The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the 28-member military alliance of the U.S., Canada, 25 European countries and Turkey, is the “the bulwark of international peace and security”, President Donald Trump said on Wednesday.
“I said it’s obsolete. Now it’s no longer obsolete,” Mr. Trump said, overturning a campaign position that drew intense criticism from Democrats and Republicans. Mr. Trump has also reversed his positions on China, Syria and Russia in recent days, aligning his thinking closer to U.S. orthodoxy and dramatically shedding his insurgent agenda. The President was talking to reporters along with the visiting NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
Terming the NATO obsolete in the early days of his campaign, Mr. Trump began revising his position along the way, calling for increased focus on fighting terrorism by the alliance and enhanced defence spending by partner countries. With his latest statement, Mr. Trump has completed the transition from being a critic to a proponent of NATO.
Tough stance
The President’s supporters point out that because of his tough stance, partner countries have committed more spending and the alliance is reorienting itself towards fighting the Islamic State. The NATO summit in Warsaw last year had resolved to prepare itself to face threats from two fronts — Russia on one side and Islamists on the other. “They made a change, and now they do fight terrorism,” Mr. Trump said on Wednesday.
NATO has been involved in the war on terror for long, however. The only time the alliance has invoked its principle that an attack on one is an attack on all was after the September 11, 2001 terror attack on the U.S. The NATO has recently started training Iraqi troops to combat the Islamic State. The President’s complete endorsement of NATO comes also against the backdrop of deteriorating relations between the U.S and Russia, belying Mr. Trump’s hope to the contrary, expressed during the campaign.
Member countries have also expressed willingness to increase defence spending. Only five of the 28 members now meet the target of 2% of GDP on defence expenditure.
On Thursday morning, Mr. Trump tweeted: “It would be wonderful if we could get along with Russia. Right now we’re not getting along with Russia at all. Russia is a strong country. We’ve a very strong country. We’ll see how that works out.”
While Mr. Trump’s serial turnarounds appear drastic, his predecessor Barack Obama had said this was coming. Before embarking on his last foreign tour as President, Mr. Obama had said the then-President elect had assured him of continuity in policy. “In my conversation with the President-elect, he expressed a great interest in maintaining our core strategic relationships. And so one of the messages I will be able to deliver is his commitment to NATO and the Transatlantic Alliance,” Mr. Obama said in December.
Mr. Trump appears to be proving him correct, as he falls in line with established U.S. policy on issue after issue. The President also abandoned his earlier position that China was a currency manipulator whom he would punish. “They’re not currency manipulators,” Mr. Trump told the Wall Street Journal in an interview on Wednesday, and pointed out that the U.S. dollar was too strong. Pushing trade disputes with China to the back-burner, the President said he would be willing to give concessions to China if it helped defuse the North Korean nuclear crisis.
