NATO meets in Washington amid concerns over Trump and rise of far-right

The specter of a possible return of former President Donald Trump haunts many of the United States’ European allies and is coming closer amid growing concerns over President Biden’s ability to win reelection. Trump repeatedly expressed antipathy toward NATO during his first term, and in the last debate he refused to say whether he would withdraw the United States from the alliance. European diplomats are already preparing contingency plans for a future Trump administration; many doubt he will actually withdraw from NATO, but fear that Trump will weaken American commitments to the alliance and damage transatlantic unity.

Trump’s ultranationalist bluster and Biden’s demonstrated fragility in the debate sent their own message to foreign observers. “This election does more to discredit American democracy than Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping could ever hope to do,” Sergey Radchenko, a historian at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, wrote on social media. “I worry about the image projected to the outside world. It’s not an image of leadership. It’s an image of terminal decline.”

In Europe itself, national and regional elections have given rise to far-right populist factions, some of them more hospitable to the Kremlin and skeptical of NATO. Yet on Sunday, exit polls in France’s legislative elections appear to show voters mobilizing to reject the right-wing, anti-immigration National Rally party. Still, political headwinds on both sides of the Atlantic are swirling around this week’s meetings in Washington.

“The summit has gone from an orchestrated spectacle to one of the most angsty gatherings in modern times,” a senior Biden administration official told Washington Post columnist David Ignatius last week.

The war in Ukraine is expected to dominate the debate. Despite Kiev’s insistence and the eagerness of some of its Eastern European neighbors, Ukraine’s NATO membership is not on the agenda. Instead, NATO member states are signing major bilateral security agreements with the Ukrainians and working to accelerate arms and military aid transfers as Ukrainian forces hold their ground more than two years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Diplomats in Washington are aware that Trump could choose to cut off military aid to kyiv, which has already suffered a costly delay, with some Republicans in Congress blocking the necessary funding for months. They fear a scenario in which a Trump White House could tacitly allow Russia to consolidate its control over illegally captured territory in Ukraine, pushing for a negotiated peace before Kiev gains the upper hand in the war. That is why the Biden administration and some European governments have been desperate to “protect Trump” from support for Ukraine in the short and medium term.

“With Trump likely to return, the best way to ensure Ukraine’s long-term security is to give it more capabilities to defeat Russia,” my colleague Josh Rogin noted. “That means accelerating the delivery of air defense systems, fighter jets, long-range missiles, and helping Ukraine develop its own defense production to reduce its dependence on the West.”

At the NATO summit in Lithuania last year, Ukrainian frustration at not receiving a formal invitation to join the alliance was on full display, plunging the meetings into chaos. Tensions may not be as high this week, but some of Ukraine’s supporters in Washington say Biden should do more.

“We have a political window right now that should allow for greater acceptance of NATO membership,” Dan Runde, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. “This is the moment for the Biden administration to push” for Ukraine to join NATO, added Runde, who served under President George W. Bush and pointed to Bush’s attempts to encourage Ukraine and Georgia to join in 2008, which were not followed up by many of the United States’ European counterparts at the time.

In the absence of clear commitments to Ukraine, NATO officials have chosen to focus on the bigger picture“The United States is home to a quarter of the world’s economy, but together, NATO allies have half the world’s economy and half its military power,” outgoing NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg wrote in Foreign Affairs. “Together, our deterrence is more credible, our support for Ukraine is more consistent, and our cooperation with external partners is more effective.”

Stoltenberg’s designated successor, former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, has positioned himself as a clear-eyed leader of the alliance and has already urged his European colleagues to adapt to the political situation that will unfold in Washington after November. “We should stop complaining and moaning about Trump,” Rutte told a security conference earlier this year. “I’m not an American, I can’t vote in the United States. We have to work with whoever is on the dance floor.”

But the background music is getting darker. A new poll by the European Council on Foreign Relations of 15 European countries, including Ukraine, has revealed a growing divide between Ukrainians and European public opinion elsewhere. When asked how the war would end, nearly 60 percent of Ukrainians said they saw their nation achieving total victory, while only 30 percent thought it would end with some form of diplomatic settlement. If reinforced by a further increase in Western armaments, Ukrainian belief in total victory, pollsters say, will only grow.

This enthusiasm is not shared by many other Europeans, who overwhelmingly reject sending ground forces to help the Ukrainians and doubt Kiev’s ability to win the war. “The prevailing view in most countries…is that the conflict will end in compromise,” noted the authors of the ECFR report, Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard. “Thus, when it comes to the end of the war, European publics express the pessimism of the intellect while Ukrainians represent the optimism of political will.”