NATO SUMMIT
Will Canada’s non-monetary support placate Donald Trump?
OTTAWA— By now it’s a familiar pattern.
The U.S. president brays that his country is getting ripped off by its closest allies. And those allies — Canada included — try to figure out what to do about it.
That’s the predicament facing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as he arrives in Brussels to meet with the other 28 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The military alliance crucial to U.S. leadership in the 20th century is now being raised by President Donald Trump as another example of anti-American unfairness on the world stage. Weeks after he blasted Trudeau as “weak” and “dishonest” for protesting U.S. tariffs that have sparked a trade war amongst Western economic powers, Trump is now calling on Canada and other NATO partners to ramp up their own military spending in the alliance.
“The U.S. is spending many times more than any other country in order to protect them. Not fair to the U.S. taxpayer,” Trump wrote on Twitter Tuesday morning, as he embarked across the Atlantic to attend the NATO summit.
“NATO countries must pay MORE, the United States must pay LESS. Very Unfair!” he wrote.
In response, Canada will hype its non-monetary contributions to NATO, including the decision this week to extend and expand its military presence in Latvia, where NATO countries have stationed soldiers in an effort to deter Russian aggression in eastern Europe.
The hope is to deflect from the narrative that Canada is not contributing enough money to NATO’s shared defence. Canada committed four years ago to work toward a target of spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence by 2024, but is currently on pace to spend just 1.4 per cent.
In Latvia Tuesday, Trudeau voiced his “continued, unflinching support” for NATO, but ruled out jacking up Canada’s defence budget to meet the 2 per cent target that Trump is demanding.
“I think it’s an important metric, amongst many others, to gauge how countries are doing in terms of contributors to NATO,” Trudeau told reporters at the Adazi military base outside Riga.
“Ultimately, the more important metrics are always, ‘Are countries stepping up consistently with the capabilities that NATO needs? … Are we contributing the kinds of resources and demonstrating the kind of commitment to the alliance that always needs to be there?”
A source close to planning Canada’s position in Brussels said while Trump is an X factor in any international meeting, Trudeau still has to lay out his vision for the defence alliance.
“We have to ask ourselves the question, regardless of (Trump), NATO is a thing that exists and Canada is a member of it,” said the source, who was not authorized to speak on the record. “So, whatever the narrative is going to be around the summit … we have to make decisions that we think are responsible and are in the national interest.
“I’m sure it will be part of the narrative for the next two days over whether or not these countries need to be spending more. And it’s something the United States has said before, under different presidents,” the source added.
Roland Paris, a University of Ottawa international affairs professor and Trudeau’s former foreign policy adviser, said Canada’s immediate goal with this week’s NATO summit will be damage control.
“(Trump’s) behaviour at the G7, combined with the messages he’s been sending in the last few days, suggest that he may take a very hard line with NATO allies,” Paris said.
The concern for Canada and European countries that make up the alliance — including Britain, Germany, France and more — is that Trump’s bluster about spending commitments may presage an American pullback of its commitment to NATO, Paris said.
Those worries are amplified because of Trump’s upcoming tête-à-tête with Russian President Vladimir Putin, scheduled to take place in Finland next week, immediately after the NATO summit.
Trump told reporters as he left Washington on Tuesday that the meeting with Putin — leader of a country believed to have interfered in the 2016 presidential election and that is under international sanctions for its aggression in eastern Europe — might be easier than the gathering with his country’s allies.
“Putin’s aggressive actions have given NATO a new lease on life,” Paris said. “But the question is whether the United States is going to stand with its allies.”
Irvin Studin, editor-in-chief of Global Brief magazine and senior fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk School, said Trump’s stance on NATO should prompt Canada to explore its own strategy on the international stage.
He said Canadian foreign policy is too reliant on American assumptions, and that it would serve Canada to consider its evolving relationships with China and Russia as U.S. power diminishes in the global order.
“We actually don’t have our own theory of the world independent of NATO, independent of the U.S.,” Studin said. “That’s the more strategic question that we haven’t really explored as a country.”
But in the short term, Paris said Canada should respond to Trump’s call for more spending by pointing to its alreadyplanned 73 per cent increase in military expenditures over the next decade — which still wouldn’t hit the 2 per cent mark — and other contributions to NATO, such as the leadership in the alliance’s Baltic troop presence, and important roles that Canada has played in conflicts such as the war in Afghanistan and the 2011 intervention in Libya.
It remains to be seen whether Trudeau and other NATO leaders can placate the U.S. president this week. Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, cautioned Trump against pulling back from longstanding trans-Atlantic partnerships.
“Appreciate your allies,” he said. “After all, you don’t have that many.