NATO aims to celebrate 70th anniversary — minus fireworks
BRUSSELS — NATO leaders are gathering in London on Tuesday to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the military alliance — and organizers are hoping to avoid any fireworks.
Nervousness is running high about President Donald Trump’s commitment to the alliance, which was founded to defend Europe from the Soviet Union and has evolved to take on security issues beyond the continent.
At previous NATO meetings, Trump declined to affirm the Article 5 principle that an attack on one is an attack on all, and he intimated that he would pull the United States out if Europeans didn’t spend more on their own defense.
Organizers are fighting a multifront battle against slinged arrows f rom friends, with French President Emmanuel Macron joining the fray with gusto. The French leader has been incensed by the lack of coordination by the United States with its allies, in Syria and elsewhere, and in an interview last month declared NATO had suffered “brain death.”
A NATO diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity to sum up dyspepsia i nside t he group’s glassy Brussels headquarters, said, “There’s a 50-50 chance that this goes south,” with both Trump and Macron taking a dash at the alliance’s fine china.
Every last detail of this anniversary get-together has been choreographed to ensure that Trump’s happiness will be maximized and any opportunities to blow up the program, or the alliance, minimized.
Organizers are trying to keep things tight and bright.
NATO leaders will get a dose of regal hospitality at a Buckingham Palace reception with Queen Elizabeth II on Tuesday evening.
Instead of two days of meetings, as is common for full-fledged summits, there will be a single three-hour session at an 18th-century estate outside London on Wednesday morning.
The agenda has been tailored to Trump’s interests. There’s a symbolic concession from Germany to save U.S. cash by spending more to pay to keep
NATO’s lights on — which diplomats hope Trump will seize as a victory out of proportion with its size.
There’s also a report that looks at China’s role as a challenge for the alliance. And defense spending figures have been calculated to emphasize Trump’s influence in getting allies to share the burden.
Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said at a Friday news conference that the 28 non-U.S. members of NATO have invested $130 billion in their defense since 2016 — an unusual way of presented spending increases that started after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.
NATO diplomats say privately that the 2016 peg is for Trump’s benefit. They acknowledge that Trump’s spend-more- or- else approach has scared up more defense expenditures.
The U.S. administration has been glad to take credit.
“We’ve done amazing work over our time in office to get NATO to step up, those countries to spend more money to secure themselves and to secure the world,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News on Monday.