President Trump Greets NATO

In January it was “obsolete.”  As recently as March, the president remarked, “We have the threat of terrorism and NATO doesn’t discuss terrorism…" But by the time of his first meeting last month with NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg, the president affirmed the United States’ commitment to the alliance, praised its seven-decade long history, said NATO is now doing more to fight terrorism and, as a result, he no longer thinks the organization is obsolete.  

I don’t know whether the president’s change of heart reflects a belief that NATO changed its strategy at his suggestion, but his rapid transformation comes as a great relief to our NATO allies, and it should also reassure us Americans. His military-heavy team of advisers no doubt had a hand in bringing the president to see that NATO is the one tool that binds an increasingly fractious Europe together and one that strengthens America’s hand vis-à-vis Russia.

President Trump’s “obsolete” assessment once wasn’t so far-fetched. After the collapse of the Soviet Union there was a furious debate over whether the alliance was still needed. After all, NATO had been created to, in the words of its first secretary general, “keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." With the Russians temporarily relegated to irrelevance, NATO’s reason for being was rightly questioned.  But in the intervening 26 years since the end of the Cold War, Russia has reverted from a pseudo-friendly role to the Putin-era adversary of today, and NATO has enlarged to embrace most of Russia’s former Warsaw Pact “allies.”

The White House announcement that President Trump will attend the May 25 NATO Summit and that he "looks forward to meeting with his NATO counterparts to reaffirm our strong commitment to NATO, and to discuss issues critical to the alliance, especially allied responsibility-sharing and NATO’s role in the fight against terrorism" came as a relief to many Alliance members. Europe is in turmoil – “BREXIT,” the flood of refugees from the Middle East and Afghanistan, the nationalist bent of democratic governments in Turkey, France, The Netherlands and Hungary – all these tectonic shifts make it appear that the very foundation of post-World War II security is crumbling. The president’s presence in Brussels will signal that he is gaining a sense of what NATO is, why it matters, and why we need it more than ever.

One of the president’s earliest misconceptions was that NATO doesn’t discuss terrorism. The President presumably has learned by now that, after the 9/11 attack, the NATO Council, for the first time in its history, invoked Article 5 of NATO’s Washington Treaty, which meant that the 9/11 attack on the U.S. was construed as an attack on all NATO nations. NATO immediately deployed to the U.S. the NATO Airborne Warning and Control (AWACS) fleet and NATO planes arrived the next day to help the U.S. determine if there were any more hijacked airliners out there.

He now may realize that NATO’s anti-terror role continued with the alliance taking over the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan – a mission that began in December 2001 and continued until 2015. In the ensuing years, NATO further branched out into counter-piracy operations off the coast of Somalia and counter-narcotics patrols and training off Africa’s west coast. 

Before he leaves for Brussels, the president presumably also will be briefed on how the alliance actually works. He’ll be dispelled of the notion that NATO is some sort of standing army. In fact, there are very few NATO forces. Everything NATO does is done by national military units provided to NATO-commanded missions like Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan.  

What NATO does provide is standardization, so that military forces from the nations can quickly operate together, using the same language (English), the same tactics, all the way down to using the same size bullets. When NATO’s civilian leaders authorize a NATO mission, the preparations have already been done in the course of countless simulations that produce NATO’s unique “interoperability” among the forces of the alliance members and such partners as Sweden, Finland and Switzerland.

Another misconception that the president perhaps has already cleared up in his mind involves NATO’s budget. In his March 17 meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the President referred to the commitment by NATO nations to spend two percent of their GDP for defense. But then he tweeted that Germany “owes vast sums of money to NATO” and that "many nations owe vast sums of money from past years…these nations must pay what they owe." Defense Secretary James Mattis told a NATO meeting that if the allies don’t pay their fair share, the U.S. will have to “moderate our commitment” to NATO. 

In reality, the NATO nations don’t “owe” anything to NATO. Its operating budget is not at issue. Instead, the president and Secretary Mattis were referring to the inadequate investment by allies in their own military capabilities. That surely will be a major theme at the Brussels summit.

But the implication that these “debts” somehow are linked to whether the U.S. will honor its Article 5 commitment landed like a bombshell not only in NATO capitals, but also in Moscow. For our allies, the idea that the United States would make our commitment conditional on whether the country being attacked was up to date on its funding struck at the heart of what NATO provides to all its members. 

If an adversary attacks, all NATO nations will unite in common defense. Newer members like the Baltic States and Poland, sitting on Russia’s border, absolutely rely on this commitment. Without that commitment, NATO fails. Implying that the U.S. might decide not to join in their defense effectively makes Article 5 meaningless and could tempt Putin to test our resolve.

So the president’s latest pronouncement that NATO isn’t obsolete after all is welcome news and suggests that he is hearing his military advisers. He may even have come to realize that his hoped-for rapprochement with Vladimir Putin is temporarily buried under the rubble of the Russian alliance with Syria’s Assad, Putin’s intransigence over Ukraine and Russia’s latest offers to the Taliban.

So the president goes to the Brussels summit hopefully better informed about NATO’s role in keeping Europe united in the face of all the internal and external forces that seek to pull it apart, that a Europe that is whole and relatively free is better for America than one which is disintegrating, and that the United States’ commitment to European stability provides us with a stronger hand in any talks that may ultimately emerge with Russia.

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Jack Segal was political adviser to NATO’s operational commander from 2000-2010.  He and his wife, Karen Puschel, co-chair the International Affairs Forum whose next speaker on May 18 is former National Intelligence Council adviser, Sam Visner, speaking about “The Cybersecurity Storm Front.”

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