US allies apprehensive after capricious Trump changes tune at Nato summit | Donald Trump
Donald Trump’s relationship with Washington’s NATO allies is no one’s idea of a happy marriage.
But the US President’s volatile performance at the Western Military Alliance’s annual summit in Ankara this week seemed extreme even by Trump standards. As commentators tried to explain what was happening, their vast stocks of Trump-friendly clichés were at risk of being depleted.
Trump arrived in the Turkish capital last Tuesday with great excitement; He was openly angered by the failure to maintain the temporary ceasefire agreement he had agreed upon with Iran, and threatened further destruction and mayhem as a result.
Sitting next to NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte, he told reporters that the country’s Islamic leadership, which he had praised as “very reasonable” just two weeks ago, were “scum” and “sick people”.
He equally assailed the alliance, which has been the cornerstone of collective Western security policy since its founding in 1949 as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in response to the spread of Soviet communism after World War II.
Trump “wasn’t happy with NATO,” he said; He complained that alliance members, including Britain, had failed to assist him in the Persian war, reasserted his claims to Greenland despite it being sovereign Danish territory, and demanded that his socialist government cut trade ties with Spain (whom he denounced as “bad people”).
Hours later, he emerged from a meeting where he spoke about unity alongside the leaders he had just berated. “There was so much love in that room,” Trump said. It seems that no NATO meeting has ever been this positive.
Trump also conveyed this sudden warmth to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who was seated next to a leader he often viewed as a bête noire, praising Zelenskyy as “masterful” for holding his country together in a war against Russia led by Vladimir Putin, who has long been assumed to prefer Trump’s political style and cause.
It has been speculated that terms such as “mercurial” and “whiplash” were used throughout much of the media to describe seemingly capricious behavior. Its cause and possible long-term impact were less clear.
Why did Trump suddenly change his mind about an alliance he frequently derided as a “paper tiger” and accused of “robbing” the United States by expecting the United States to cover the lion’s share of spending? So what could be the consequences of such unpredictable and, by some standards, abusive behavior?
The answers range from the relatively simple to the more complex, according to some analysts, with Trump’s impulsiveness and tendency to change his mind near the surface of any statement.
One of the driving forces for his sudden change may have been his closeness to the summit’s host, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has held power for 23 years and to whom Trump has long expressed admiration despite his Islamist political roots.
At a joint press conference with Erdogan on Tuesday, Trump said he might not have attended the summit if it had not been held in Türkiye, with which he said he has a “great relationship.”
“Türkiye has been much more loyal in many ways than other countries that we thought would be loyal,” he said, before heatedly comparing his bond with Erdogan to other leaders. “You never know why a relationship is special.
“Sometimes you get along with the toughest people, like [Erdoğan]. Sometimes you don’t get along with the weakest, most pathetic people, maybe you don’t respect them.”
Ian Lesser, a member of the German Marshall Fund who attended the summit, said the summit had a “bipolar quality” and attributed this to Trump’s chemistry with Erdogan, whom his domestic opponents label as an autocrat who suppresses political dissent and press freedom.
“The fact that President Trump has such a close relationship with President Erdogan probably played a role in ensuring stability.” [and ensuring] “The demonstrations did not reflect well on the summit.”
“President Trump wanted to make sure that President Erdogan could achieve success at the summit,” Lesser said. “Political personalities have a role in such relations and they are clearly visible at the summits.
“Trump, more than most, reveals his personality when dealing with international relations. He has a tendency to see the world not in terms of alliances, but in terms of individual countries and, above all, individual leaders… he has a skeptical view of alliances.”
Equally effective is the extravagant flattery bestowed by Rutte, the former Dutch prime minister who has made an art of adapting his natural garrulousness to play the role of “Trump whisperer”, frequently praising the US president for “saving” NATO by getting its European allies to increase defense spending.
“Rutte is doing a really good job of saying to Trump, ‘Hey, it’s working. We’re becoming more capable allies. We hear you,'” said Charles Kupchan, a professor of international relations at Georgetown University and former senior European adviser to the White House under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
“And I would guess that some of the same refrains emerged during the closed-door meeting as well,” he said, referring to the private session Trump shared with 31 allied heads of government at the summit.
The apparent change of public opinion against Zelenskyy, to whom Trump once said in the White House, “You don’t have the cards,” may stem from frustration that Putin has made no concessions to help end a conflict that now lasts longer than the first world war, and from awareness of sentiment in the U.S. Congress, to which the president has paid little heed on other issues.
“I think there is a question here about the congressional opinion,” Lesser said. “And the weight of that will obviously increase as we get closer to the midterm elections.”
Despite the unexpectedly soothing finale, a trend of thought has emerged that Trump’s regular attacks on his allies will leave a lasting mark, even if he is eventually replaced by an administration with a more traditional view of the transatlantic alliance.
But Kupchan argued that Trump’s rhetorical hostility did not undermine or undermine the alliance, despite the loss of confidence that Europe could count on US support. “If we take a step back from all of Trump’s heated rhetoric and derogatory language towards NATO, the picture that emerges is positive in some respects,” he said. “NATO is still NATO. There are still 80 thousand US soldiers in Europe.”
Analysts predict NATO will become a more European-led alliance as the United States’ European partners fulfill commitments they made at last year’s summit to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense by 2025.
Europeans, meanwhile, will continue to be “scared” by Trump’s hostile language, Kupchan predicted.
“He enjoys the ability to scare others because that’s his style,” he said. “He’s a reality TV star. He wants to keep everyone off balance. So one moment he’s ready to withdraw from NATO, and the next moment he loves NATO.”
There may be a deeper problem with U.S. strategic indecisiveness underlying the president’s headline-grabbing behavior.
Kupchan – author of a book last article In an article titled “America does not know its own mind,” he warned that Trump is a symptom, not the cause, of the malaise in foreign policy. “The fundamental problem is the collapse of the political center, the fact that the United States no longer has a real foreign policy,” he said.
“Every time there is a presidential election, we move from one grand strategy to a completely different grand strategy.
“If you are the Chancellor of Germany or the Prime Minister of Japan and you have relied on the security guarantee of the United States for decades, you have to plan for the worst because the United States is going through such a long period of political dysfunction that you don’t know whether you can trust Uncle Sam.”
