NATO Chief Warns "Alliance May Not Survive" [Archive]

Swordsmyth

06-22-2018, 05:02 PM

With President Trump's performance at last year's NATO summit (https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-30/nato-recoils-trump-spending-salvos) still fresh in the minds of its members, NATO's continued existence has probably never before seemed as tenuous as it does right now. Trump has blasted NATO as "obsolete" and criticized the alliance in keeping with his "America First" platform. But NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg warned during a recent speech that there are still many strategic reasons why the alliance should persevere: Speaking in the UK, Stoltenberg invoked the rise of international terrorism and an "assertive Russia" as threats that should underscore how serious the issue of preserving the alliance truly is.
https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/2018.06.23nato.JPG
Yet, there's still no guarantee that, despite these security concerns, the trans-Atlantic partnership will survive as the relationship between the US and other NATO powers deteriorates. To protect against NATO's collapse, Stoltenberg called for its members to make a bigger effort to shore up the military alliance, according to the Associated Press. (https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2018-06-21/nato-head-no-guarantee-trans-atlantic-alliance-will-survive#close-modal)

"It is not written in stone that the trans-Atlantic bond will survive forever," Stoltenberg said during a speech in London. "But I believe we will preserve it."
With the NATO summit looming in July, Stoltenberg said "we may have seen the weakening" of the relationships between North America and Europe, but "maintaining the trans-Atlantic partnership is in our strategic interests." The world, Stoltenberg said, is facing "the most unpredictable security environment in a generation", largely thanks to terrorism.

"We must continue to protect our multilateral institutions like NATO, and we must continue to stand up for the international rules-based order," he said.
[...]
"We have had differences before, and the lesson of history is that we overcome these differences every time," Stoltenberg said.
But as trade tensions strain Trump's relationship with Europe, concerns about President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's growing authoritarianism have raised speculation about the possibility of a Turkish exit. Meanwhile, Stoltenberg has hinted at the possibility of a dialogue with Russia, as he has said he doesn't want "another cold war." (https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-03-15/natos-stoltenberg-slams-reckless-russias-attack-dont-want-new-cold-war)

More at: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-06-22/nato-chief-warns-alliance-may-not-survive

Swordsmyth

06-23-2018, 07:51 PM

This dismantling of long-established norms of global diplomacy has many wondering whether NATO, the alliance that has preserved global stability since the darkest days of the Cold War, is the next foundation block of the current world order that the President plans to uproot.
“All of that left the friends and allies of the United States wondering, who is the leader of the democratic world?” Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the previous secretary general of NATO, tells TIME. “And if that is repeated in Brussels in July it would be no less than a disaster, not only for the Western democratic world but for the democratic world globally.”
There are many targets of Donald Trump’s ire, but NATO has long played a key role in his narrative of the U.S. footing the bill for the rest of the world at the expense of its own citizens. He has repeatedly railed against the U.S. putting up a disproportionate amount of funding (https://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/25/politics/trump-nato-financial-payments/index.html) for NATO.
The U.S. accounts for 22% of the NATO alliance’s common funding, which is spent on projects like military readiness, joint exercises, and initiatives to counter cyber-warfare, and is responsible for 70% of total defense spending among alliance members. Under pressure from Washington — and reacting to Russian aggression — NATO members agreed in 2014 to each increase defense spending to 2% of GDP by 2014. But progress has been slow; so far only eight NATO countries meet that target.
While many Europeans, including Rasmussen, agree with Trump’s general point about defense spending, his method of expressing it is exasperating allies. On June 10, a day after the G7 summit, Trump launched a Twitter tirade clearly aimed at Europe, lamenting that the U.S. spends money “protecting many of these same countries that rip us off on trade”, and warning that “change is coming”.

....Germany pays 1% (slowly) of GDP towards NATO, while we pay 4% of a MUCH larger GDP. Does anybody believe that makes sense? We protect Europe (which is good) at great financial loss, and then get unfairly clobbered on Trade. Change is coming!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 11, 2018 (https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1005988633747312640?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)
On trade and the G7, European leaders are feeling empowered to punch back at the U.S. French President Emmanuel Macron said recently that the G7 could do without Trump, while on trade the E.U. this week retaliated with their own tariffs on US goods. “The initial idea of playing nice with Donald Trump, which several European leaders have tried, has been demonstrably proven to yield no benefits,” says Anthony Gardner, who acted as U.S. Ambassador to the E.U. from 2014 to 2017.
But there is far more at stake when it comes to NATO, especially on the front line of the new antagonistic relationship with Russia. Since Putin annexed Crimea in 2014, nations along NATO’s eastern flank have been increasingly concerned by Russian aggression along their own borders, and still see the U.S. as the most important backer of their security.
“Without the United States, European security would be in great danger,” Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics tells TIME. “We can’t simply build something that would exclude the United States – this is simply impossible: look at the resources, look at capabilities.” While he predicts “long, very difficult, very heated meetings” at the July summit, Rinkevics believes a consensus is still within reach.
Trump’s abrupt cancelling of joint military exercises on the Korean peninsula after his meeting with Kim has also raised questions about whether war games in Europe could suffer a similar fate. Just this month, the U.S. led joint exercises in the Baltics and in Poland with 18 other nations (http://www.newsweek.com/saber-strike-18-us-leads-massive-europe-war-game-near-russia-border-956815). Rinkevics, whose country helped host these exercises, is confident the war games will continue. “I don’t believe that there is going to be such kind of development,” he says, even if Trump does make good on suggestions of a U.S.-Russia summit (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/trump-putin-summit-us-russia-john-bolton-kremlin-nato-kim-jong-un-a8409661.html).
Yet the tensions between the U.S. and Germany may again come to the fore. Not only does Germany spend comparatively less on defense than other major powers, but Trump has recently taken Chancellor Angela Merkel to task over her refugee policy that is currently the subject of a bitter domestic political feud.
“He is picking on Germany more than anyone else for a simple reason: he wants Merkel to fail and he wants the migration issue to demonstrate the failure of her policies,” says Gardner. “It is a remarkable situation of the President of the United States attacking one of our closest and dearest allies, basically for domestic purposes.”
The embattled Merkel will be keen to avoid a further spat with Trump, says Christian Mölling, deputy director of the German Council on Foreign Relations. With that in mind, German defense officials travelled to Washington for meetings ahead of the summit to try and sell to their U.S. counterparts a plan to increase defense spending to 1.5% by 2024. “She will definitely want to prevent a public fight with Trump, if that is possible, because he holds the cards given the fact that he can always choose to come up with the 2% discussion and Merkel would be on the defensive side,” says Mölling.
Rasmussen urged NATO members to keep discussions about defense spending behind closed doors, cautioning that a public disagreement may raise public doubt over America’s commitment to Article 5, the clause which says that all NATO members will respond if one of their number is threatened. “Putin might take it as a signal that when push comes to shove, the Americans will not be ready to really defend its allies, so it sends a very dangerous signal to autocrats,” he says.
The former NATO general secretary hopes that the President will take advice from figures like Defense Secretary James Mattis, who has served as a NATO Supreme Allied Commander and, he says, understands the importance of the alliance.
At last year’s summit, Trump caused a stir by refusing to explicitly affirm his commitment to Article 5 in a speech in front of a memorial to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when the U.S. became the first member to invoke the clause. He swiftly corrected that a few weeks later, most likely on the advice of his national security team.
But the concern in European capitals is that Trump will ignore his counsellors this time around, says Heidi Obermeyer, a fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations. “Worst case is Trump goes in, even more angry that nobody is doing anything, and calls into question the validity of Article 5, or says that he is going to try and remove American troops from Europe – all gift-wrapped in a beautiful box for Vladimir Putin,” she says.
And the best-case scenario? “A lack of criticism,” says Obermeyer. Given the President’s recent approach to diplomacy, even that may be too much to expect.

More at: https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-trying-dismantle-world-order-133450809.html