When President Biden and his aides planned NATO’s 75th anniversary, which opens Tuesday night in Washington, they aimed to create an aura of confidence.
The message to Russian President Vladimir Putin and other potential adversaries would be that a broader and more powerful group of Western allies has emerged, after more than two years of war in Ukraine, more determined than ever to repel aggression.
But as 38 world leaders began arriving in Washington on Monday, that confidence appeared under threat. Even before the summit officially began, it was overshadowed by uncertainty over whether Mr. Biden would remain in the running for a second term and the looming possibility of former President Donald J. Trump’s return.
Mr. Trump once declared NATO “obsolete,” threatened to leave the alliance and more recently said he would let the Russians do “whatever they want” to any member country he felt was not contributing enough to the alliance. In recent days, as Mr. Trump surged in the polls after the debate, key European allies have begun discussing what a second Trump term might mean for the alliance — and whether it could take on Russia without American weapons, money and intelligence at its center.
Mr. Biden will greet the leaders in the vast Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, just blocks from the White House, on Tuesday night — the same room where the treaty creating NATO was signed in 1949, in a ceremony presided over by President Harry S. Truman. Mr. Biden was 6 years old at the time, and the Cold War was in its infancy.
The 81-year-old is arguably the most vocal defender in Washington of an alliance that has grown from 12 members in 1949 to 32 today as the era of superpower conflict has resumed. But when they gather Tuesday night, the leaders will be watching Mr. Biden’s every move and listening to his every word for the same signals that Americans are focused on: his ability to last as many as four more years in office.
Mr. Biden knows this, and said in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Friday that he welcomes the scrutiny. “Who’s going to hold NATO together like I do?” the president asked rhetorically. “I guess a good way to judge me,” he said, is to watch it at the summit — and see how the allies respond. “Come listen. See what they say.”
As they arrived, NATO leaders acknowledged that the alliance faced a test they had not anticipated: whether it could credibly maintain the momentum it has built in supporting Ukraine when trust in its most important actor has never been more fragile.
And they know that Mr Putin and Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, are watching them too.
“NATO has never been, is not and will never be a given,” Jens Stoltenberg, the alliance’s outgoing secretary general, said Sunday during a wide-ranging debate with journalists. “We have done it successfully for 75 years. I am convinced that we can do it again in the future. But it is a question of political leadership, it is a question of political commitment.”
Months before the meeting, the alliance began hedging in case of a second Trump presidency. Creation of a new NATO command to ensure long-term supplies of arms and military aid to Ukraine, even if the United States, under Mr. Trump, withdraws.
But in conversations with NATO leaders, it becomes clear that their plans to modernize their forces and prepare for an era that could see decades of confrontation with Russia are not accompanied by commensurate increases in their military budgets.
More than 20 NATO countries have now met the goal of spending 2% of their gross national product on defense, meeting commitments made by some in response to Mr. Trump’s demands and others in response to the realities of the Russian invasion. That percentage — a goal set more than a decade ago, at a time when terrorism seemed the greatest threat — seems vastly understated compared with the task at hand, many of Mr. Biden’s advisers say.
In Europe, Germany has outlined plans to upgrade its military capabilities to deter Russian aggression, a transformation that Chancellor Olaf Scholz promised in the weeks after the Russian invasion. But Mr. Scholz’s grand plans have yet to be matched with a budget to pay for them, and the politics of winning over public opinion has proven so difficult that German officials refuse to put a price on them.
Carl Bildt, co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations and former Swedish Prime Minister, written recently that European nations “will have to further double” their budgets “in order to credibly deter threats from an increasingly desperate Russian regime.”
Even so, White House officials said Monday that Mr. Biden would not push for new military spending targets.
But the most immediate problem for Mr. Biden and Mr. Scholz is avoiding another public spat with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky over how his country’s eventual NATO membership will be described.
Last year, while traveling to Vilnius, Lithuania, for NATO’s annual meeting, Zelensky expressed his displeasure at the lack of a timetable for Ukraine’s entry into the alliance. “It is unprecedented and absurd that no timetable is set, neither for the invitation nor for Ukraine’s accession,” he wrote on social media at the time.
It was temporarily mollified upon his arrival, with the Alliance’s commitment that Ukraine could avoid some of the hurdles other nations had to jump through before they could join the Alliance.
But for months, NATO countries have been negotiating language that would get around the problem, without risking allowing Ukraine in while it is still at war.
In recent weeks, negotiators have begun to agree on a new approach: The alliance is expected to declare Ukraine’s eventual inclusion in NATO “irreversible,” diplomats involved in the talks said.
While the term “irreversible” sounds definitive, it does nothing to resolve Mr Zelensky’s central demand: a date when his country would fall under NATO protection.
Mr Zelensky’s case is, by all accounts, the most serious. But he is not the only one.
Seventy-five years after NATO was created to deter threats posed by the Soviet Union at the dawn of the Cold War, some current and potential future leaders among the alliance’s member states appear sympathetic to Russia’s diplomatic entreaties despite Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban visited Russia The other day, in his public statements alongside Mr. Putin, he said nothing critical of the invasion of Ukraine or the continued attacks on civilians. He suggested that he was considering an opening to peace negotiations on conditions 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 Mr. Orban’s visit “certainly does not appear to be productive in moving things forward in Ukraine,” adding: “That’s worrisome.”
But to avoid any public split within NATO on the eve of the summit, Mr Stoltenberg refrained from criticising Mr Orban, noting that “NATO allies interact with Moscow in different ways, at different levels”.
He suggested, however, that trying to reach a deal as Mr. Putin advances in Ukraine would not ultimately bring peace. “We all want peace,” Mr. Stoltenberg said. “You can always end a war by losing it. But that will not bring peace — it will bring occupation, and occupation is not peace.”
