Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state, explained the fraught atmosphere in his memoirs: “The Western leaders treated Nixon with the respect they felt for him and the solicitude shown to terminally ill patients.”
At this week’s 75th anniversary NATO summit in Washington, the mood is likely to be similar. President Biden has been one of the most effective leaders in NATO history, rebuilding the alliance and galvanizing its members to support Ukraine. But Europeans tell me they feel a deep anxiety now about the future of U.S. leadership, with Biden in severe political trouble and former president Donald Trump seeming poised to regain the White House.
The historical resonance of this week’s gathering is haunting — and also, perhaps, oddly reassuring. Worries about the future of American leadership and the durability of the transatlantic alliance are such common NATO themes that they ought to be part of the organization’s mission statement. Europeans are always fretting about America’s reliability, just as Americans are always peeved that the Europeans aren’t pulling their weight in providing for the common defense.
The alliance was founded with what Dean Acheson, the secretary of state who drafted its founding treaty, described in his memoir as “basic problems, which NATO has never been able to solve.” The alliance was “a body … without a head,” unable to compel its members to do anything. And NATO’s collective defense required “increased forces from its members,” though many European nations from the start refused to pay their fair share.
At the signing ceremony for the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949, Acheson noted, the Marine Band played two songs from the musical “Porgy and Bess” that unintentionally highlighted gaps in the alliance’s bold promises. The tunes were “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”
As NATO waged the Cold War, its core conundrums remained. When Kissinger became Nixon’s national security adviser in 1969, he saw three big issues: America’s “flexible response” doctrine of nuclear retaliation against a Russian attack, the alliance’s formula for sharing defense costs and the number of U.S. troops needed in Europe. Those questions persist to this day, even as NATO remains the world’s most successful alliance.
Panic is the flavor of the day in Washington, and in this anxious environment, the NATO summit may seem like a television rerun from the 1960s. But if we take a closer look, we can see reasons the alliance is less fragile than the current political climate on both sides of the Atlantic.
The White House had planned this week’s summit as a celebration of NATO as guarantor of collective security — and of Biden’s role as steward of that relationship. Those arguments may seem wobbly now, but I’d argue that both remain true, regardless of what happens at the ballot box in November. As for Trump’s lead in the polls, voters can surprise us, as the recent victory of the left-wing parties over the hard right in France demonstrated.
For all Biden’s political troubles, his NATO laurel is well deserved. He helped refurbish the alliance after four years of Trump’s disdain. He shared American intelligence secrets to warn Europe that Russia truly intended to invade Ukraine; he mobilized NATO to help valiant Ukrainians defend their country. Some argue in hindsight that he didn’t do enough, but a more aggressive American stance might have busted NATO’s solidarity.
The truth is that Biden blocked President Vladimir Putin while avoiding a direct conflict with Russia — no easy task.
I’d credit Biden for rebuilding support for NATO at home, too. He was steadfast through six months of delay by a cabal of House Republicans who tried to block $61 billion in essential military aid to Ukraine. By the end of that agonizing debate, more Americans — even House Republicans — understood better why the security of Europe and that of the United States are intertwined.
Biden and Jake Sullivan, his national security adviser, have worked this spring and summer to put more bite into NATO’s commitment to Ukraine. With new U.S. weapons and more freedom in using them, Ukraine was able to halt Russia’s offensive on Kharkiv, stabilize its lines and inflict severe casualties on Russian forces. At the summit, Biden is expected to announce that Ukraine will have an “irreversible” bridge to NATO membership, so long as it continues anti-corruption reforms. That would be a stronger commitment than NATO made a year ago during its summit at Vilnius.
This week’s appalling Russian missile strike on a children’s hospital in Kyiv is a grim reminder of why NATO matters. Looking at footage of the hospital ruins, Americans and Europeans alike will see vivid evidence that Putin is a cruel and unyielding adversary. Without NATO’s opposition, Putin would redraw the security map in Europe, with lasting consequences for America.
A similarly macabre message came in September 1949, when the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear weapon just as the Senate was debating the North Atlantic Treaty. Acheson mused: “Once again the Russians had come to the aid of an imperiled nonpartisan foreign policy, binding its wounds and rallying the divided Congress.”
Biden’s successful stewardship of NATO makes this an ideal time, in my view, for him to take a victory lap (at a slow pace, to be sure). Then he should invite Democrats to select a new presidential candidate who can represent the United States in its long struggle against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Your race is won, Mr. President. As your allies and friends applaud, hand off the baton.
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