2 September 2025 - 10:45am
The Lansdowne Club, London
Nato members should have allowed the expedited accession of Ukraine to the alliance in 2008, according to former US national security advisor John Bolton.
Speaking at The Lansdowne Club in London for an event by the Eurosceptic think tank Bruges Group, the former Trump aide suggested that if France and Germany had accepted then-President George W. Bush’s attempt to speed up Ukraine and Georgia’s accession to Nato, Russia’s consequent invasions of both countries could have been avoided.
“Ukraine is critical for the security of Europe,” he said, “and I just regret that the French and the Germans in April 2008 at the Bucharest Summit blocked George W. Bush’s effort to get Ukraine and Georgia into Nato on an expedited basis.” He continued: “But you don’t get any laboratory experiments in international affairs and it only took until August of 2008 for Russia to invade Georgia.”
In 2008, France and Germany refused to let Ukraine and Georgia join Nato as they thought it would not bolster the alliance’s military strength and would simultaneously cross one of Moscow’s explicit red lines. In 2007, Vladimir Putin told the Munich Security Conference that the West had broken its promise made at the end of the Cold War not to expand Nato and had damaged trust in international law. While some member states refused Ukrainian and Georgian accession in 2008, Croatia and Albania joined in 2009.
Bolton said yesterday that “the only safe place in Europe is being a Nato member.” He added that “Finland and Sweden have proven this point by abandoning 75 years of neutrality” and joining the alliance in recognition of Russia’s threat. Finland joined in 2023 before Sweden the year after. “Nato is critical for all of us,” Bolton said.
The former US ambassador to the UN also spoke at length about the “danger” of the Sino-Russian axis of power. The Shanghai Cooperation Summit took place this week, with Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and India’s Narendra Modi holding trilateral talks and promising closer alignment. Bolton said this was a direct threat to the West. “Today, in China, you can see that Putin and Xi Jinping and, unfortunately, the Prime Minister Modi of India, whom President Trump has all but thrown back into the arms of the Russians and the Chinese, are talking closely, [in a meeting that] we’re excluded from.” At the summit, Putin reiterated Moscow’s official position that Western attempts to bring Ukraine into Nato were prolonging the war.
The former Trump advisor, who has since become one of the President’s strongest critics, said America’s tariff policy and “trade war with the rest of the world” is “probably the worst self-inflicted problem” in US history. He said this was not only provoking enemies of the US, but also isolating allies. Just last week, Bolton’s home was raided by the FBI as part of an investigation into classified documents. On his second day in office, Trump removed his former aide’s security detail.
Bolton seemed most exercised by what he views as Trump’s diplomatic ineptitude. “I don’t know what the administration in Washington is going to do next,” he said. “I think we’ve been through a series of delegations where we’ve watched Vladimir Putin essentially work his KGB magic [on Trump].”
“When the [US] President began in Alaska, he went to Anchorage, saying there would be severe sanctions against Russia,” Bolton continued. “There was no ceasefire, and he came out of the meeting saying, ‘You don’t need a ceasefire, and we’re not going to have any sanctions,’ which is where we are.”
