Trump hasn’t destroyed NATO, but he’s trying
Group soldiers on, despite Trump’s efforts
In the end, the president of the United States did not walk out of the NATO summit or renounce its objectives or scale back his country’s support for the alliance. Why, he even signed the summit’s closing declaration, in which NATO restated its commitment to the sorts of things NATO would ordinarily be expected to stand for. These days that counts as news.
So it was not the complete disaster some had feared. All that Donald Trump did, in the space of 24 hours, was to denounce NATO ally Germany, falsely, as being “totally controlled” by Russia; accuse NATO members, misleadingly, of being “delinquent” in their “payments” for U.S. “protection”; demand, absurdly, that each raise its spending on defence to four per cent of GDP; and ask, rhetorically, “what good is NATO” in a post-summit tweet complaining, inter alia, of how much the U.S. “loses” on trade with Europe.
Whatever the formalities of the summit declaration, in other words, they were belied by Trump’s every other word or deed. This performance, moreover, came after weeks of similar outrages: his attempts, in public statements, to destabilize the already shaky premierships of Theresa May of Great Britain and Angela Merkel of Germany; his reported offer to French President Emmanuel Macron of a special trade deal if he would pull France out of the European Union; his reported musings to aides about withdrawing from the World Trade Organization; all the way back to his petulant eruptions during and after last month’s G7 meeting, and his continuing assault on NAFTA.
The world has learned not to attach any particular importance to Trump’s signature: he has been making and breaking promises from the time he was in private business (not that he ever left). What matters is not the words he signs but the views he holds. The past month makes crystal clear, if it were not already, that he not only has no use for the system of international alliances, institutions and agreements the U.S. helped build and which until now it has led: he is actively working to undermine them.
It is in this light that his increasingly aggressive demands on other NATO members should be seen. Other U.S. presidents, it is true, have prodded their allies to increase defence spending: that was the theme of Barack Obama’s last trip to Canada, disguised as it was by a clever bit of flattery (“the world needs more Canada”). It was, indeed, during Obama’s tenure, in 2014, that NATO members agreed to a defence spending target of two per cent of GDP by 2024, to which, with six years to go, they are in differing degrees of proximity. But that is a world away from Trump’s bullying approach, conceived as it is in the apparent belief, either that NATO members pay the U.S. to protect them (they do not), or that they pay NATO for that purpose (there is a small administrative budget, which is fully funded).
That is not how NATO works. Each country, rather, pays for its own forces, with which it is obliged, under NATO’s famous Article V, to defend not only itself but the others.
No president has spoken of NATO with such evident hostility as Trump has (“NATO is worse than NAFTA,” he reportedly told his mystified G7 colleagues), nor has any threatened, publicly at least, to withdraw American troops and materiel if his demands are not met. And while that might be seen, stripped of all context, as a mere negotiating tactic, albeit of a peculiarly reckless kind, it is hard to square with his other statements.
Two per cent of GDP will be difficult enough for many countries to meet, even by 2024, never mind “immediately,” as Trump now demands. Four per cent is preposterous. In Canada’s case, it would require tripling current defence spending, an increase of nearly $60 billion annually, or one-fifth of the entire federal budget (it is now about a tenth). It is not going to happen.
It’s a stunt, in other words, an impossible demand made precisely because it is impossible — much in the style of Trump’s trade demands, which he has used as the pretext to launch simultaneous trade wars with all of America’s major trade partners. Were his intent to strengthen NATO, and not to divide and demean it, he would note the progress made towards the two per cent target, possibly even take credit for it — not suddenly move the goalposts another 100 yards downfield.
Were he committed, likewise, to NATO’s mission, notably of resisting Russian aggression, he would not speak and act in a way that regularly calls that commitment into doubt: suggesting he might not defend the Baltic states should they come under Russian attack; implying he might recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea since, as he again reportedly told the G7, they speak Russian there; and otherwise giving every impression of seeing Vladimir Putin as a soulmate — for whatever reason — rather than an adversary.
So while NATO is still formally intact, post-summit, there is room to doubt how much it remains a reality, in the only sense that counts: the willingness of its members, in particular its largest member, to go to war in defence of each other. And whatever Trump might have agreed to this week, can anyone say with assurance he will not renounce it at next week’s tete-a-tete with Putin?