Fresh off announcing his second Supreme Court nominee, President Trump will arrive in Brussels Tuesday afternoon for another noteworthy moment in his presidency: a crucial two-day summit with longstanding NATO allies who are hoping to ease tensions and steer the U.S. leader toward a display of unity.
Trump is expected to leave a mark on what administration officials have described as one of the most “substantive and meaty” summits the 69-year-old alliance has ever held. Just prior to leaving for Brussels, the president restated his frustration with NATO allies that have failed to meet his demand for more equitable defense spending.
“The United States is spending far more on NATO than any other Country. This is not fair, nor is it acceptable,” he wrote. “While these countries have been increasing their contributions since I took office, they must do much more. Germany is at 1%, the U.S. is at 4%, and NATO benefits Europe far more than it does the U.S.”
Complaints about NATO have become a recurring line during Trump’s campaign rallies and joint press conferences with European leaders. Only five of its 28 members — Greece, Britain, Estonia, Poland, and the U.S. — currently meet the organization’s the self-imposed goal of defense spending equal to at least 2 percent gross domestic product.
But in the weeks leading up to this year’s summit, the president has gone so far as to hint that the U.S. might scale back its role as a security umbrella if certain countries decline to increase their defense spending.
“The major concern is that [Trump] will continue to insist this is a glass-half-empty situation, and that might mean the U.S. moderates its troop presence or takes other measures,” said Magnus Nordenman, director of the Atlantic Council’s Transatlantic Security Initiative. “Were that to happen, insecurity in Europe would increase because the backbone of NATO deterrence is the U.S. and its military.”
Pentagon officials and the president have rebuffed suggestions that his administration is looking to reduce or relocate American troops in Europe if NATO nations decline to spend at least 2 percent of their GDP on defense expenditures. But the president has simultaneously referred to the trans-Atlantic alliance as “obsolete” and took time to pen individual letters ahead of this week’s summit to leaders whose countries have yet to meet the two percent threshold.
Some viewed the letters as unusually stern, despite Trump’s attempt to address the domestic pressures some foreign leaders are facing and thank them for positive steps they have taken. Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michael, one recipient of the president’s written warning, told reporters earlier this month he was “not very impressed.”
In his letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, for example, the president said her country’s “underspending on defense undermines the security of the [NATO] alliance and provides validation for other allies that also do not plan to meet their military spending commitments.”
“Growing frustration is not confined to our executive branch. The United States Congress is concerned, as well,” Trump wrote.
Nordenman said the letters were “rather to-the-point,” but achieved the president’s desired goal of raising the temperature in a “constructive” way.
But he cautioned that the latest international gathering Trump will partake in follows “a G-7 meeting that went poorly, a lot of tweets about NATO being a burden on the U.S., and [occurs days ahead] of the upcoming Putin-Trump summit.”
“So these letters arrived in the context of pre-existing tensions and a recent track record of things that have not gone well with the U.S. and its allies.”
The question of whether Trump will choose to pursue the defense spending issue in public or private bilateral meetings this week looms large over the NATO summit. Some former diplomats have contended that the president might be prepared to abandon the alliance if he believes the U.S. is going to continue to be shortchanged, despite his incessant calls for equitable burden-sharing.
“The biggest of the allies doesn’t just have a disagreement with us, but he actually seems willing to walk away,” former Slovak Ambassador to NATO Tomas Valasek told the New York Times over the weekend.
A source close to the administration said the topic of inadequate contributions to the security alliance “is probably going to come up within the first three minutes” of Trump’s remarks when he speaks to fellow NATO members at the summit. “Privately he’ll be nice, but firm on that,” the source said.
White House allies urged Trump to avoid disrupting the summit with harsh rhetoric, claiming disparaging tweets and sharp comments that focus too little on the purpose of the alliance itself would be the wrong habits to take with him overseas.
“Private diplomacy would work better than having a very tough opening speech or bashing our European allies on Twitter like he did with [Canadian Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau,” said Harry Kazianis, director of the defense studies at the Center for the National Interest, referring to a tweet in which the president called Trudeau “dishonest and weak.”
The goal of ensuring each NATO nation spends 2 percent of its GDP on defense was created as a 10-year program, leading some European countries to respond to Trump’s demand by pointing to their gradual process. Germany has previously said it intends to boost its military spending to 1.5 percent of GDP by 2024, a 0.4 percent increase since 2015, but still short of the overall target. Because of the size of its economy, German officials have previously said 1.5 percent would make them the second-largest contributor to NATO behind the U.S., which spent $685 billion in 2017.
“We are still going to be very much a part of NATO for the foreseeable future. That is not going to change, but I think the actual burden of the alliance needs to be shifted from America to Europe,” Kazianis said. “I don’t see the U.S. pulling back its nuclear umbrella or withdrawing from NATO, but when you have countries that are very rich have very different priorities, it is difficult for the U.S. to be spending what we are.”
He continued, “There could even be some negotiations at the summit about that 2 percent figure. The Germans could make sure their Air Force works, or that they and others are putting troops through the proper training. Military capability is more important than anything else.”
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis appeared to share that sentiment in a letter to his British counterpart last month, in which he reportedly expressed concern that the United Kingdom’s military strength was “at risk of erosion” if defense spending continues at its current level.
U.S. allies are also on edge ahead of the summit in Brussels because of Trump’s scheduled sit-down with Russian President Vladimir Putin just days later in Helsinki and recent disputes over the administration’s actions on trade. The president will meet one-on-one with his Russian counterpart to discuss relations between the two countries, and any positive remarks by the two men on the heels of a tense summit between the U.S and its closest European allies would likely rattle the international order.
