As NATO convenes, leaders worry about a hole in its center

Washington: When President Joe Biden and his aides planned the 75th anniversary of NATO, which opens Tuesday evening in Washington, it was intended to create an aura of confidence.

The message to President Vladimir Putin of Russia and other potential adversaries would be that a larger, more powerful group of Western allies had emerged, after more than two years of war in Ukraine, more dedicated than ever to pushing back on aggression.

But as 38 world leaders began arriving Monday, that confidence seems at risk. Even before the summit formally begins, it has been overshadowed by the uncertainty about whether Biden will remain in the race for a second term, and the looming possibility of the return of former President Donald Trump.

Trump once declared NATO “obsolete,” threatened to exit the alliance and more recently said he would let the Russians do “whatever the hell they want” to any member country he deemed to be insufficiently contributing to the alliance. In recent days, as Trump has edged up in post-debate polls, key European allies have begun discussing what a second Trump term might mean for the alliance— and whether it could take on Russia without US arms, money and intelligence-gathering at its center.

Biden will greet the leaders in the vast Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium a few blocks from the White House on Tuesday night— the same room where the treaty creating NATO was signed in 1949, in a ceremony presided over by President Harry S. Truman. Biden was 6 years old at the time, and the Cold War was in its infancy.

He is now 81 and perhaps the most vocal advocate in Washington for an alliance that has grown from 12 members in 1949 to 32 today as the era of superpower conflict has roared back. But as they gather Tuesday evening, the leaders will be watching Biden’s every move and listening to his every word for the same signals Americans are focused on— whether he can go the distance of another four years in office.

Biden knows that, and said in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC on Friday that he welcomed the scrutiny. “Who’s going to hold NATO together like me?” the president asked rhetorically. “I guess a good way to judge me,” he said, is to watch him at the summit— and to see how the allies react. “Come listen. See what they say.”

As they arrived, NATO leaders acknowledged that the alliance was facing a test they did not anticipate: whether it could credibly maintain the momentum it has built in supporting Ukraine when confidence in its most important player has never been more fragile.

And they know that Putin and Xi Jinping, China’s leader, are watching as well.

“NATO has never been, and is not, and will never be, a given,” Jens Stoltenberg, the outgoing secretary-general of the alliance, said Sunday in a wide-ranging discussion with journalists. “We have done so successfully 75 years. I’m confident that we can do so also in the future. But it’s about political leadership, it’s about political commitment.”

Months before the meeting, the alliance began hedging its bets in case of a second Trump presidency. It is setting up a new NATO command to ensure a long-term supply of arms and military aid to Ukraine even if the United States, under Trump, pulls back.

But in conversations with NATO leaders, it is clear that their plans to modernize their forces and prepare for an era that could be marked by decades of confrontation with Russia are not matched by commensurate increases in their military budgets.

More than 20 NATO members have now reached the goal of spending 2 per cent of their gross national product on defense, making good on pledges that some made in response to Trump’s demands, and others to the realities of Russia’s invasion. That percentage— a goal established more than a decade ago, in an era when terrorism appeared to be the biggest threat— seems wildly undersized to the task at hand, many of Biden’s aides say.

In Europe, Germany has described plans for upgrading its military capabilities to deter Russian aggression, a transformation promised by Chancellor Olaf Scholz in the weeks after the Russian invasion. But Scholz’s grand plans have yet to be matched by a budget to pay for them, and the politics of bringing the public along have proved so fraught that German officials resist putting a price tag on them.

Carl Bildt, the co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations and a former prime minister of Sweden, wrote recently that European nations “will need to double” their budgets “yet again in order to credibly deter threats from an increasingly desperate Russian regime.”