The gathered leaders on Wednesday agreed that they will support Ukraine “on its irreversible path to full Euro-Atlantic integration, including NATO membership” — wording that was subject to intense negotiation in recent weeks, with President Biden initially opposed to using the word “irreversible.”
Four nations also announced Wednesday that donated F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine will be operational later this summer. And alliance leaders called out China for being a “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war in Ukraine, its toughest language yet toward Beijing.
But for all the effort to strengthen the alliance, Trump’s shadow was casting a pall over Washington’s convention center, where the summit is being held. European leaders quietly wonder whether this is a goodbye to a U.S. president who hews to a transatlantic agenda — a bipartisan constant of U.S. foreign policy from World War II until Trump’s arrival in the White House in 2017.
“If we elect him a second time, then I think that’s, from the Europeans’ perspective, extraordinarily telling about our direction of travel in the United States,” said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, director of the transatlantic security program at the Center for a New American Security think tank. “And so it is Trump-proofing for the most immediate four years, but there is a growing worry that the United States will be less committed to Europe over the longer term.”
Few European policymakers say they believe that Trump would formally pull the United States from NATO. Congress recently passed legislation that binds the country to the alliance and would require a two-thirds vote in the Senate to withdraw.
But many fear Trump would bring a far more transactional approach to the alliance, and some take seriously his vow that he would look at whether they are meeting their defense spending commitments before deciding whether to come to their aid if they are attacked. How to handle Trump is dominating social conversations among NATO policymakers in Washington, along with the related obsession of whether Biden will drop his reelection effort.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Wednesday downplayed concerns about a second Trump presidency.
“The main criticism from former president Trump, but also from other U.S. presidents, has not primarily been against NATO, it has been against NATO allies not investing enough in NATO — and that has changed,” he told reporters. “The clear message has had an impact, because now allies are really stepping up.”
Asked whether European leaders are talking about Trump behind closed doors, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre told The Washington Post in an interview that “you will not believe me if I said no.”
While in Washington, many leaders are taking the opportunity to have quiet conversations on the side with potential Trump administration foreign policy officials. Keith Kellogg, the retired general who was then-Vice President Mike Pence’s national security adviser and continues to advise Trump, said last month that he had received 165 requests for briefings from foreign officials since November, and that he had granted 100 of them. Kellogg noted that he doesn’t speak in an official capacity for Trump or the Trump campaign.
Many international policymakers — including Ukrainian leaders, who have the most to lose — have been hedging their bets against the possibility that Trump could return to office. That was notable Tuesday in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s choice of venue to deliver a speech: the Reagan Institute, to a room of Republican luminaries and European diplomats.
Though he was careful not to comment directly about the U.S. election, Zelensky urged Biden to allow Ukraine to use U.S. long-range weaponry to strike military bases on Russian territory “and not to wait for November or any other event.”
Asked afterward by Fox News anchor Bret Baier how closely he was watching the U.S. election, he said, “I think…
Read More: NATO leaders move to ‘Trump-proof’ the alliance in Washington