Trump disrupts NATO summit, criticises Theresa May. Now it’s Putin’s turn
When Donald Trump meets Russia’s Vladimir Putin, allied hearts will skip a beat.
Is the West, as a strategic or even a cultural entity, starting to unravel at last?
US President Donald Trump is never so scary to his allies as when he meets a ruthless dictator who can engage in man love, in mutual admiration and hail-fellow-tough-man-well-met bonhomie and outrageous personalised flattery.
So when Trump meets Russia’s Vladimir Putin on Monday, allied hearts will skip a beat, feel a tremble, take up residence in allied leaders’ mouths.
But after this astonishing week of Trump in Europe, it may be that the allied leaders will be happy that Putin has to deal with him.
Because, as we are learning, even ruthless dictators who flatter Trump shamelessly cannot rely on concessions he seemingly makes to them.
But first we must register this astonishing week of Trump in Europe, Trump with NATO and now Trump in Britain. In every case he said things which is it unimaginable that any president could have said before.
Some of the things he said were true, and he was brave to say them. Some were nuts, and he was mad to say them. Some were false, and he was dishonest to say them. Some of the things he said contradicted other things he said, and some contradicted statements by senior administration officials.
Trump as President is doing a great deal of good and a good deal of bad. Judging the balance is exceptionally difficult. If you denounce Trump you are denying the good, if you endorse Trump you are denying the bad. Yet the essence of strategic effect is correctly diagnosing reality.
Trump’s statements got stronger and more unconventional the longer he was in Europe. He began the NATO summit by denouncing Germany. Trump said: “Germany … is captive to Russia because it’s getting so much energy from Russia … It’s very sad when Germany makes a massive oil and gas deal with Russia where you’re supposed to be guarding against Russia, and Germany goes out and pays billions and billions of dollars a year to Russia.
“We protect you against Russia yet Germany pays billions to Russia. That’s very inappropriate. It should never have been allowed to happen. Germany is totally controlled by Russia.”
There is a lot of truth in what Trump is saying here about Germany, but there is also wild, wild overstatement. Four critical questions emerge from the remarks: will they induce Germany to change its behaviour in a way that Trump wants, will they reduce German popular support for the alliance, will they reduce American popular support for the alliance, and does Trump intend to continue with highly inflammatory, overstated rhetoric, which he often reverses a few days later, for the entirety of his presidency?
These all feed into the larger geostrategic question about him: will the net effect of Trump be to enhance global security through a series of discrete actions and tough negotiations, or will he gravely weaken global security by undermining the US alliance system?
Trump berated all the US’s European allies for not spending enough on defence. NATO has long had a standard that every one of its 29 members should spend 2 per cent of their respective GDPs on defence. The figure can be criticised as a crude measure of military effectiveness. But overall it is as good a measure as any other.
On the most generous assessment, holding the figures up just the right way and looking on them kindly, five European NATO members meet the 2 per cent mark. At $US700 billion, the US spends closer to 3.7 per cent of its GDP on defence. In fact, this understates what the US really spends on defence. The US Energy Department alone spends tens of billions of dollars a year on US nuclear weapons. And the US defence effort is so vast that it involves huge swathes of industry and even academic participation.
In Europe, Trump said: “It’s an unfair burden on us. Take a look at the chart. Many countries owe us a tremendous amount of money. They are delinquent for 10 or 20 years. Add it all up.” He further said the amounts of money European NATO nations had committed to increase their defence budgets by were “very small compared to what they owe and what they should be paying”.
He also said that the US often provided 80 or 90 per cent of NATO’s costs. He called for European allies to lift their commitments from 2 per cent to 4 per cent.
Once again, the substance of what Trump is saying is right, though a rather huge amount of the detail is wrong. Almost every serious participant in the security debate agrees that the rich nations of western Europe gravely underspend on defence and are in some measure “free riders” on US security. The NATO standard of 2 per cent has existed for a long time and has been almost universally honoured in the breach, Britain being the most notable and honourable exception. NATO nations have mostly committed to reaching the 2 per cent target by 2024, which is a typical on the never-never promise from Europe.
One of the details Trump got wrong is that the US provides 22 per cent rather than 90 per cent of NATO’s expenses. Trump never bothers to master detail like this. But he is nonetheless right in substance. What Trump presumably means by NATO expenses or budget is not the NATO budget but the combined defence expenditure of all NATO members.
Presumably what he means is the total combined military spending of the US compared with the combined military spending of the other NATO members. This is a legitimate measure for Trump to refer to, as it indicates the disparity in effort between the US and the rich but indolent Europeans. And in any real military or security crisis, it’s the totality of the assets you can bring to the table, the size of the dog you can put in the fight, that makes all the difference.
One of the worst European offenders again is Germany, which spends a pathetic 1.25 per cent of its GDP on defence. Nobody utters banal cliches and fudged versions of the conventional wisdom more frequently or with more seeming gravity than Chancellor Angela Merkel. But her recent record is awful. More than anyone else in Europe, she contributed to creating the illegal immigrant crisis, which she then tried to reverse by bribing Turkey to stop asylum- seekers coming through.
She poses as a champion of the Atlantic alliance and speaks with, for her, moving personal involvement about how she saw the awful reality of part of Germany being once under Soviet domination; she commits herself to resisting Russian aggression in Crimea; and yet she signs extravagantly beneficial energy deals with Russia and spends this risible proportion of her national resources on defence.
Trump didn’t invent this longstanding American complaint about the NATO allies. Big European economies such as Italy and Spain spend an even smaller proportion of their national wealth on defence than Germany. Within the limits of the formal politeness they always observed in international affairs, Barack Obama and George W. Bush also complained bitterly to the Europeans about their defence delinquency.
So despite the unfriendly language, Trump has an enormous measure of justice on his side in his complaints to NATO’s European members.
But then, after making all these complaints and reportedly threatening to withdraw the US from NATO, Trump declared victory the next day, saying the NATO members had all promised to do much more. As usual, the details were scant, vague, airy and apparently meaningless. He talked about another $US30bn in pledges. But the actual joint communique Trump and the other NATO leaders signed contained no such pledge. French President Emmanuel Macron almost immediately contradicted Trump and said nothing beyond the pledge for 2024 had been agreed.
This seemed to be a disturbing repeat of the Kim Jong-un syndrome. Trump identifies a real problem, like North Korean nukes. He threatens “fire and fury”. He holds a highly choreographed summit. He then emerges from this summit lavishly praising the magical personal chemistry he brought to bear, and declares the problem solved.
Yet in the North Korean case, it is clear that so far Kim has done absolutely nothing. The very easiest thing, a million times easier than giving up his nukes, is returning the identified remains of US servicemen killed in the Korean War. At one time Trump, as ever misinformed about the detail, claimed that Kim had already returned these remains. In fact the North Koreans just this week didn’t even show up for a meeting with American officials on this very issue and are now asking for general UN talks on repatriating remains.
Kim has got to be a bit careful here not to overplay his hand. If he doesn’t engage in some sort of public pantomime, even Trump’s intense personal investment in declaring his summit with the North Korean dictator a success will not withstand the clash with reality.
It is tempting indeed to see Trump operating a very high-octane version of the celebrity diplomacy that Obama engaged in with such dolorous consequences. Obama, like Trump, was interested above all in the media moment, admittedly a media moment fashioned very differently from Trump’s media moments.
Obama delivered a grand speech about his Asia pivot but never implemented it; he was so committed to getting a deal with Iran that his red lines were constantly moved backwards; he was so committed to posturing on climate change that he signed up to deals that imposed no restrictions on the biggest emitters apart from the US; and of course he could not get the US congress to ratify anything he did anyway.
Like Trump, Obama apparently believed, and certainly promulgated, the fantasy that his special personality could create geostrategic change.
After NATO, Trump went to Britain, where his comments were even more astonishingly undiplomatic. In the wake of Boris Johnson’s resignation from the British cabinet, Trump had already described Britain as “somewhat in turmoil”. Theresa May would have hated that, because after the two cabinet resignations her priority above all was to project a sense of business-as-usual about her government.
When he got to Britain, Trump gave an interview to The Sun in which he said the soft Brexit that May got her cabinet to agree to at Chequers meant there could be no US-UK free trade agreement. He added that he had told May how to do Brexit but she didn’t listen to him. Her approach was “killing off Brexit”. He also said that London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan had done a terrible job on terrorism. And that Europe was killing off its culture by allowing in too many of the wrong immigrants.
And just for good measure, he opined that Johnson “would make a great prime minister”.
It may well be that in the context of British politics, Trump has hurt Johnson’s prospects. But he has certainly also hurt May.
And that is a disturbing pattern with Trump. He hurts allies all too often and very frequently for no benefit. What all this does to the US-Britain alliance over time is impossible to know.
On Monday, Trump gets to have his summit with Putin, including a one-on-one session with no advisers in the room. The only other international leaders Trump ever really speaks well of are dictators, the bloodier the better. He likes China’s Xi Jinping but he absolutely loved Kim Jong-un. And he has always liked Putin.
There are a number of concessions allies are worried Trump could unilaterally give to Putin. He has already called for Russia to be readmitted into the G7. He might say something that seems to justify Moscow’s military conquest of Crimea. He might well say something about his desire to bring US troops out of Europe, or out of Syria or Afghanistan.
In all three situations there is a case for US troop drawdown, but to give it as a concession to Putin would be bizarre.
The conspiracy theory has it that Trump will do something for Putin because the Russians have some devastating information on Trump with which they are blackmailing him.
While the Trump era shows us that nothing can ever be totally ruled out, this is extraordinarily unlikely because this proposition has been investigated to within an inch of its life by every forensic authority in the US power system and so far nothing of consequence has been found.
Not only that, while Trump keeps saying weirdly nice things about Putin, his administration has levied far tougher sanctions on Russia than Obama’s ever did, and has supplied Ukraine with far more lethal weaponry than Obama’s ever did.
So here is another factor to add to the Trump balance. Dictators do get disturbing concessions from Trump in one-on-one meetings where they flatter him extravagantly. But often Trump doesn’t let them keep the concessions.
Xi sensibly invested hugely in his relationship with Trump, yet this week Trump announced tariffs on $US200bn worth of Chinese exports to the US, and he also tweeted that he suspected Beijing of inducing Kim to go slow on denuclearisation — which may well be a rhetorical route the US President uses more vigorously down the track.
Indeed one of the oddly self-balancing features of the Trump presidency, what economists would call an automatic stabiliser, may be that the whole world, friend and foe alike, is learning to discount for the Trump rhetoric.
He can do very consequential things — like imposing tariffs or beefing up the defence budget — but what he says has to be discounted by 90 per cent or so.
The new priority will be just to survive your meetings with Trump with as few bruises as possible, just manage the moment.
It is of course the opposite of strategic stability. But Trump did not create the problems he identifies. Whether his solutions are good or durable is unclear.
Putin will have war-gamed their approaching summit very carefully, The odds are that it will be a disturbingly friendly encounter, but difficult to interpret.
Does Trump represent a new paradigm of leadership in the West, or stylistically just a new riff on the growing dominance of celebrity dynamics in almost all leadership?
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