President Joe Biden said Sunday on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” that he didn’t think Ukraine was ready for NATO membership.
Biden said, “I don’t think it’s ready for membership in NATO. But here is the deal, I spent a great deal of time holding NATO together because I believe Putin has an overwhelming objective at the time that he launched 85,000 troops into Ukraine, and that was to break NATO. He was confident in my view that he could break NATO. So holding NATO together is really critical.”
He continued, “I don’t think there is unanimity in NATO about whether or not to bring Ukraine into the NATO family now, at this moment, in the middle of a war. If you did that, then you know, and I mean what I say, we’re determined to commit every inch of territory that is NATO territory as a commitment that we’ve all made no matter what. If the war is going on, then we’re all in a war. You know, we’re in a war with Russia if that were the case.”
Biden added, “So I think we have to lay out a path for the rational path for Russia, for excuse me, for Ukraine, to be all to qualify to get into NATO. and we have. The very first time that I met with Putin two years ago in Geneva and he said I want commitments on no Ukraine and NATO, and I said we’re not going to do that and because it is an open door policy and we’re not going to shut anybody out. The NATO s a process takes time to meet all of the qualifications.”
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