While the political world spent Wednesday focused on the fallout from New York City’s mayoral primary and the continued debates over how much of Iran’s nuclear program was damaged, a hugely significant NATO conference flew under the radar.
Normally when a NATO meeting is significant it is because the alliance of democracies is considering the accession of a new member or because a NATO country is under threat of attack.
Not on Wednesday. How’s this for a headline: “How ‘Daddy’ Trump Learned to Love NATO.”
That’s atop the Wall Street Journal’s report on the NATO summit at the Hague. But even with a slightly more modest framing, the New York Times ends up in the same place:
“A NATO summit designed to please President Trump ended on Wednesday with his European allies approving an ambitious spending goal to meet the threat of a militarizing Russia, and clinching a long-elusive public commitment from the mercurial American leader for the alliance’s collective defense.
“Since his first term, Mr. Trump has been pressing for the allies to spend more on their own defense. On Wednesday, after a one-day meeting in the Netherlands, they agreed to raise their spending on the military to 5 percent of their national income by 2035.”
NATO leaders decided the best move would be to flatter Trump and to compress the conference into one day to give Trump less time to get into arguments with other leaders. The result was a clear success: “It’s not a rip-off,” Trump said of the alliance, seemingly changing his opinion overnight. Asked about the Russia-Ukraine war, Trump said: “Vladimir Putin has been more difficult. Vladimir Putin really has to end that war.”
Trump even seemed to be having some fun: “I came here because it was something I’m supposed to be doing. But I left here a little bit different.”
Where did these good vibes come from? In part, America’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites. Our European allies (to say nothing of the Turks, who are also in NATO) tend to disagree with Trump’s support for Israeli self-defense when it comes to the Palestinians. But the Iran nuclear program is much more of a consensus issue. While many in the Democratic opposition here at home have a partisan attachment to Barack Obama’s failed nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic, in the real world most people just want the Iranian program ended. Diplomacy failed in this regard. But one way or another, this threat had to be neutralized, and a few big bombs with no casualties is, to any rational observer, a successful mission.
But there’s another aspect of the bombing of Iran that gets lost in the highly politicized debate in the US: Iran has played a key role in Russia’s war on Ukraine, and disarming Iran is a major boost to the security of NATO member states. The Israeli and American operations against Iran roiled the China-Russia-Iran axis and weakened the forces waging war on Ukraine.
Which is to say: It had been a good week for NATO thanks in large part to Donald Trump. That is a sentence one rarely has reason to write, but there it is.
Yet there are reasons for members of the alliance to curb their enthusiasm. For one, Trump can be fickle and we don’t know whether his newfound finger-pointing at Putin will stick.
Additionally, compressing the conference to one day while organizing it around the concept of pleasing Trump has its costs. The Russia threat has not gone away and the war in Ukraine hasn’t ended. The alliance of democracies cannot really afford to spend the bulk of its time “managing” Trump.
Still, seeing Trump and NATO leaders on the same page is undeniably a good sign; the alliance is certainly in no danger of dissolving, as some have feared since Trump’s first term began nearly a decade ago. Most of all, there is the possibility that the underlying source of Trump-NATO tension has been taken off the table. As a certain former president might say, just take the win.
