Trump on Collision Course with NATO

BASIRAT POLITICAL CENTER

HANIF GHAFARI
First of all, Trump repeated his controversial demand that other NATO members should allocate more budget to the Western military alliance. During his election campaign in 2016, Trump had time and again called NATO an outdated organization with an old and unreliable structure. He had also slammed the fact that the US was paying a major part of NATO’s collective expenses. After Trump won the race to the White House, NATO leaders hoped the new American president would back off from his previous positions against the military alliance. But it seems Trump has no intention of rethinking his approach on NATO.
Although people like Jens Stoltenberg, the Norwegian Secretary General of NATO, seek to create the impression that the military alliance and the UA have normal relations and try to highlight multilateral commitments in that regard, it is lost on no one that NATO-Washington ties have hit rock bottom in recent decades. Trump did not send promising messages to NATO leaders during his recent trip to Brussels: Trump, on the one hand, stressed the need for NATO to be restructured, and on the other, called on NATO member states to increase their tax payments to be able to bankroll the costs of the military alliance.
The second point is that Trump made no mention of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. Ever since NATO was established, all US presidents have mentioned the article in their speeches. The article stipulates that if any of NATO member countries should come under attack, all member states will come to the mutual defense of the country. Still, Trump made no reference to that article during his trip! Many American media outlets and analysts have referred to this issue.
"But alas, Trump could not even bring himself to utter explicitly that the US supports Article 5 in his remarks at Brussels, which every single US president has done since Harry Truman in 1949,” wrote Washington Post.
There was so much criticism of Trump on the issue that after he returned from the Brussels trip, US National Security Advisor General McMaster underlined Article 5. In a speech apparently aimed at justifying Trump’s not mentioning Article 5 during his Brussels trip, McMaster said:
"I think it's extraordinary that there would be an expectation that the president would have to say explicitly that he supports Article 5. Of course he does. He did not make a decision not to say it. It was implicit in the speech. There was no decision to not put it in there. It is a matter of fact that the United States, the president, stands firmly behind our Article 5 commitments under NATO.”
Another point mentioned above regards NATO members meeting the collective costs of the military alliance. Many European members of NATO have turned down the request. Allocating 2% of NATO member nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) to paying the organization’s collective costs is not something that member states would accept easily. Still, Trump once again insisted on his demand during his trip to Brussels. It could be all the more reason why many American media have described Trump’s trip as unsuccessful.
Trump’s recent trip to Brussels shed light on rifts between the US and other NATO members at this sensitive juncture. At a time when the standoff between Moscow and NATO has intensified and even some military affairs analysts and experts are warning about the outbreak of a major conflict between the two sides, one needs to ponder on Trump’s confrontational approach vis-à-vis other NATO members. All in all, the Brussels meeting showed that the US president has no intention of backing down from its position on NATO, something that NATO leaders themselves cannot deny.