Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was far from Washington — campaigning in Florida, his home state, where he hosted Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on Thursday night. Despite that geographic distance, his shadow still loomed over the allies’ deliberations at this week’s NATO summit in the US capital. Concern about a possible 180-degree turn in US foreign policy in the event of a victory by the former president in the November presidential election, fueled by uncertainty over President Joe Biden’s physical condition, lay behind a series of steps taken by NATO leaders to protect aid to Ukraine and shield the Alliance itself from possible political swings if a highly critical former president returns.
Over the course of their three-day summit, the 32 countries have declared Ukraine’s path to membership “irreversible” and announced the delivery of new air defence equipment and F-16 aircraft. They have also agreed on measures that will transfer control and coordination of aid, until now more or less supervised by the United States, to NATO. A command based in Germany will be responsible for managing training, planning and coordinating the aid, which will be delivered to kyiv via Slovakia, Romania and Poland.
The allies have also signed a commitment to strengthen and coordinate their defence industries, a key objective to make Europe more self-sufficient in weapons should the United States, the organisation’s largest partner, reduce its contributions. Among other agreements, Germany, France, Italy and Poland have signed a memorandum of understanding to develop a new long-range ground-launched cruise missile.
And they have repeatedly stressed that the vast majority of members, 23, meet the minimum spending target of 2% of their GDP on defense, and the rest have plans to do so in the coming years. That the partners reach and even surpass that goal is one of Trump’s great fixations regarding the Alliance.
What might happen to US policy towards NATO was one of the big topics in the huddles at the convention centre in Washington and in the expert debates. Throughout the three days of the summit, every interview with the leaders or their ministers invariably contained a question about Biden’s physical and mental strength, in the face of calls from lawmakers in his own party for him to give up running for re-election. In more or less embellished form, the answer – with a few Hungarian exceptions – was an invariable “he is in good shape”.
Similarly, to questions about a possible return of Trump, the standard answers ranged from “we will see” to “the Alliance is solid, a change of government will not change anything.”
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The policies of the two candidates were clearly on display throughout the summit. “A strong NATO is fundamental to American security interests,” Biden argued in his closing press conference. The Democrat presented himself as the “most qualified candidate” to defend that strength and ensure that Ukraine prevails against the Russian invasion.
End the war “in 24 hours”
Trump, for his part, has repeatedly stated that if he returns to the presidency he will end the war “within 24 hours.” During his meeting with Orbán at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, the two discussed the alleged peace plan for Ukraine. “We discussed ways to achieve peace. The good news of the day: he will fix it!” the Hungarian prime minister said in a message on social media, along with a photo of the two of them. The Republican, in turn, also replied on social media. “Thank you, Viktor. There must be PEACE, and quickly.”
This week, the former president was once again very critical of the Alliance and its members at a rally in the wealthy Doral neighborhood, outside Miami. “I didn’t have much idea about what the hell NATO was before” becoming president, he stressed. “But it didn’t take me long to find out, like two minutes. And the first thing I understood was that they didn’t pay. We paid, almost all of NATO. And I said that’s unfair.” The Republican candidate went on to reiterate his threat to not respect Article 5, the mutual defense clause, if any of the countries that do not meet the defense spending target of more than 2% of GDP were attacked.
The candidate later qualified his words. In an interview with Fox News Radio, he denied that he plans to withdraw the United States from NATO — as was suggested more than once during his term. “No, what I want is for (the rest of the partners) to pay their defense bills,” he argued.
Outgoing NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg says he is not worried about the US commitment to the alliance if Trump wins in November. He says the alliance has the backing of a majority of lawmakers in the US Congress and most NATO members are meeting spending targets.
Trump’s allies have also sought to quell concerns about what would happen if the real estate mogul returned to the White House. Speaking at an event on the sidelines of the summit, Republican Senator Thom Tillis, co-chair of the NATO Observer Group in the US Senate, insisted that Trump was not considering leaving the alliance, and attributed the candidate’s rhetoric to mere electoral bluster. “It’s not a real threat,” he insisted, “let’s be clear: it’s not something he’s considering.”
Others were more skeptical. Trump “has said he will end the war in 24 hours, and that he will end it even before his inauguration. No one knows what that means. What we can be sure of is that it will not be like that, because [el presidente ruso, Vladímir] “Putin has no intention of ending the war in 24 hours, no matter what,” said Kurt Volker, former US ambassador to NATO, of the Centre for European Policy Analysis, in a talk on Friday.
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