As President Joe Biden and his aides plan events commemorating the 75th anniversary of NATO’s founding, which opens in Washington on Tuesday night, the aim is to create an atmosphere of confidence.
The message to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin and other potential adversaries is that more than two years into the war in Ukraine, a larger, more powerful group of Western allies has emerged that is more committed than ever To counterattack aggression.
But that confidence appears to be at risk as 38 world leaders begin arriving here on Monday. Even before the summit officially begins, uncertainty over whether Biden will remain in the re-election campaign and the looming possibility of a return by former President Donald J. Trump have cast a shadow over the summit.
Trump has declared NATO “obsolete,” threatened to withdraw from the alliance, and recently said he would let Russia “do whatever it wants” to any member he deemed not contributing enough to the alliance. In recent days, as Trump’s support has risen in post-debate polls, key European allies have begun discussing what a second Trump term might mean for the alliance and whether it can survive without U.S. weapons, finance and intelligence gathering to counter Russia.
On Tuesday night, Biden will greet leaders at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, a few blocks from the White House. The treaty that created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Mr. Biden was 6 years old at the time, and the Cold War was in its infancy.
Now 81, he is perhaps the most vocal advocate in Washington for building an alliance whose membership has grown from 12 in 1949 to 32 today as the era of superpower conflict returns. But when they come together Tuesday night, leaders will be watching Biden’s every move and listening to his every word for the same signals Americans are watching — whether he can stay in power for another four years.
Biden knows this and said in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Friday that he welcomed the scrutiny. “Who can unite NATO like me?” the president asked rhetorically. “I guess a good way to judge me,” he said, is by watching his performance at the summit and the reaction of his allies. “Come and listen. See what they say.
NATO leaders arrived acknowledging that the alliance was facing a test they had not anticipated: whether the alliance could reliably maintain the momentum it had built in support of Ukraine at a time when confidence in its most important actor was more fragile than ever.
They knew Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping were watching.
“NATO has never been, is not and never will be a given,” outgoing NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in a wide-ranging discussion with reporters on Sunday. “We have successfully done this for 75 years. I believe we can do this in the future. But it is about political leadership, about political commitment.
In the months leading up to the meeting, the coalition began hedging its bets on Trump’s reelection as president. It is setting up a new NATO command to ensure long-term arms and military aid to Ukraine even if the United States withdraws troops under Trump.
But in conversations with NATO leaders, it’s clear that their plans to modernize their forces and prepare for an era of potentially decades of confrontation with Russia are not accompanied by corresponding increases in military budgets.
More than 20 NATO members have now met the goal of spending 2% of their gross domestic product on defense, fulfilling commitments made by some members in response to Trump’s demands and by others in response to the reality of Russia’s invasion A commitment was made. Many Biden aides say that percentage — a goal set more than a decade ago when terrorism appeared to be the biggest threat — appears woefully inadequate for the current mission.
In Europe, Germany described plans to upgrade its military capabilities to deter Russian aggression, a shift from Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s pledge just weeks after the Russian invasion. But Mr. Scholz’s grand plan has yet to be matched by a budget, and the politics of engaging the public have proven so fraught that German officials have refused to put a price tag on it.
Carl Bildt, co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations and former Swedish prime minister, recently wrote that European countries “will need to double their budgets again to credibly contain the threat from an increasingly desperate Russian regime.”
Still, White House officials said Monday that Biden would not push for new military spending targets.
But the more pressing issue facing Biden and Scholz is avoiding another public spat with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky over how to describe Ukraine’s eventual membership of NATO.
Last year, while traveling to Vilnius, Lithuania, for NATO’s annual meeting, Zelensky expressed dissatisfaction with Ukraine’s lack of timetable for joining the alliance. He wrote on social media at the time: “Neither the invitation letter nor the timetable for Ukraine’s accession to the EU has been determined, which is unprecedented and ridiculous.”
When he arrived, he was temporarily reassured by the alliance’s promise that Ukraine could jump through some of the hoops other countries had to go through before joining.
But for months, NATO countries have been negotiating language to address the issue without risking allowing Ukraine to join during the war.
In recent weeks, negotiators have begun agreeing on a new approach: one in which the alliance is expected to declare Ukraine’s eventual membership of NATO “irreversible,” diplomats involved in the talks said.
While “irreversible” sounds clear, it does nothing to address Zelensky’s core demand – the date by which his country will come under the NATO umbrella.
Zelensky’s situation is clearly the most dire. But it’s not the only one.
Seventy-five years after NATO was founded to deter the threat posed by the Soviet Union in the early days of the Cold War, some current and potential future leaders among the alliance’s members appear to remain sympathetic to Russia’s diplomatic pleas despite Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban visited Russia in the past few days, and in public speeches with Putin, he did not make any criticism of Russia’s invasion or continued attacks on civilians. He signaled he would seek peace talks on terms similar to those demanded by Russia.
The White House criticized the visit on Monday. John F. Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said Orban’s visit was “clearly unproductive in trying to resolve the situation in Ukraine,” adding, “That’s concerning.”
But in order to avoid an open split within NATO on the eve of the summit, Stoltenberg did not criticize Orban, noting that “NATO allies interact with Moscow in different ways at different levels.”
However, he said trying to reach reconciliation while Putin was making progress in Ukraine would ultimately not lead to peace. “We all want peace,” Mr. Stoltenberg said. “It is always possible to end a war by losing it. But that will not bring peace, it will bring occupation, and occupation is not peace.
