Nato leaders meet under shadow of widening trans-atlantic rift
BRUSSELS: Nato leaders meeting in Brussels on Wednesday and Thursday are taking important decisions aimed at showing unity and preparedness in the face of Russian aggression, but their summit is being overshadowed by one man: US President Donald Trump.
Trump is travelling to the summit with the core message that Nato’s other allies, and Germany in particular, must increase their defence spending — or else the US could reconsider its defence pledges to Europe, on which the world’s post-1945 order has been built.
Furthermore, the summit is Trump’s first stop on a European tour that culminates in a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on July 16 — the very leader whose actions have put Nato on high alert in recent years.
There is potential for the US president to deliver shocks at either meeting, according to Jan Techau of the German Marshall Fund, a think-tank. “A double whammy could seriously damage Nato [and] plunge the trans-atlantic relationship into deeper turmoil,” he wrote in a recent article. By comparison, Trump’s first Nato summit last year was an altogether pleasant affair with a few uncomfortable moments.
However, the rift between transatlantic partners has since widened amid tectonic shifts in the relationship.
Trump has withdrawn the US from the Iran nuclear agreement — an important deal for key European allies aimed at preventing Tehran from building a nuclear bomb — and has raised tariffs on steel and aluminium products from both the European Union and Canada.
If recent summits between Trump and traditional US allies are any indication of what could come, the Nato meeting might be a tense one in which the president could again find himself alienated from the rest of the group. While the US has long been pushing for fairer burdensharing among Nato allies, Trump has been especially outspoken about the issue,calling the alliance “obsolete” and labelling European allies as free-riders. “I’m going to tell Nato you gotta start paying your bills. The United States is not going to take care of everything,” he said on Thursday at a rally in the US state of Montana.
Nato does not have its own budget, but all 29 allies have agreed to a guideline of spending 2 per cent of gross domestic product on defence.
Eight allies are set to meet that target this year, Nato Secretarygeneral Jens Stoltenberg announced in February. However, the US leads the way by spending close to 4 per cent of GDP on defence.
Germany, a traditional laggard, is expected to come in at 1.24 per cent in 2018. Reading the signals out of Washington, Nato’s European allies have made strides in becoming more autonomous when it comes to defence, setting up a framework for joint military initiatives within the EU.
Of the EU’S 28 countries, 22 are also members of Nato, although the departure of Britain — one of the few European countries to have been meeting the 2-per-cent target — from the EU next year is set to change the balance. European Council President Donald Tusk recently urged EU countries to prepare for “worst-case scenarios” as “trans-atlantic relations are under immense pressure due to the policies of President Trump.”
Nato’s 29 leaders are meeting in Brussels on Wednesday to sign off on a series of initiatives to deter Russia, fight terrorism and equip the alliance for future challenges. But the question on everyone’s mind is: Is this the next global summit to fall victim to Trump?