Washington.- As NATO leaders met in Washington this week, one U.S. president hailed the 75-year-old defense alliance as the greatest “in the history of the world.”
Another described it as a virtual protection racket and said it would abandon “rogue” members to the mercy of Russian invaders.
President Biden was the official host, greeting his European and North American counterparts in Washington with smiles, handshakes and solidarity, posing for smile-gripping photos and boasting about the progress and principles underlying the historic partnership. Former President Donald J. Trump was nowhere to be seen, not taking part in the formal events but adding his voice from afar at a rally and in an interview.
“NATO’s continued standing as a bulwark of global security did not happen by accident,” Biden said at an opening ceremony at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, where the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in 1949. “It was not inevitable. Time and again, at critical moments, we chose unity over disunity, progress over regression, freedom over tyranny, and hope over fear. Time and again, we stood behind our shared vision of a peaceful and prosperous transatlantic community.”
Just two hours after Mr. Biden finished, Mr. Trump took the stage at a campaign rally in Doral, Florida, and denigrated the alliance. He made no mention of its contributions to history, its victory in the Cold War or its role in defending Europe today, as the war in Ukraine continues. Indeed, he acknowledged that he was largely unaware of the organization until he became president. But he later boasted that he had branded the allies as defaulters.
“I didn’t know what the hell NATO was before,” Trump told supporters. “But it didn’t take me long to figure it out, about two minutes. And the first thing I found out was that they weren’t paying. We were paying, we were paying almost entirely for NATO. And I said that was unfair.”
He then repeated a story he told in February to the shock of world leaders, saying that as president he had warned his NATO counterparts that he would not defend them if they did not increase their own military spending. “’Would you protect us?’” Mr Trump quoted another leader whose country had failed to meet a spending target. “I said, ‘No, I will not protect you from Russia.’”
Every recent American president has pushed NATO allies to spend more on their own militaries, but Mr. Trump is the only one who has threatened to let them be attacked by Russia. The notion that the United States would abrogate its mutual defense obligations under Article V of the NATO treaty has rattled the alliance.
During his tenure in the White House, Trump came close to pulling the United States out of NATO more than once, but was talked out of it by his advisers. But if he is elected again, he won’t have the same advisers around him. He may not even need to formally withdraw to effectively gut the alliance, since Article V would no longer be considered inviolable.
“President Trump still fails to understand that NATO is an alliance of democracies that believes in values,” said Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and a former U.S. ambassador to Russia. “This is not a protection racket. They don’t pay us to protect them.”
Indeed, as he has done repeatedly over the years, Mr. Trump distorted how NATO works, making it sound as if allies had to pay the United States. In reality, the issue has been how much each member should spend on its own military. And while his bullying may have been one reason some members increased their investments during his tenure, he exaggerated the progress made.
Mr. Biden, by contrast, has overseen a much larger increase in spending by NATO members. This, of course, may owe less to either American president than to Mr. Putin of Russia and the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which terrified European allies. But many European officials credit Mr. Biden with strengthening the alliance, which had frayed under Mr. Trump.
In Mr. Trump’s final year in office, just nine NATO members met the goal of spending 2% of their national economies on their military by 2024. Since Mr. Biden took office, that number has grown to 23. Mr. Biden also presided over the addition of two major new NATO members, Sweden and Finland, bringing the alliance to 32 members.
“This is remarkable progress,” Biden said, “proof that our commitment is broad and deep, that we are ready, willing and able to deter aggression and defend every inch of NATO territory across all domains: land, air, sea, cyberspace.”
Unsurprisingly, Trump sought to take credit for anything good that happened during Biden’s presidency. “I took the money that he’s spending now,” Trump told Fox News host Brian Kilmeade on his radio show. “If I hadn’t taken it, they wouldn’t even have a NATO to fight Russia. I put in all the money.”
Unlike Biden’s pledges to maintain aid to Ukraine, Trump offered no such words of support. Instead, as NATO leaders in Washington condemned Putin for his unprovoked war, which included an attack this week on a children’s hospital, Trump highlighted his close friendship with the Russian leader.
“You wouldn’t have had Ukraine attacked if I were president,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Kilmeade, a counterfactual view shared by few, if any, Russia experts who are not political supporters of Mr. Trump. “I wouldn’t have. I had a very good relationship with President Putin. We got along very well.”
Even as Mr. Biden conducted diplomacy, his campaign used the summit to attack Mr. Trump for his “very good relationship” with the Russian president. In a new online ad, the Biden campaign said Mr. Trump was “walking away from NATO” and “giving Putin the green light to attack whoever he wants.” It concluded: “Because that’s Donald Trump: a dictator’s lapdog who blames America first.”
Although Mr. Trump did not attend the meetings in Washington, he was scheduled to host one of the NATO leaders afterward. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whose authoritarian leadership has made him an outlier in Europe, was expected to fly to Florida after the alliance meeting to visit Mr. Trump.
But with the exception of Mr. Orban, experts and officials said, the presidents and prime ministers gathered for the anniversary feared the possibility that he would win again.
“You can’t spend five minutes in a conversation that doesn’t turn to the future of who’s going to be the next president,” McFaul said. “There’s a lot of anxiety right now within the NATO alliance about what will happen if Mr. Trump is re-elected.”
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