IT WAS scripted as a lovefest with only one purpose: to prevent the most impulsive and erratic US president in history from throwing Nato’s toys out of his pram. No one provoked a tantrum. Wednesday’s (Jun 25) summit in the Hague made little pretence of discussing global strategy. It merely showcased the desperate efforts of European Nato members to increase their defence spending. It offered flattery to the US guest of honour in a fashion unprecedented even during the Cold War.
Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte set the tone with his welcome message before Donald Trump’s arrival, congratulating the president on his “decisive action” in Iran and promising that he would be “flying into another big success in the Hague”. He even expressed sympathy for the president’s public use of four-letter language.
National leaders who may have wondered what life was like under a Roman emperor now know from experience. As they struggle to do business with the most powerful man on earth, they are obliged to abase themselves, to pander, to profess assent when privately many dissent. No one in the room save the principal guest believed his claim that US and Israeli bombs had set back Iran “by decades”. But they kept silent, and will continue to do so, lest they provoke his wrath, so easily roused.
Some Europeans oppose this posture, arguing that appeasement demeans our continent to no purpose. I disagree. Like it or not, Trump is apparently the unchallenged master of the richest nation on earth. He is being indulged by Congress and the Supreme Court in exercising dictatorial powers for making war, and much else. The rest of us must parley with Trump, or forfeit his indispensable support.
The standout issue is Ukraine, which survives only at his pleasure. He is squeezing US arms deliveries to the country, which he dislikes. He has completely suspended them once and might do so again tomorrow. The Russians are pressing the Ukrainians on the ground, and intensifying bombardment of their cities. President Volodymyr Zelensky’s people are running perilously short of air-defence weapons. Their morale will suffer grievously if their armed forces lose the capability to blunt Putin’s terror attacks.
The Europeans can’t provide Zelensky with what he gets from the US. To have a chance of forcing Putin to negotiate, Washington must intensify economic sanctions and increase weapons deliveries. Every Nato member present at the Hague understood this, recognising that only their submission and that of Zelensky may sustain Ukraine’s struggle unless or until Trump abandons his apparent infatuation with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
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On the wider issue of keeping the US in Nato, most other members are showing willingness to contribute more cash, and to support American strategic objectives. A British aircraft carrier has just docked in east Singapore in a swing across the Indo-Pacific, as an earnest show of solidarity with the US amid Chinese aggression. The British government announced this week that it will buy 12 US F-35A strike aircraft.
Rutte messaged Trump on Tuesday that all Nato members have signed up to a new target of spending 5 per cent of gross domestic product on defence by 2035. In reality, many of the allies won’t even meet the earlier 3.5 per cent target.
But the Germans, Europe’s most important player, will spend 62.4 billion euros (S$93.3 billion) on the military in 2025, a critical show of intent. Chancellor Friedrich Merz told parliament in Berlin on Tuesday: “We are not doing that as a favour to the US and its president. We’re doing this out of our own view and conviction, because Russia is actively and aggressively endangering the security and freedom of the entire Euro-Atlantic area.”
I am a cynic. I don’t believe that most of the Nato nations will seriously attempt to achieve the ambitious spending targets, set for a decade ahead, by which time most of the present generation of national leaders will have quit politics. A game is being played in which none of the parties is being honest. But the Europeans have an honourable purpose – to save Ukraine and to save Nato, not from the Russians but from the Americans.
And so to Iran. Most of Europe, like most of the US, was appalled by Trump’s airstrikes, which were perceived as a dance to a tune written by the deeply feared and mistrusted Israeli leader, Benjamin Netanyahu.
As with Iraq in 2003, while nobody likes Iran, few people believe that the country was on the verge of producing nuclear weapons. It seems especially outrageous, to have attacked within days of telling the world that the White House would grant a two-week pause for diplomacy, before resorting to force.
Moreover, the real objection to the airstrikes isn’t the scale of damage to the nuclear programme, which must be considerable, but to the destabilisation of the region, with unknowable consequences that could well include an Iranian dash to acquire a bomb. The only people who can achieve successful and durable regime change in any country are its own citizens, as the West should have learned from our several failures to achieve this since the millennium.
At the Hague on Wednesday, however, once again truth was subordinated to telling the US president what he wanted to hear. National leaders surely had to do this, but those of us who don’t hold public office, and thus aren’t constrained by the demands of diplomacy, seem to have a responsibility to be frank. We need not simulate belief in Donald Trump’s constant outrageous statements and acts.
I chance to have reread recently Giuseppe Lampedusa’s great novel The Leopard, about 19th century Sicily. In it, his principal character describes the villain: “Free as he was from the shackles imposed on many other men by honesty, decency and plain good manners, he moved through the forest of life with the confidence of an elephant which advances in a straight line, rooting up trees and trampling down lairs, without even noticing the scratches of thorns and moans from the crushed.”
What seems especially depressing about such events as this Nato summit, and Trump’s participation in it, is that while other leaders may go home believing that their flattery and deceit will suffice to save the organisation, Trump is perfectly capable of returning to the White House and tearing up everything Nato members think has been agreed upon.
The game of stroking the president’s ego must go on and on, presumably for three years and seven months.
Britain has just issued an invitation to the president for a full state visit to London in September. In the past, US leaders have been received with genuine warmth and gratitude, sometimes even with love. We have always recognised how much we have owed to the greatest nation on earth, especially during the Cold War.
Now, however, it is different. Not one person, including the king and our prime minister, sincerely wants Donald Trump in London. He has been invited solely in hopes of constraining the worst of his elephant-charges against allies, in hopes of sparing the flora and fauna around Buckingham Palace, figuratively echoing Lampedusa.
Many of us feel sad that we have shrunk so far that we must make this gesture. But just as Trump has no respect for others, so the rest of us must, I suppose, sacrifice our self-respect to him. If it helps to save Ukraine, it will be worth it. BLOOMBERG
