President Donald J. Trump’s first international trip ended on a sour note. Whatever one thinks of the substantive outcomes of his trips to Saudi Arabia and Israel, they were marked by public displays of comity between Trump and his hosts. The short stop to visit Pope Francis went off without particular incident.
The NATO summit in Brussels and a meeting of the G-7 in Taormina were altogether more contentious.
In Brussels, Trump criticized NATO members for their failure to pay their “fair share” for alliance defense. He also avoided a formal commitment to Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, under which member states will consider an attack on one member to be an attack on all. In Taormina, Italy, the president refused to join other G-7 leaders in a statement reaffirming the group’s commitment to the Paris agreement on climate change.
Trump’s call for higher defense expenditures by NATO members echoes complaints by previous U.S. administrations, though his language was (unsurprisingly) more blunt. He has a point: very few NATO members have reached the alliance goal of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense. Germany, which boasts the largest economy in Europe, dedicates a mere 1.2 percent. The president, however, was on far shakier ground when he argued that NATO members “owe massive amounts of money from past years.” The 2 percent goal is precisely that: a target for annual defense expenditures, not an accumulating debt owed by members to the alliance.
The refusal to reaffirm Article 5 was, from a European perspective, more disturbing. True, Trump advisors quickly asserted that the United States remained, in fact, committed to mutual defense under Article 5. But commenters in both Europe and the U.S. were quick to criticize the president for sowing doubt about U.S. security guarantees to NATO members.
Article 5 has been a cornerstone of the alliance since NATO’s founding nearly 70 years ago. As Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution has noted, the mutual defense commitment has always contained a certain amount of ambiguity. Notably, Article 5 does not specify how countries should respond were there to be an attack on a fellow member. This ambiguity has only increased as NATO has expanded to include countries of less clear strategic import to the United States. To put it crudely: while the United States and other NATO countries would surely react to a Russian incursion into, say, a member state like Estonia, that response would surely fall short — well short — of a full-fledged war against Moscow.
Indeed, in the aftermath of the Cold War, NATO expanded under the implicit assumption that the Article 5 guarantee would not be invoked; Russia was, after all, a mere shadow of the former Soviet Union — diplomatically feeble, economically prostrate and focused inward. A resurgent Russia under Vladimir Putin has challenged this assumption. Even if ambiguous, Article 5 nevertheless does raise the potential stakes for any country — or group, for that matter — considering an attack on a NATO member. And Europeans were right to be concerned by Trump’s apparent unwillingness to reaffirm it.
The G-7 summit revealed further divisions between the United States and its European partners. Here the chief bone of contention was the Paris agreement on climate change, an ambitious, if largely non-binding, international accord to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. President Barack Obama considered the agreement one of his administration’s signal accomplishments; as a candidate, Trump pledged to pull the United States out of it. We have yet to do so, though the president has intimated that he will make a decision soon.
How deep is the rift between Washington and European capitals? Over the weekend, German Chancellor Angela Merkel suggested that all is not well in the U.S.-European relationship. “The times in which we could completely rely on others are over to a certain extent. That is what I experienced in the last few days,” she said, “That is why I can only say: We Europeans must really take our fate into our own hands.”
Merkel’s remarks clearly reflect her disenchantment with Trump, particularly in comparison to Obama, with whom she enjoyed a cordial working relationship. But her statement is also political. She faces a general election in September. Trump is very unpopular in Germany, and distancing herself from him won’t hurt Merkel with voters. Finally, the chancellor’s remarks can be seen, at one level, as a reiteration of Germany’s commitment to the project of European unification, currently battered by Brexit, uncertainty over the future of the euro and rising authoritarianism in European Union member states like Hungary.
Let’s see if Europe really does go its own way when it comes to security. I have my doubts. There may be some closer military cooperation between Germany and France. But neither country is prepared to expend the huge financial and human resources necessary to create a security structure to replace NATO. Nor is a Franco-German embrace of Russia a very likely prospect, as it would immediately alienate Eastern European countries which are very wary — to put it mildly — of Moscow’s influence. In other words, Europe’s practical strategic options are limited. NATO may not be the only game in town when it comes to European military security. But it is — by a huge margin — the most important one. And Europeans will have no choice but to continue dealing with Trump on security issues, however distasteful they may find it.
What of the United States? I have noted before that there is often a gap between the president’s rhetoric and his administration’s actual foreign policy. Since Trump assumed office, much of the latter has, in fact, been surprisingly conventional. When it comes to NATO, there are no signs that the United States is prepared to cut resources dedicated to European defense or limit U.S. cooperation with the alliance in any substantial way. Perhaps we will do so in the future. After all, if we have learned one thing about Trump, it is that he can be unpredictable. But it is far too early to announce the end of NATO. What happened in Brussels was much more than a mere kerfuffle. But it does not mark — at least not yet — an existential crisis for the transatlantic alliance.
Europe is likely to break with the United States on climate policy. It is inconceivable that Western European countries would reconsider their commitments under the Paris agreement simply because the United States pulled out. I will leave to others more expert than I am to assess the potential environmental consequences of a U.S. withdrawal from the Paris agreement. But such a move would surely weaken whatever voice we hope to have in future international negotiations on climate change and complicate talks in such areas as trade and investment in which environmental factors will play an increasingly important role.
Joe Barnes is the Baker Institute’s Bonner Means Baker Fellow. From 1979 to 1993, he was a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State, serving in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.