As the 75th anniversary summit of NATO leaders approached, President Joe Biden and other alliance heads took a calculated risk: the allies would develop a strategy to contain threats from Russia — but not this year.
“Because of the elections in the United States…The strategy was to avoid any kind of controversy during the summit, and that would be a success to the Biden administration,” a senior Central European official told the Washington Examiner on the sidelines of the summit. “And that’s why we have the NATO summit that we have — with the decisions that have been made, and the decisions that have been postponed — to avoid controversy.”
In the event, the pageantry of the summit was swamped by a cascade of anxiety over Biden’s feeble performance in a June debate with former President Donald Trump — a political disaster that has prompted more than a dozen House and Senate Democrats to call for Biden to abandon his re-election campaign. That uproar reverberated through the convention center where the NATO summit took place, as European officials contemplated the ramifications of a U.S. presidential election that seems more uncertain than ever, amid a gathering storm of threats from an “axis of upheaval” led by China and Russia.
“Whoever gets elected in November, we have to get along with that person — whether it’s Biden, or some other Democrat, or whether it’s Trump,” another senior European official said. “We just have to get along.
And, for the officials involved in the negotiations over the vaunted Washington Summit Declaration, the stentorian rhetoric of the Washington Summit Declaration couldn’t mask the fact that the most pressing problems before the alliance have been left to a very uncertain future.
“I was expecting to see the contours of the solution here at the summit,” a European ambassador to NATO who spoke on condition of anonymity told the Washington Examiner. “I don’t see them yet, to be honest.”
Some of that irresolution was long-planned. A major diplomatic effort to see NATO begin the process of inviting Ukraine into the alliance foundered at the Vilnius Summit in 2023, chiefly due to objections from Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and there was no serious effort to reopen that controversy in Washington, even though several NATO foreign ministers, at an Atlantic Council event on the sidelines of the summit, were candid about their belief that Ukraine’s application “should be advanced.” Instead, the allies agreed to say that Ukraine remains “on its irreversible path…to NATO membership,” at some unstated future point.
“With all our heart, we wish that your government will have strong leadership that, if anything, is even more tough against Russia,” a senior political leader of a NATO member-state told the Washington Examiner. “Putin respects strength and is provoked by weakness and doubt…And so far, the West has been so ambiguous, drawing some red lines [on Western support for Ukraine] and then stepping over them. And that does not work. It just encourages Putin.”
The allies agreed to develop a strategy to “constrain and contest Russia’s aggressive actions” for the leaders to consider when they meet in The Hague next year.
“We are determined to constrain and contest Russia’s aggressive actions and to counter its ability to conduct destabilizing activities towards NATO and Allies,” the Washington Summit Declaration says. “For our next Summit, we will develop recommendations on NATO’s strategic approach to Russia, taking into account the changing security environment.”
That language represents a long-awaited breakthrough — but an insufficient one, in the judgement of the allies most vulnerable in the event of a war with Russia.
“We don’t need to talk about the upcoming elections, because the question is right now, and it has been last year in Vilnius, it has been a year before in Madrid, and I don’t think that we have a right answer,” Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said during an Atlantic Council event. “And at this point, I think that the main thing is that, unfortunately, we’re not exactly there, where we should be, in order to meet the threat that Russia and its allies pose to [our] alliance.”
Some allies and analysts familiar with the discussions blamed the usual suspects for thwarting a more advanced discussion.
“The U.S. and Germany set a very low bar for this summit, and then they rigorously enforced it,” Kurt Volker, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, told the Washington Examiner. “And the Baltic States, and Poles, and others tried to urge more; the U.S. and Germany said ‘no, no, no, no. We’re not doing this. We’re not going there.’ … They just punted on a lot of stuff.”
If that decision seemed like the risk-avoidant choice to Biden’s team over the last several months, it takes on a new meaning in the light of his debate crisis.
“They didn’t want to have any type of policy discussions about, what is it that we really want?” Stefanie Babst, a former chief strategic policy analyst in NATO’s international staff, told the Washington Examiner. Next year, she said, “it will be a very controversial exercise, not just because of Trump…in terms of our strategic objective, do we want Russia to see defeated in Ukraine? Yes. Do we want to see Russian forces fully withdrawn from Ukraine territory? Yes. Do we want the Putin regime [to be seen] defeated? Big, big controversy.”
For many Europeans, the political cacophony around Biden’s campaign during the summit persuaded them that Trump will be the next president — a prospect that promises “unpredictability,” as multiple official said, for better or worse. The Russia strategy will be drafted in parallel with an ongoing debate about whether European defense spending should flow chiefly to European companies, another official emphasized, or if the allies will have instead a “transatlantic defense market” that could redound to the benefit of U.S. companies and workers.
“Is it better for Vladimir Vladimirovich to have Trump or not?” the NATO ambassador said. “I don’t think Trump is bad news. It’s like a nemesis. It will teach Europeans the hard way that they should value their security and stop really supporting Russia through trade, spruce up European military might. The debate will be how much spoils will go to business on one side or the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.”
That wry outlook is what passes for optimism. “We cannot really be too dependent on the U.S. We fully understand that this shift that has already taken place, that it’s much more about the Indo-Pacific for the US, and in the end, we should be able to defend ourselves against Russia, but preferably, preferably with the U.S.,” another NATO ambassador said. “And we need to have a Germany that is really investing in defense. That’s really the only solution.”
For Landsbergis, NATO’s hesitance to grapple with those controversies could come at a bloody price. The Lithuanian foreign minister believes that NATO could look back on these years of war in Ukraine as a period of relative calm before greater dangers arise — because the allies refuse to muster the political will to develop their own strategy before Putin forces the issue.
“Well, Putin has not yet done everything to unite us enough in order to bring the answer that is needed,” he told the Atlantic Council. “That’s the way I see it, and it’s very unfortunate, and that most likely that the future will be . . . that Putin will force us to do more.”
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If Landsbergis is correct, then even the promise to deliver a strategy may prove less significant than its proponents hope.
“I think this is a paper exercise,” Volker said. “Any reality is going to be driven by who gets elected president and what they and the allies want to do.”