:36.2 | it into the Russian Empire. And so the NATO alliance had a chance to fix the error that it had |
| 1:43.4 | in 2008 in Bucharest, and they failed. |
| 1:46.6 | So it's always fascinating to me that people say that everything that America says and does in the world doesn't matter anymore. |
... |
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