The threat to Nato

If I were Vladimir Putin, said Kim Sengupta in The Independent, I’d be musing right now on how much longer the US “will remain the world’s only superpower”. Over the past few months, Donald Trump has loudly questioned the usefulness of Nato; he has said that the West should accept the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea; and warned the Baltic states not to bank on him defending them against Russia. Putin has every reason to think that America’s new isolationist president will “accept a relationship between Europe and Russia that is very much to Moscow’s advantage”. The threat to Nato and the world order is truly alarming, said David Aaronovitch in The Times. Getting cosy with Russia is all very well, but what if, next year, “Putin is nice to Trump but horrid to Estonia”? Will the US then suspend its Nato commitment to defend the Baltic state? Across the world, authoritarian rulers such as Putin stand ready to step into the vacuums that will be created by the troop withdrawals Trump envisages.

Actually, Mr Trump has made clear that his intention is to strengthen Nato, said John Bolton, a contender to be Trump’s secretary of state, in The Times. He just wants to reform it by getting Nato allies to pay their fair share of the cost. And he has a point, said Juliet Samuel in The Daily Telegraph. “The US footed the bill for more than 70% of Nato’s defence spending last year”, even though the combined GDP of its allies tops America’s. Only Poland and the UK meet their defence spending obligations. Unwilling to indulge Trump, some Eurocrats now talk once again of building an EU army. Good luck with that. Even supposing they could find the money, “hell would freeze” before France “handed Jean-claude Juncker the keys to its tanks”. So Trump may turn out to be the catalyst that gets EU nations to update their defence systems within Nato. He might even make the world safer by “halting the slide to international confrontation”, said Michael Burleigh in The Mail on Sunday. If he comes to an accommodation with Putin over Syria and Crimea, he could get Putin to relinquish his aggressive designs on eastern Ukraine, and join him in destroying Isis.

But the pitfalls of such a strategy are huge too, said Gideon Rachman in the FT. Besides the moral opprobrium that will result from allying “with the butchers of Aleppo”, there will be a very real risk of the devious Putin making a fool of Trump by not keeping his side of the bargain. Indeed, most of Washington’s foreign policy establishment “will warn Mr Trump to be deeply suspicious of Mr Putin”. Truth to tell, Russia’s politicians are just as wary of Mr Trump, said Russian journalist Oleg Kashin in The Observer. They won’t admit it, but they’d feel better off dealing with Hillary Clinton. Russian politics thrives on the notion of the US as the enemy: “Obama is a wanker” reads a popular bumper sticker. Putin’s foreign policy objective must now be to fall out with Trump as fast as possible. If he doesn’t, “the Kremlin will have no one to blame for Russia’s problems but Russia”.