When President Biden and his aides planned the 75th anniversary of NATO, which opens Tuesday afternoon in Washington, he intended to create an aura of confidence.
The message to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and other potential adversaries would be that a larger, more powerful group of Western allies had emerged, after more than two years of war in Ukraine, more committed than ever to repelling aggression.
But as 38 world leaders began arriving here on Monday, that confidence appears to be at risk. Even before the summit officially began, it was overshadowed by uncertainty over whether Mr. Biden would remain in the race for a second term and the looming return of former President Donald J. Trump.
Mr Trump once declared NATO “obsolete”, threatened to withdraw from the alliance and more recently said he would let the Russians do “whatever the hell they want” to any member country he deemed not contributing enough to the alliance. In recent days, as Mr. Trump led in the polls after the debate, key European allies began discussing what a second Trump term might mean for the alliance — and whether it could confront Russia without American weapons, money and intelligence in its center.
Mr Biden will greet the leaders in the sprawling Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium a few blocks from the White House on Tuesday night – the same room where the treaty creating NATO was signed in 1949, in a ceremony presided over by President Harry S. Truman. Mr. Biden was then 6 years old and the Cold War was in its infancy.
He is now 81 and perhaps the staunchest advocate in Washington for an alliance that has grown from 12 members in 1949 to 32 today as the era of superpower conflict has roared back. But as they gather on Tuesday afternoon, leaders will be watching Mr. Biden’s every move and listening to his every word for the same signs Americans are focused on — whether he can go the distance of another four years in office.
Mr. Biden knows this and told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in an interview on Friday that he welcomes the scrutiny. “Who will hold NATO together like me?” asked the president rhetorically. “I guess a good way to judge me,” he said, is to watch him at the summit — and see how the allies react. “Come listen. See what they say.”
As they arrived, NATO leaders recognized that the alliance faced a test they had not anticipated: whether it could reliably maintain the momentum it has built in support of Ukraine when confidence in its most important player has never been more fragile.
And they know Mr Putin and Xi Jinping, China’s leader, are also watching.
“NATO has never been, and is not, and never will be, a given,” Jens Stoltenberg, the alliance’s outgoing secretary general, said Sunday in a wide-ranging discussion with reporters. “We’ve been doing it successfully for 75 years. I’m sure we can do it in the future as well. But it’s about political leadership, it’s about political commitment.”
Months before the meeting, the alliance began hedging its bets in the event of a second Trump presidency. It is creating a new NATO command to ensure the long-term supply of arms and military aid to Ukraine, even if the United States, under Mr. Trump, withdraws.
But in talks with NATO leaders, it is clear that their plans to modernize their forces and prepare for an era that could be marked by decades of confrontation with Russia are not matched by commensurate increases in their military budgets.
More than 20 NATO members have now met the target of spending 2 per cent of their gross national product on defence, fulfilling pledges some made in response to Mr Trump’s demands and others in the wake of Russia’s invasion. That percentage — a goal set more than a decade ago, at a time when terrorism appeared to be the biggest threat — seems too small for the work being done, many of Mr. Biden’s aides say.
In Europe, Germany has outlined plans to upgrade its military capabilities to deter Russian aggression, a transformation promised by Chancellor Olaf Scholz in the weeks after the Russian invasion. But Mr. Scholz’s grand plans have yet to be matched with a budget to pay for them, and his policy of bringing the public together has proven so fraught that German officials resist paying for it.
Carl Bildt, the co-president of the European Council on Foreign Relations and former prime minister of Sweden, recently wrote that European nations “will need to double” their budgets “once again to credibly fend off threats from an increasingly desperate Russian regime .”
Still, White House officials said Monday that Mr. Biden would not push for new military spending targets.
But the more immediate problem for Mr. Biden and Mr. Soltz is to avoid another public spat with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky over the question of how to describe his country’s eventual NATO membership.
Last year, as he headed to Vilnius, Lithuania for NATO’s annual meeting, Mr Zelensky expressed his displeasure at the lack of a timetable for Ukraine’s entry into the alliance. “It is unprecedented and absurd when no time frame is set, neither for the invitation nor for the accession of Ukraine,” he wrote on social media at the time.
It was temporarily calmed when it arrived, with a pledge from the alliance that Ukraine could skip some of the hoops other nations had to jump through before they could join.
But for months, NATO nations have been negotiating language that could resolve the problem without allowing Ukraine in while it remains at war.
In recent weeks, negotiators have begun to settle on a new approach: The alliance is expected to declare Ukraine’s eventual NATO membership “irreversible,” diplomats involved in the talks said.
While “irreversible” sounds definitive, it does nothing to resolve Mr Zelensky’s central demand – a date when his country would come under the protection of the NATO umbrella.
The case of Mr. Zelensky is, obviously, the most tragic. But it’s not the only thing.
Seventy-five years after NATO was created to fend off threats from the Soviet Union at the dawn of the Cold War, some current and potentially future leaders among the alliance’s member states appear sympathetic to Russia’s diplomatic pleas despite Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán visited Russia the other day and in public statements alongside Mr Putin said nothing critical of its invasion or ongoing attacks on civilians. He has hinted that he is seeking an opening to peace talks on terms similar to Russia’s demands.
The White House criticized the visit on Monday. John F. Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said Mr. Orban’s visit “certainly does not appear to be productive in terms of trying to get things done in Ukraine,” adding: “It’s troubling.”
But to avoid any public split within Nato on the eve of the summit, Mr Stoltenberg stopped short of criticizing Mr Orban, noting that “NATO allies interact with Moscow in different ways, at different levels”.
However, he suggested that trying to reach a settlement while Mr. Putin moves forward in Ukraine would not ultimately bring peace. “We all want peace,” Mr Stoltenberg said. “It is always possible to end a war by losing a war. But that will not bring peace – that will bring possession, and possession is not peace.”
