23 April—NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg asserted the other day that Ukraine deserves to be in NATO: “Let me be clear,” he said, “Ukraine’s rightful place is in the Euro-Atlantic family. Ukraine’s rightful place is in NATO.”

Stoltenberg has said as much before. But this time he was standing next to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at a press conference in Kyiv when he made the pronouncement. What else could he say?

The reality is that lots—perhaps most—of NATO’s 31 members are dead set against letting Ukraine join the mutual-defense pact. They include Germany, France, and (of course) the United States. Even the UK, the NATO signatory perhaps the least openly opposed to Ukraine’s membership, isn’t really committed.

As British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly cleverly put it [couldn’t resist], “Obviously, there is long-standing commitments [sic] to providing Ukraine with a path to NATO membership,” but, he added, “the priority of course, at the moment, is about their self-defense in the here and now.”

Diplomatic bullshit pure and simple. Cleverly means, “So let Zelenskyy continue to beg for every little bullet we NATO allies are willing to give him out of the goodness of our craven little hearts and, of course, self-interest”.

At a 2008 summit in Bucharest, NATO had committed to admitting Ukraine. That’s 15 years ago. But all the members have been crapping their figurative pants about Vladimir Putrid ever since he took over Russia at the turn of the century. In fact, that’s the very reason Finland finally decided to join the defense pact just this year—everything to gain, nothing to lose.

It’s undeniably safer militarily and politically, after all, for all the countries to speak loudly and do very little, to supply matériel to Ukraine essentially as the spirit (i.e., politics at home and abroad) moves them, rather than be committed to do anything in a mutual defense pact. Especially as Putrid has made it crystal clear that preventing Ukraine from joining NATO has been a key justification of Russia’s invasion strategy, rationalizing, as he does, that Ukraine in NATO would pose an existential threat to Mother Russia.

(Virtually everything these days is misrepresented as posing what are claimed to be existential threats—threats to the survival of whatever it may be. Sounds dire but really means nothing.)

Of course, Vladimir Putrid warns that he’d use “all means available”—from which the NATO membership infers nuclear weapons—to keep that from happening. In actual fact, Putrid may be a megalomanical madman with all sorts of delusions and unrealistic ambitions; he may have inferior, even incompetent, commanders, troops, and evil allies at his disposal. But he has one thing the good guys lack. Make that two things: scrotal content, big ones, cojones, balls.

Are the 31 NATO members going to continue to let Comrade Putrid intimidate them as he’s been doing for almost a quarter-century? Better believe it . . .