It could have been a lot worse. That’s about the best that can be said of the NATO summit that wrapped up Wednesday in Ankara. After having jailed dozens of journalists and civil society activists in the lead-up to the gathering, Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a favourite of U.S. President Donald Trump, concluded the proceedings by handing out engraved pistols to the presidents and prime ministers in attendance.
Erdogan’s Big Win and Trump’s Praise
Erdogan emerged from the conference with a big win. Over Israel’s objections, Trump agreed to lift sanctions that prevented Turkey from acquiring American F-15 fighter aircraft. But Erdogan wasn’t the only smiling statesman in Ankara, and a tremendous amount of effort is being expended in presenting the two-day top tier assembly of the Transatlantic Alliance as a smashing success.
Trump said there was a “lot of love” at the conference. “A lot of unity. We’ve had a tremendous time and I think a great success . . . They said, ‘Sir, we love you.’ These are grown people saying that. Isn’t that nice?”
Rutte’s Defensive Praise for Trump
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, the flamboyant former Netherlands prime minister who made headlines last year by referring to President Trump as “daddy” and prides himself on his skills as Europe’s leading “Trump whisperer,” was especially upbeat. “I think we should praise Donald Trump for the fact that NATO is so much stronger,” Rutte told a journalist from the U.K.’s Independent newspaper at Wednesday’s closing news conference.
The question Rutte was responding to alluded to Trump’s chronic habit of attacking the sovereignty of NATO states, right up to the moment before the assembly when he doubled down on his threat to take over Denmark’s territory of Greenland. The reporter asked Rutte: “Does this have any effect on your self-respect when you sit like that and say nothing?”
A Low Bar for Success
If a NATO summit “success” is mollifying an unstable American president whose signature policies involve waging trade wars against American allies and trash-talking Europe and Canada while sweet-talking Russia’s Vladimir Putin, it’s hard to imagine a lower bar. But a lower bar was established in Ankara. The summit heralded as a highlight its reiteration of NATO Article 5, the “all for one” clause, which was NATO’s entire raison-d’etre when the alliance was established in 1949.
It would not have gone unnoticed in Kyiv that Article 5 is the primary reason Trump cites, like President Joe Biden before him, for opposing Ukraine’s entry into NATO — even though NATO’s official standpoint is that Ukraine belongs in the alliance. Ukraine’s NATO membership would force NATO states to jettison the diplomatic fiction that Europe and Russia are not at war, and the recapitulation of Article 5 in Ankara further provides Moscow with another perverse incentive to prolong the war: So long as Ukraine is under attack, NATO membership is beyond Kyiv’s reach.
NATO’s Strength on Paper, Weakness in Practice
If the NATO alliance is stronger — and on paper, in military-budget spreadsheets, you could say it is — it’s because almost every key NATO state is scrambling to build up its defence and security infrastructure owing to the Trump administration’s abdication of the American rule-setting role the U.S. had imposed on the alliance for the 75 years before Trump‘s return to the White House in January last year.
