Nato: has it lost its raison d’être?

“Is Nato suffering the 70-year itch,” asked Mark Almond in The Daily Telegraph. Repeated declarations of solidarity from the alliance’s leaders at last week’s anniversary summit in London “hardly masked the squabbling between Presidents Trump, Macron and Erdogan, or the carping stage whispers from Justin Trudeau”: the Canadian president was caught on camera laughing at Trump with several of his colleagues. At the summit’s conclusion, an “alphabet soup” of reforms and commitments was announced. But it didn’t mask the void at the organisation’s centre. “What is the point of Nato decades after the collapse of the USSR?” And does Article 5 – the principle that an attack against one member is an attack against all – still hold?

“Nato is facing a crisis sparked by Trump,” said Michael H. Fuchs in The Guardian. The leader of its most important member regularly criticises the alliance, and has suggested that if Nato countries don’t meet their spending commitment of 2% of GDP on defence, the US might not defend them from attack, as if he is running some kind of “protection racket”. Then in October, he “abruptly pulled US forces out of Syria with no coordination with Nato”, although Britain and France both had special forces fighting Islamic State there. This was the last straw for President Macron, who declared last month that Nato was suffering from “brain death”. It was a “powerful wake-up call”, said Peter Ricketts in the FT. Macron believes that the US’s main security priority today is its confrontation with China. As a result, he proposed that Europeans should “pursue strategic autonomy to avoid being squeezed into insignificance between the great powers”: they should build up their own forces while repairing relations with Russia, “as an insurance policy”.

So as things stand, Trump thinks “most alliance members, starting with France and Canada, are a bunch of ungrateful and unhelpful freeloaders”, said Bret Stephens in The New York Times. These members, in turn, see Trump as “an erratic, pompous, dangerous simpleton”. Unfortunately, both sides are right. If Macron is now talking up a European army and talking down the Russian threat, it’s because “Trump’s wild rhetoric” has led him to this point. But equally, it’s disgraceful that only nine out of Nato’s 29 members meet the 2% spending target. Germany recently stated that it would hit the target, but not until 2031. To Americans, “that sounds like something between a bald insult and a bad joke”. The “defence of the free world against its common and perennial enemies” is a serious business, and leaders on both sides of the Atlantic must take it seriously.