NATO leaders pose for a group picture during the NATO summit in Ankara, on Wednesday.LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP/Getty Images
Kerry Buck is Canada’s former ambassador to NATO and a senior fellow at the University of Ottawa.
Some might dismiss the NATO summit that just concluded in Ankara as another example of what has become the annual ritualistic drubbing of the Alliance’s members by U.S. President Donald Trump. Others are declaring it a success because NATO held together.
Both would be wrong.
Mr. Trump did go to Ankara swinging. But the real story was about how NATO members continue to work to rebalance the Alliance toward Europe and Canada, and away from the United States.
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Since 1949, NATO has been built around an unhealthy, asymmetric dependency on U.S. military and political leadership by the other Allies, including Canada. The U.S., beginning as early as 1952, has been pressing NATO members to take on more responsibility.
At this year’s summit, the Allies no longer had a choice. Washington announced in May that it would shrink the military capabilities available to NATO in a crisis and review American troop numbers in Europe. Even with more defence spending, NATO wouldn’t be able to adequately respond to an attack until 2035 at current readiness levels, with Russia estimated to be able to launch a full-scale attack on an ally as early as 2029. All agree that Moscow is already in a sub-threshold war with NATO, disrupting communications infrastructure, systematically sending drones over Allied nuclear facilities and military bases and mounting disinformation campaigns aimed at destabilizing democracy and paralyzing political decision-making.
It’s clear that more defence spending is now a national imperative for the Allies. And because the U.S. has military capabilities that the Alliance cannot do without, like strategic bombers and the nuclear umbrella, it is in all NATO members’ interests to keep the U.S. inside the tent. This includes the U.S. itself; a withdrawal from NATO would leave America more exposed and with greater defence burdens, eroding the U.S.’s strategic leverage, shifting its defence perimeter westward and exposing North Atlantic sea lanes and the Arctic to greater Russian and Chinese probing.
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The Ankara summit was structured around showing how Europe and Canada have stepped up, announcing a generational increase in defence spending and billions in new contracts. The summit also resulted in an agreement around significant support for Ukraine, with the final declaration reaffirming that an “attack on one is an attack on all.” And reportedly, in the closed-door leaders’ meeting, Mr. Trump said he wanted to keep the U.S. in NATO.
If we measure success by whether Allies were able to keep Mr. Trump committed to NATO by offering him “big beautiful numbers” on defence spending, then the Ankara summit was a success. But this measure means NATO is falling into what I call the Trump transactional trap, managing a relationship but papering over some of the broader seismic changes underway inside the Alliance.
Canada put forward the idea of NATO in the 1940s to forestall America’s isolationist and unilateral tendencies, and to give us a voice and a veto at the world’s premiere international security table. Until Mr. Trump, the U.S. push to get other allies to spend more on defence was about burden-sharing – that is, “we will all do more” in the worsening threat environment. In Ankara, this became burden-shifting: “The rest of you do more, so the U.S. can do less.” The question for Canada will be how that plays out over time; if more Europe means more EU, could Canada wind up with less leverage? Given the interconnected nature of today’s threat environment, Canada needs allies more than ever.
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The Alliance’s deterrent effect has also been undermined. Mr. Trump’s past invitations to Vladimir Putin to attack Allies that underspend on defence, as well as the thinning of U.S. arms and troops in Europe, are gifts to Moscow. Recent polling shows that the majority in 15 European allied states do not believe America would come to their aid if they were attacked.
Finally, instead of reaffirming the transatlantic bond, the summit effectively widened the transatlantic divide. When Mr. Trump berated NATO for failing to support America’s war of choice against Iran, he was fundamentally misstating the Alliance’s purpose, obligations and history. NATO was never intended to be a blanket guarantee for support in wars initiated by a single ally. Iran wasn’t a loyalty test the Allies failed, as Mr. Trump claimed; NATO wasn’t asked. And Mr. Trump’s renewed calls for Greenland to become part of the U.S. undercut the Alliance’s raison d’être.
Many of the Allies will head home feeling good that they have managed their relationship with the United States. This was pragmatic and needed. But a transatlantic trust deficit has been created that poses a cost to NATO, and will take a long time to repair.