Trump to press NATO on spending & terror

Meet aims to impress US prez

BRUSSELS, May 23, (Agencies): US President Donald Trump will press his NATO allies on Thursday to increase defence spending and take a more active role in the fight against Islamist terror.

Here are the expected main talking points during the brief summit at NATO’s new, futuristic headquarters on the outskirts of Brussels.

Washington and top US political figures have been demanding that the allies share more of the defence burden since NATO was set up in 1949 to hold back the Soviet Union.

Trump however has been unusually blunt, warning on the campaign trail he might first check whether an ally is up to date with its contributions before deciding to come to its aid.

That apparently less than full commitment to NATO’s core Article 5 “all for one, one for all” collective defence commitment caused consternation in Europe.

Dubbing NATO “obsolete” only added to dismay among allies who, marshalled by Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama, had committed to the biggest defence build-up since the end of the Cold War to counter a more aggressive Russia.

At their 2014 Wales summit, NATO leaders agreed to allocate two percent of economic output to defence annually within a decade.

So far, only the US, Britain, Greece, Poland and Estonia have met the target while the rest are doing their best to make up lost ground.

Washington spends some $650 billion a year on defence, equivalent to about 70 percent of the combined budgets of the 27 other NATO members.

European diplomatic sources say the allies want to have something to offer Trump, perhaps agreeing to annual defence spending reviews so as to encourage progress towards the two percent target.

Trump said NATO was “obsolete” because it was unsuited to what be believed to be the real threat of our times, Islamist terrorism.

That wrong-footed allies focused on Russia and who believed that by having joined the US-led anti-Islamic State coalition they were already on the front line in the war against jihadi groups.

Trump however wants NATO to take the next step and join the coalition itself to give a powerful symbol of political support for the campaigns in Syria and Iraq.

Trump

Non-combat

NATO currently provides AWACS surveillance planes to help anti-IS operations and trains officers in Iraq but it stresses that these are and should remain non-combat roles.

Diplomatic sources say some of the allies, including France and Germany, are reluctant to go further for fear of getting dragged into a fullyfledged ground war and risking NATO’s standing with Arab powers in the region.

They are also concerned NATO could end up taking over control of the whole operation in Iraq, just as it did in Afghanistan in 2003.

Afghanistan has since become NATO’s longest military commitment and it shows no signs of ending as a resurgent Taliban make deadly inroads against government forces.

Meanwhile, ribbon-cutting, jets overhead and a dinner in a new, billion-dollar headquarters: Donald Trump’s first meeting at NATO on Thursday is choreographed to impress a US president who called the Western alliance “obsolete”.

In a fortuitous twist, a series of NATO goals including a new HQ and expansion to include new member Montenegro have coalesced around Trump’s visit, which officials have kept free from the dense policy debates of their biennial summits.

“This is the moment to remind Trump that he’s the leader of the free world,” said a senior NATO diplomat involved in the preparations. “Gravitas is what the alliance does best.”

In that vein, Trump, a New Yorker, is expected to unveil a memorial to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, placed at the entrance to the new NATO building that has been almost two decades in the making at a cost of 1.1 billion euros ($1.2 billion).

NATO officials hope the steel wreckage from one of the Twin Towers will remind Trump that the only time the alliance has activated its collective defence clause was following the attacks on New York and Washington, a decision that also sent NATO into Afghanistan to fight the militants behind them.

In related news, hoping for the best, fearing the worst: EU and NATO leaders are braced for their first meeting with US President Donald Trump on their home turf on Thursday.

The trepidation in Brussels, a city Trump once dubbed a dangerous “hellhole,” is palpable as he has up-ended one long-held certainty about US ties after another.

On the campaign trail Trump dubbed NATO -- the US-led alliance credited with keeping the peace in Europe for the past 70 years -- “obsolete” and unsuited to tackling the real threat of Islamist terror, while he has since accused allies of not paying their way.