When President Trump makes his first appearance at a meeting on Thursday of a NATO alliance he once described as “obsolete,” he will face another high-profile test of his ability to apply the “America First” agenda while cooperating with others.
Trump has tempered his tone on NATO since taking office, walking back his claim that the alliance has outlived its utility and reaffirming the U.S. commitment to its collective goals.
But he has not shed his demand that NATO countries meet minimum spending requirements for their militaries, and he has consistently argued that the U.S. cannot and should not pick up the slack for countries that are unwilling to provide for their own defenses.
“My sense is that, he will be very hard on the Europeans on military spending,” said Andras Simonyi, managing director of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at Johns Hopkins University and former Hungarian ambassador to NATO. “I think he will be very clear about the 2 percent [of their GDPs] as a minimum.”
Trump’s drive to increase NATO nations’ defense spending has been one of several ways he has threaded the needle between the inherently unilateral foreign policy agenda that he developed during the presidential race and his country’s multilateral commitments. The president straddled those two ideals on Sunday with a speech — which promoted a philosophy he described as “principled realism” — to Arab leaders in Riyadh. The speech was aimed at encouraging Middle Eastern allies to assume more responsibility for the fight against Islamic terrorism.
Magnus Nordenman, director of the Transatlantic Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council, said NATO has moved “in the right direction” thanks to Trump’s previous pressure but noted countries may go further on Thursday to show the president their progress.
“What we should be looking for from a U.S. perspective is a new commitment by the Europeans of better burden-sharing,” Nordenman said. “This is obviously central to President Trump, and it was central to him during his election campaign.”
Weeks before Trump departed Washington for his five-country tour, his national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, attempted to relieve the tension between the isolationist connotation of Trump’s campaign-era foreign policy slogan and the need for a restoration of U.S. leadership around the world.
“President Trump understands that ‘America First’ does not mean America alone,” McMaster said on May 12. “To the contrary, prioritizing America’s interests means strengthening alliances.”
One of Trump’s top priorities, eradicating the Islamic State, will require global cooperation among allies, as Trump has already acknowledged during the first three legs of his trip. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters on Wednesday that the president would like to see NATO take on a more active role in the coalition to defeat terrorism, although he stopped short of predicting that the role would be defined during the meeting this week.
Nordenman said individual NATO countries have participated in coalition efforts to advise and train forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and other places where the Islamic State is active.
“As an institution, there are additional things that NATO can bring to the table,” Nordenman noted, adding that the issue of what more NATO can do to fight terrorism will likely come up in Brussels.
Enlisting allies in the battle against extremism stood out as a theme of Trump’s time in Saudi Arabia and Israel earlier this week. So, too, did his pledge that America would re-emerge as a global leader after years of what he has described as a weakening of U.S. standing around the world.
Trump is likely to telegraph a similar message to NATO.
“I expect the president of the United States to make one thing clear: that the United States is back in its leadership role and that it will want to lead the alliance, period,” Simonyi said of the upcoming meeting.
After months of uncertainty as to how the unconventional American president would approach their conventional institution, NATO leaders may be hoping for a display of allegiance from Trump this week.
Nordenman said other leaders at the conference will watch Trump on Thursday for signs of dedication to NATO’s traditional obligations.
“The Europeans will be looking for one thing, and that is a clear American signal about U.S. commitment to European security,” he said. “They’ve already heard good things from Secretary Mattis and Secretary Tillerson and Vice President Pence … but obviously at the end of the day, the voice that really matters here is that of the president of the United States.”
Many of the heads of state who greet Trump in Brussels on Thursday will also want to assess how the new president conducts himself in such an unfamiliar environment, Nordenman noted.
“It will remain unsaid, but in the back of all the Europeans’ minds will be — they will be looking for: ‘How does President Trump behave, and how does he present himself in Brussels?'” Nordenman said. “I think so far what we’ve seen on this trip … the president is doing quite well right now.”
