Why Nato fears for its future America could scale back its involvement under Trump

Small wonder, then that American domestic politics loomed large. Held just days ahead of the Republican National Convention, the gathering was timed perfectly to allow Nato leadership to ensure one of their key points for this year — that many hitherto freeloading allies had stepped up their defence spending — would be fresh in the minds of its Republican critics. Back during the now infamous 2018 summit, Trump lambasted flunkies for not paying their fair share and even threatened to withdraw the US from the alliance. This year, though, Nato leaders could boast that at least 20 out of 32 member states would be spending 2% of their GDP on defence. Both anxious Atlanticists and Nato sceptics would be reassured that the alliance was, as Stoltenberg said, adaptive and agile; it would endure, regardless of dramatic changes in political leadership in its member states. And it was responsive both to events on the ground and internal criticism.

But efforts to make the event about the steadiness and durability of Nato — a rare fulcrum of stability in an unpredictable world — were challenged by mounting concerns about the cognitive fitness of 81-year-old President Biden. Despite the usual pomp and pathos, along with attempts to pander to Trump Republicans, inevitably, it became a referendum on Biden’s age. Then, during the brief interlude between the summit and the start of the Republican National Convention, an assassination attempt on Trump’s life made it clear that there would be no assurances forthcoming about Nato’s future, that nothing would be predictable.

Things had begun on a triumphant note, in the Mellon Auditorium in Washington, where the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in 1949. There was no shortage of grandiosity on display. “The most successful military alliance in history”, claimed Stoltenberg, had now become the longest-lasting — outliving even the Delian League of ancient Greek city-states. The auditorium looked like Nato’s holy temple, with Biden describing the US commitment to the Alliance as a “sacred obligation”. His performance was better than at last month’s debate, but it wasn’t reassuring. His eyes were glued to the teleprompter as he seesawed back and forth between jingoistic shouting and barely audible, indecipherable mumbling. He managed to muddle through.

The President’s lapses of memory and coherence weren’t such  a surprise. Earlier this year, Biden twice referred to dead European leaders — former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and former French President François Mitterrand — when referring to recent discussions with foreign counterparts. At the summit, Biden did not mistake contemporary leaders for those long dead, but he did confuse allies with enemies, calling Ukrainian President Zelensky “Putin” and Kamala Harris “Vice President Trump”.

With Biden faltering so badly, the spectre of a new Nato-sceptic Trump administration drew closer, prompting some of the more hawkish member states to tailor their talking points to address the Republicans. At one panel composed of the three top defence officials from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, participants spoke in a language they knew the Trump camp would understand: golf. “Nato is a club,” Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur said. “When you have club rules, then you respect the rules and you expect that everyone will also respect the rules. When you pay your fee in the golf club, you can play. It doesn’t matter how big is your wallet.” They hammered away at the idea of all those members who were now spending 2% of GDP on defence, hoping to convince Republicans that Europe was now pulling its weight. And yet, as international relations theorist Patrick Porter told me, this “magical 2% figure” was arrived at with full US commitment in mind. Europeans are still avoiding the difficult question: if America scales back its commitments in Europe under a Trump presidency — many in his camp advocate for a “pivot to Taiwan” and a shift of focus to the Indo-Pacific — who will fill in the gap?

In fact, much of the summit did seem to be a carefully calibrated pitch to America — or at least those Nato sceptics at the RNC. Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti, whose country is a Nato aspirant, wrote a front-page op-ed in the New York Times with the title “Don’t Doubt NATO, it Saved My People”, outlining the role the alliance played in ending the Kosovo conflict in 1999. Meanwhile, Latvia’s President Edgars Rinkevics addressed the criticism that the US does much more than Europe to support Ukraine, claiming that in truth, it was the other way around. “It’s also very important to explain to the American public,” Rinkevics said in a speech on Tuesday. European Atlanticists fear an American retreat from the continent under Trump, who has complained that Europe has given too little aid to Ukraine, while the United States has given too much.

The contentious subject of Ukraine’s future membership in Nato was the other big theme of the summit. Germany and the United States are unwilling to extend full Nato membership while Ukraine is still at war with Russia. Instead, they say, Ukraine should be granted a “bridge to Nato”, a nebulous promise that fell far from aspirations of full membership that Ukraine has been waiting for since 2008. However, some felt the language of the communique was made stronger by the insertion of the word “irreversible”: apparently the bridge to Nato can only be crossed in one direction. But the Ukraine section of the Washington Summit Declaration, published last week, was ambiguous about its future. “We reaffirm that we will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met.”

Meanwhile, Ukraine and its supporters in Eastern Europe are adamant that the country be granted membership, or at least a timetable for it. Only full membership, they claim, can deter Russia. Some suggest that Article 5 security guarantees — the provision that states that an attack on one member state is an attack on all — be introduced incrementally, first on territory already under Ukrainian command, and eventually under those parts of the country Zelensky’s forces win back.

But critics counter that admitting Ukraine risks triggering all-out war with Russia. They contend that membership would make it far more difficult to negotiate a ceasefire or engage in peace talks, since Russia has long insisted that Ukraine in Nato is a “red line”. And they point out that, contra the exalted Atlanticist rhetoric surrounding the current war, Nato has no intention of fighting for Ukraine. And if Nato is not committed to entering the war now, as Ukraine is fighting for its life, then it certainly isn’t going to make any promises about some undefined point in the future. They suggest a dialing down of the rhetoric and scaling of expectations. In fact, dozens of foreign policy experts signed a controversial letter ahead of the summit urging caution. “If Ukraine were to join NATO, Russia would have reason to doubt the credibility of NATO’s security guarantee — and would gain an opportunity to test and potentially rupture the alliance. The result could be a direct NATO-Russia war or the unraveling of NATO itself.”

Notwithstanding membership, Ukraine won’t leave the summit empty-handed. Nato has pledged five strategic air defence systems over the coming year, as well as F-16 fighter jets. These will be donated under the proviso that they can’t be used to strike targets inside Russia. Along with the equipment, a new Ukraine command, staffed with 700 employees, will be established in Germany, and Nato will deputise a senior representative to Kyiv. Ukraine will also receive at least €40 billion of assistance within the next year. The Alliance is also looking to “Trump proof” its assistance for Ukraine and will take over coordination of military aid for Ukraine through the Ukraine Defence Contact Group, a role hitherto played by the US Department of Defence. This reorganisation was made to ensure that Ukraine will continue to receive military aid, even if a new Trump administration decides to cut it.

With Biden’s cognitive state drawing all media attention, some significant developments received far less scrutiny. There was, for example, a joint-statement by the US and German governments announcing that the US would, in 2026, begin “episodic deployments” to Germany of long-range missiles, including SM-6, Tomahawk, and developmental hypersonic weapons. Some of these weapons have a range that would have seen them banned under the defunct Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987. Russia’s response to news of the planned deployments was dramatic. “Without nerves, without emotions, we will develop a military response, first of all, to this new game,” deputy minister, Sergei A. Ryabkov, told Interfax. But what was most remarkable about news of the imminent deployment was how closely it echoed events of the Cold War — but with one glaring difference. During the early Eighties, the United States began deploying Pershing II missiles to West Germany. The news was met with deep anger by the European Left. More than one million people took to the streets in West Germany as weeks of demonstrations also swept through Paris, Stockholm, Rome, and London.

Today, in contrast, the announcement was met with comparative silence. This is doubtless down to the fact that the Left is being slowly absorbed into the Nato project. All four of Nato’s newest member states — Sweden, Finland, North Macedonia and Montenegro — opted to join with Social Democratic-led governments in power. Emblematic of this shift are the German Greens. One former party leader, Petra Kelly, was a star of the anti-missile protests in West Germany, yet some 40 years on, the Greens are now among the most hawkishly Atlanticist in Europe. Meanwhile, many peace initiatives and calls for a ceasefire in Ukraine have come from the Right. Hungary’s Viktor Orban has been on a self-styled “peace mission” in recent weeks, visiting Moscow, Kyiv, and Trump in Mar-a-Lago in an effort to bring the warring parties to the negotiating table. Orban and his ilk are not the dedicated anti-war activists of the Cold War. They support conflict; they just don’t like this one, which they view as an unwinnable liberal pet project. But broad swathes of the Left have also proved inconsistent: they may say they dislike the foreign policy of the United States, but they have uncritically embraced a military alliance that ensures its hegemony over Europe.

As Biden stumbled through his final, possibly terminal, press conference, he did manage to make one clear point: that Trump and his ilk were a threat to Nato. Why the average American voter should care as much as the tbose assembled in Washington, he did not say. And while the eyes of the world watched this very public demonstration of his vulnerability, it was clear that the future of Nato and the entire transatlantic order will be determined by who is elected president in November. The summit that was supposed to be a celebration of the alliance’s stability and longevity was instead a testament to its frailty.