Ukraine getting a pure economic effect from its cooperation with NATO

NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer believes that the Bucharest Summit will be a wonderful occasion to re-consider relations between Ukraine and the Alliance. He said this in Vilnius after meeting with Ukraine’s Minister of Defense Yurii Yekhanurov.

However, NATO member countries will hold one more discussion concerning Ukraine’s accession to the Membership Action Plan (MAP). “NATO is the one making the decisions. And these decisions are adopted jointly by the members of the Alliance. Full stop,” the Alliance’s secretary- general said.

Ukraine’s accession to the MAP does not provide any guarantee that it will eventually join NATO. Fulfillment of the plan may last for quite a long time. The Poles needed only eight years for this. Therefore, the efforts of the Party of Regions to block these efforts are absolutely illogical.

“The biggest irony is that in 2003-04 it was Kuchma and Yanukovych, not Yushchenko, who were implementing the MAP. It was they who sent our troops to Iraq, and Yushchenko brought them home. The Party of Regions, if it is eager to appear consistent, has to admit that what it is doing at the moment is an absolute absurdity, since it is absolutely disproving things it supported three or four years ago,” said Professor Taras Kuzio, who teaches at George Washington University.

We have many myths surrounding NATO. One of them is that Ukraine’s military-industrial complex will collapse and the economy will fail after our country joins the Alliance. In the interview below, the director of the Foreign Policy Institute at the Diplomatic Academy of Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Hryhorii PEREPELYTSIA, tries to dispel these and other myths.

“If you reject myths and political speculations, you can say that no essential positive or negative economic consequences will result from Ukraine’s accession to NATO. Of course, there will be indirect consequences.

“We are getting a pure economic effect from cooperating with NATO at the moment. NATO is financing our weapons utilization program and providing great technical assistance. Let’s ask ourselves a simple question: what real military threat existed for the countries of the Warsaw Pact in the 1990s and now? None. Then why were these countries so eager to become NATO members? Economic benefit is the simple reason. The system of collective defense is much cheaper than individual defense.

“Experience proves that foreign investments increase when a country joins NATO. Of course, NATO does not make direct investments into the countries of the Alliance, but it creates political stability, it creates the very level of safety that foreign capital needs so much. By the way, there was no paradise on the Canary Islands until Spain joined NATO. The island used to have only volcanic rock and some flora. After Spain became a NATO member, American investments went there.

“What other indirect consequences are possible? NATO membership moves us closer to EU membership. This is an axiom.

“We have heard fears that the defense complex will collapse. Let’s put these fears aside and analyze everything in a normal way. Today, Ukraine receives 50 percent of its revenue from the military- defense complex thanks to its supplies to Russia. Let’s imagine a situation where Russia stops cooperating in response to Ukraine’s NATO membership. Will it take such a step? This will become a very big problem for Russia. It will endanger its own military production. But I want to say that a long time ago Russia started to move toward a closed cycle of armaments, and it did this in order to pursue its own national interests. From Russia’s point of view, this was an absolutely correct step.

“What is the most important thing for Russia at the moment? These are new technologies that neither Ukraine nor Russia has. Who has them? The West does. Russia is looking for new markets to sell its military production. Where are they? Again, they are in the West. Therefore, Russia has a prospect to cooperate with the Boeing Company, not with the Motor Sich Company. Russia is staying ‘deep’ in Brussels and trying to take over these projects: and it will take them over, without Ukraine.

“And the last thing: NATO is modernizing Soviet armaments. This modernization costs two billion euros a year. So start counting.”