NATO could face a serious risk of the US leaving the alliance if Donald Trump is re-elected in November, the Telegraph said on Saturday, citing several diplomats from the bloc’s member states.
Europe’s NATO countries should develop some strategy to deal with the consequences of such an eventuality and reconsider the bloc’s defence capabilities, they warn. The possibility of America’s withdrawal is a “concern,” one European diplomat told the paper. “Nobody knows what he’s going to do next,” he said, referring to Trump. The former president secured his leadership in the Republican primaries earlier this week as he swept 14 out of 15 states at stake on Super Tuesday and got 995 Republican convention delegates’ votes. His only opponent, Nikki Haley, dropped out of the race for the GOP nomination soon thereafter. He is now expected to face off against President Joe Biden in November since the incumbent American leader also came out on top in the Democratic primaries. Earlier, several former senior US officials claimed that a Trump White House could make America withdraw from NATO. Former US Défense Secretary Mark Esper made such a prediction in December 2023. According to him, Trump could start pulling US forces out of NATO countries, potentially causing “the collapse of the alliance.” Reuters also reported on such a possibility at that time. In mid-February, Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, made a similar statement. “NATO would be in real jeopardy,” he said, adding that Trump “would try to get out.” A European diplomat said that the rest of the bloc should “do the planning” for a scenario in which Trump follows through on such plans or just weakens America’s commitment to NATO. “Preparations need to be in place,” the paper’s source added. Another official described NATO as “so overdependent on the US.” A “discussion” on hedging against risks of a US withdrawal was “necessary,” this person added. A third source quoted by the paper said European nations should check the adequacy of their own “defence planning” amid such risks. In the UK, similar concerns were previously voiced by Lord Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to the US and a prime minister’s national security adviser. “If I were an official in any prime minister’s office around Europe, I would be commissioning the experts in government to start doing some contingency thinking about how a NATO without the United States would look and function – just in case,” he said in a piece he wrote for Prospect last month. Trump himself has not made any comment lately about leaving the alliance. Instead, he said in February that he would not “protect” those NATO members that fall short of the 2% spending threshold in case of an attack, including by Russia. Speaking at a campaign rally in South Carolina on February 10, he recalled what he described as a conversation with “the president of a big country” in Europe. When allegedly asked whether he would rush to the nation’s aid in case of an attack by Moscow, Trump said that if this nation hadn’t spent enough on defence, he “would encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want” to it. Moscow itself has repeatedly denied any plans to attack a NATO member, adding that starting a global war would go against “common sense.”
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Sweden has officially become the 32nd member of the US-led NATO military bloc after the document formalizing Stockholm’s accession entered into force on Thursday.
The accession ceremony will be held in Washington, where Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson will submit his country’s documents to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. A document published by the US Department of State asserts that all conditions for Sweden’s entry into NATO have been fulfilled and that the protocol signifying Stockholm’s membership entered into force on March 7, 2024. In a post on X, Kristersson also declared that NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg had informed him that all bloc members have formally accepted Sweden’s accession protocol and had invited Stockholm to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Stockholm is set to make a final formal decision on joining the bloc, which will be followed by a news conference. After that, Kristersson is set to issue an address to the nation, according to Swedish Radio. Sweden and Finland abandoned their longstanding policies of non-alignment and submitted bids to join the US-led military bloc in 2022, citing security concerns following the launch of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine. The two countries' bids to join had to be ratified by all current bloc members. Hungary and Türkiye initially objected, with Ankara accusing Sweden and Finland of harboring members of armed groups designated as terrorists under Turkish law. Finland and Sweden eventually reformed their anti-terrorism laws and both bids were ultimately ratified. Finland became the 31st member of NATO in April 2023. Meanwhile, Russia has insisted that NATO’s continued expansion poses a threat to its national security and is destabilizing Europe, making it less safe. Moscow has pointed out that it did not have any issues with the two Scandinavian countries before they decided to join the US-led bloc, but will now be forced to respond by reorganizing and strengthening its armed forces in the region. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte will not have Budapest’s backing in his bid to become the next secretary general of NATO, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said on Tuesday.
The Dutch politician is considered the frontrunner for the job. Rutte has the endorsement of several heavyweights in the military alliance, including France, Germany, the UK, and the US. But the Hungarian government opposes the candidacy due to his vocal criticism of their country in the past. ”We certainly can’t support the election of a man to the position of NATO’s secretary general, who previously wanted to force Hungary on its knees,” Szijjarto said. He was referring to remarks made by Rutte in 2021, after Hungary passed a law that prohibited the exposure of LGBT-themed content to minors. The Dutch prime minister had argued that this was incompatible with EU values, saying Hungary had “no business being in the European Union any more.” Brussels’ goal should be “to bring Hungary to its knees on this issue,” he added, speaking ahead of an EU leaders’ summit. While roughly two-thirds of alliance member states support Rutte’s bid, the secretary general has to be appointed by a unanimous vote. Budapest has demonstrated its willingness to leverage its voting rights in NATO by withholding the ratification of Sweden’s bid to join the transatlantic bloc for almost two years. President Tamas Sulyok signed the bill approving the accession on Tuesday. The Dutch prime minister is serving his fourth term. Rutte announced his decision to depart from national politics last July. He currently holds office in a caretaker capacity, as MPs elected in November’s election have struggled to form a new government. Jens Stoltenberg is set to step down as NATO secretary general in October after a decade in the position. His successor is expected to be chosen in July, during a leaders’ summit in Washington. Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov signed a plan for the implementation of the adapted Annual National Program of Cooperation with NATO for 2024, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry reported Friday.
Aiming at reforming Ukraine's security and defense sector, the Ukrainian defense ministry mapped out 50 steps to achieve 17 goals in its plan. The plan includes creating a joint NATO-Ukraine center for analysis, training and education, developing national documents based on NATO standards and completing the transformation of its command and control system in accordance with NATO principles and standards. The Ukrainian parliament earlier declared rapprochement with NATO as one of the key priorities for Ukraine this year. NATO recognized Ukraine as its Enhanced Opportunities Partner in 2020. In September 2023, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that the alliance is not ready to accept Ukraine as a member while its conflict with Russia is in an active stage. French President Emmanuel Macron has argued that deployments of troops to Ukraine by NATO members and other allies cannot be ruled out because Western powers must stop at nothing to ensure that Russia does not defeat Kiev’s forces.
“There’s no consensus today to send, in an official manner, troops on the ground,” Macron told reporters after hosting a meeting of European leaders on Monday in Paris. “But in terms of dynamics, we cannot exclude anything. We will do everything necessary to prevent Russia from winning this war.” France hosted Monday’s summit of Ukraine backers to demonstrate steadfast support and European unity amid concerns that US aid to Kiev may stop, especially if Donald Trump wins this year’s presidential election. Macron said that while Ukraine’s European allies want to avoid escalating the conflict into a direct war with Russia, they agree that they must do more to ensure that Moscow doesn’t win. “We have to take stock of the situation and realize our collective security is at stake,” the French leader said. “We have to ratchet up. Russia must not win, not only for Ukraine, but secondly, we are, by doing so, ensuring our collective security for today and for the future.” Macron noted that the allies who say “never, ever” today about direct troop deployments to Ukraine are the same ones that previously ruled out escalations of military aid that were later granted, including long-range missiles and fighter jets. “Two years ago, a lot around this table said that we will offer helmets and sleeping bags, and now they’re saying we need to do more to get missiles and tanks to Ukraine. We have to be humble and realize that we’ve always been six to eight months late, so we’ll do what is needed to achieve our aim.” There is broad consensus among the nations represented at Monday’s meeting that the allies must provide more aid to Ukraine and step up more quickly, Macron claimed. “We are not at war with the Russian people, but we cannot let them win in Ukraine,” he said, adding, “We are determined to do everything necessary for as long as necessary. That is the key takeaway from this evening.” Washington ran out of money for Ukraine last month, after burning through $113 billion in congressionally approved aid packages. US President Joe Biden is seeking an additional $60 billion in Ukraine funding as part of an emergency spending bill that also includes aid for Israel and Taiwan. Conservative Republican lawmakers have balked at approving more aid for Ukraine, saying Biden is merely prolonging the conflict without changing its outcome. Trump has claimed he would end the crisis swiftly by forcing the Ukrainian and Russian leaders to the negotiating table. The early delivery of US fighter jets would not have changed the course of Ukraine’s failed summer counteroffensive because there were not enough trained pilots to fly them, White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has said.
Speaking to ABC News on Sunday, Sullivan disagreed with the narrative that the White House did not provide enough “war-fighting equipment” for Ukraine to succeed on the front line. “The idea that we did not mobilize a massive quantity of resources and capabilities to deliver to Ukrainians simply doesn’t wash,” Sullivan said in response to a question on whether Washington’s incremental approach to deliveries of advanced weaponry was to blame for Ukraine’s lack of progress on the battlefield. “If you look at some total of what the United States provided to Ukraine in this fight it is an incredible quantity of material delivered at speed, at scale outpacing the expectation,” he argued. “There are additional capabilities that Ukrainians have looked for, F-16 being one of them,” he continued, explaining that while the US is prepared to provide the jets, the real challenge Ukraine faces is that “there aren’t many pilots to be able to pilot those aircraft.” Kiev has repeatedly asked for Western fighter jets, saying they are needed to repel Russian air attacks. In August, the US allowed Denmark and the Netherlands to donate F-16s to Ukraine, with the first deliveries expected this year. NATO member states also agreed to form a coalition to help train Ukrainians to fly the Western-made aircraft. Moscow has warned that the move would be a dangerous escalation, given that some F-16 modifications can carry nuclear bombs, and vowed to destroy the jets in Ukraine if they arrive. The United States, Britain and other major NATO members have said they would support Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte as the new leader of the military bloc, as the current secretary general prepares to end his ten-year term.
The White House threw its backing behind Rutte on Thursday, with National Security Council spokesman John Kirby telling reporters that Washington had already conveyed its stance to other member states. ”The United States has made it clear to our allies, our NATO allies, that we believe Mr. Rutte would be an excellent secretary general for NATO,” he said. Berlin has also declared support for Rutte, with the office of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz describing the outgoing PM as an “outstanding candidate” to take over from Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. ”Chancellor Scholz supports the nomination of Mark Rutte as the new Secretary General of NATO,” Scholz’s spokesman, Steffen Hebestreit, wrote in a social media post. He praised Rutte’s “immense experience, his great security policy expertise and his strong diplomatic skills.” Britain adopted the same position. “The UK does strongly back Dutch PM Mark Rutter to succeed Jens Stoltenberg as NATO secretary general,” a government spokesperson said in a statement to the British media. A senior French official told Reuters that President Emmanuel Macron was an early backer of Rutte, and had discussed the matter with him last year. While unnamed diplomats told Reuters that 16 other NATO states also favoured Rutte for the role, his appointment would require a unanimous vote from the bloc’s 31 members. The Polish Foreign Ministry noted that Warsaw has not yet expressed support for any candidate, while officials in Hungary and Türkiye have not made their positions known. Berlin has also declared support for Rutte, with the office of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz describing the outgoing PM as an “outstanding candidate” to take over from Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. ”Chancellor Scholz supports the nomination of Mark Rutte as the new Secretary General of NATO,” Scholz’s spokesman, Steffen Hebestreit, wrote in a social media post. He praised Rutte’s “immense experience, his great security policy expertise and his strong diplomatic skills.” Britain adopted the same position. “The UK does strongly back Dutch PM Mark Rutter to succeed Jens Stoltenberg as NATO secretary general,” a government spokesperson said in a statement to the British media. A senior French official told Reuters that President Emmanuel Macron was an early backer of Rutte, and had discussed the matter with him last year. While unnamed diplomats told Reuters that 16 other NATO states also favoured Rutte for the role, his appointment would require a unanimous vote from the bloc’s 31 members. The Polish Foreign Ministry noted that Warsaw has not yet expressed support for any candidate, while officials in Hungary and Türkiye have not made their positions known. Scared of being abandoned by the US under Trump, European officials are floating the idea of the bloc’s own nuclear force.
With its farmers rebelling, its economy declining, and its traditional parties decaying, you’d think the European Union has enough to worry about at home. Yet its thoroughly detached elites love to think big. And what’s bigger than nuclear weapons? That’s how they have ended up falling for one of Donald Trump’s typically blunt provocations. The former – and likely future – American president has warned that NATO members not spending enough on defence won’t be able to count on US protection on his watch. Eminently sensible – why do declining but still comparatively wealthy EU states keep behaving like defence beggars? – Trump’s threat has triggered various predictable meltdowns. The White House archly tut-tutted about the “appalling and unhinged” rhetoric of a man who is not, unlike the current president Joe Biden, overseeing a genocide together with Israel. Go figure, as they say in the US. On the other hand, many Republicans have displayed demonstrative insouciance, if not outright agreement. And that is certain to reflect what many ordinary Americans think as well; that is, if they think about Europe at all. And as if the Big Scary Orange Man hadn’t done enough damage yet, next came the Pentagon, which (sort of) revealed that Russia – that famous gas station sending out its shovel-wielding soldiers to capture German washing machines – is building, if not a Death Star, then at least something equally sinister out there in space: Sputnik déjà vu all over again, as America’s greatest philosopher might have said. All of that, of course, against a background of incessant NATO scaremongering, which, it seems, has succeeded in spooking NATO most of all. No wonder then that inside EU-Europe, reactions to Trump’s taunting sally have been marked by serious abandonment anxiety. One of its symptoms has been a call for the bloc – or Europe’s NATO members; the issue is fuzzy – to acquire its own nuclear force. One way or the other, Christian Lindner, Germany’s minister of finance, made time from razing the state budget in an economy that his cabinet colleague, the children’s book author and minister of the economy, Robert Habeck, has just labelled “dramatically bad,” in order to pen an article calling for France (not subordinating its nukes to NATO) and Britain (not even in the EU anymore) – two small nuclear powers – to step in as the new security sugar daddies by expanding their nuclear umbrellas over everyone else. Katarina Barley, eternally fresh-eyed vice president of the European Parliament and the top EU election candidate of the German Social-Democrats – a party leading a deeply unpopular government while approaching extinction in the polls – and Manfred Weber, head of the conservative faction in the European Parliament, have kept things more general: They simply suggest that the EU should get its own doomsday weapons, somehow. Donald Tusk, freshly re-established as Poland’s EU-subservient viceroy, has made similar noises. Well, who cares about details, right? That attitude of “on s’engage et puis on voit” has, after all, proven a smashing success in Ukraine. In reality, this is not a problem caused by Trump: That, in a world of more than one nuclear power, the US nuclear umbrella over any place other than the US itself is – and can only be – fundamentally unreliable is, of course, a perennial, structural problem. Those who prefer realism to wishful thinking have always understood this. Henry Kissinger, for instance, a sinister yet sometimes brutally frank practitioner of realpolitik, explained as much as early as the 1950s – perhaps most succinctly in a television interview in 1958 – just a little over a decade after the dawn of the nuclear age. If any clients abroad were to be attacked so severely or successfully that only a US nuclear strike would be left to respond, any American president – whatever treaties are in place or promises have been made – would always face an impossible choice: Drop the client or suffer a retaliatory strike on America itself. It is true that various policies have been devised to mitigate this dilemma (“limited” nuclear war, nuclear sharing, or the NATO medium-range missiles of the 1980s), but, in reality, it cannot be resolved. Yet here we are. An EU that seems to suffer from historical amnesia produces chatter about a search for nukes of its own. Not the nukes that are already in US-aligned Europe anyhow, in the national arsenals of France, Britain, and at American bases in five NATO countries, so that, at least, we are already used to them, but different nukes, new nukes. Nukes the acquisition, politics, and rules of which are all still to be figured out. What could go wrong? Everything, really. But let’s be a little more detailed. First of all, the elites of EU-Europe have, expectably, immediately displayed disunity and confusion. In essence, while no one meant the call for nuclear weapons as a challenge to the US, it was still too much for hard-core Atlanticism compradors: Germany’s minister of defence, Boris Pistorius, NATO’s figurehead General-Secretary Jens Stoltenberg, and the head of the German parliament’s defence committee – and “jokingly” “Volkssturm”-nostalgic (no kidding) – uber-hawk Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann all scrambled to contain the inadvertently mildly subversive idea that Europe could possibly try to do anything significant on its own. Perish the thought! A house so divided against itself is not a safe place to own nukes. Secondly, nuclear weapons are, of course, meant for extreme emergencies, means of last resort either to serve deterrence by the threat of we-will-take-you-with-us retaliation when all is lost anyhow (the purpose of Britain’s and France’s arsenals) or, at best, in a situation of imminent, catastrophic defeat. One implication of this fact is that the decision to use them would end up with either one person or a very compact group hunkered down in a bunker. Who would that be in the case of the EU? The head of the commission, for instance? Someone like Ursula von der Leyen, a self-promoting, short-sighted, and reckless power-grabber, free of any electoral legitimacy, who is really serving the US and not Europe? Good luck! And how would the EU overcome the fact that any such ultimate decider would also have national allegiances: An Estonian or a Pole perhaps, from states, that is, that have their own risky agendas and, to be frank, national(ist) complexes? Or someone from Spain or Greece perhaps, from, that is, countries that may well largely escape the direct effects of a large-scale fight in central Europe, and therefore would have no sane incentive to have Madrid or Athens incinerated to make a last point about Latvia or, indeed, Germany? Set up a committee (unanimity rules or majority voting on when to push the very last red button?), and all you will get is a multiplication of clashing and divided loyalties. Thirdly, more generally, can you imagine today’s EU – or anything growing out of it – in possession of weapons of mass destruction? That is, a club of states most of which are now stubbornly complicit (International Court of Justice be damned) in an ongoing genocide in the Middle East (committed by Israel against the Palestinians), many of which have a pathological obsession with crusading against Russia, and none of which can even grasp that the greatest threat to their sovereignty comes from their “allies” in Washington. And that leads us to the final and most fundamental problem: This whole debate about nukes for Europe is based on bizarrely blinkered premises that betray that EU-Europe is by far not politically mature enough to have such weapons (if any state ever is). Because if it were, then its strategists and politicians would honestly acknowledge and discuss one simple fact: A nuclear force would have to deter every possible vitally dangerous opponent, that is, of course, including the US. Yet these are the same leaders that have simply ignored that the greatest act of war, eco-terrorism, and vital-infrastructure demolition against the EU – the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines – was launched by Washington, whether hands-on or via proxies. The EU is a large bloc of countries in an increasingly unstable and lawless world where the ever-wider proliferation of nuclear weapons will be inevitable. Hypothetically, such an entity would be a candidate for owning such weapons. Yet, in reality, the EU lacks three essential qualities to even consider acquiring them: It is far too fractious, it has no serious concept of its own interests as apart from and, indeed, opposed to the US, and it lacks an elite that could remotely be trusted with weapons capable of ending the world. There, it is of course, not alone. But isn’t one US on planet Earth bad enough already? The Netherlands’ outgoing Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, has said that admitting Ukraine to NATO is not feasible while the conflict with Russia is ongoing.
Rutte has been described in the media as a frontrunner to become the next secretary-general of the US-led bloc. The politician made the comments at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday in response to a question about whether EU prime ministers would “personally support” Ukraine’s membership bid at the next NATO summit in Washington in July. “The bad news is – as long as the war is raging, Ukraine cannot become a member of NATO,” Rutte has said. “The good news is that we can learn from the European Union,” he added referring to the EU approach of implementing “intermediate steps” that countries take on “the way to accession” as opposed to NATO’s process that goes “from nothing to full membership.” Rutte admitted that the last time the question of Ukraine’s membership arose, Kiev was left “dissatisfied.” As a result, there is a need to “work carefully” to see “what next step is possible” so as not to “overpromise.” Ukraine applied to integrate with the NATO Membership Action Plan in 2008 and a decade later enshrined in its constitution membership in the US-led bloc as a strategic foreign policy goal. At last year’s NATO summit in Vilnius, the bloc’s leaders said that Ukraine’s “rightful place is in NATO,” but failed to provide clear commitments or describe a timeline. While the question of Ukraine’s membership is likely to be discussed at the next NATO summit in July, some Western politicians have warned against expecting a “big leap forward on that.” Russia views NATO expansion towards its border as a major security threat. President Vladimir Putin has argued that Western powers have used Ukraine to antagonize Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Putin called the West’s approach to Ukraine a colossal political mistake, pointing to NATO’s 2008 promise to accept the country into the bloc, as well as the Western-supported coup in Kiev in 2014. Eighteen NATO member states plan to meet the alliance’s target of spending the equivalent of 2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) on defence in 2024, Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said. Speaking in Brussels before a meeting of defence officials from NATO’s 31 members on Wednesday, Stoltenberg noted that the number of states meeting the threshold has risen rapidly amid Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian territory and ultimately its full-scale invasion in 2022. Concern that the return of former United States President Donald Trump to the White House has also encouraged a rise in spending. “That is another record number and a sixfold increase from 2014 when only three allies met the target,” Stoltenberg said at a news conference. Stating that US partners in NATO have raised spending by $600bn over the past decade, the alliance’s political chief also warned that Trump was undermining their security by calling into question Washington’s commitment to its allies. Trump has long complained over the spending levels of NATO states. Over the weekend, the likely Republican candidate in November’s US election called into question the country’s willingness to support “delinquent” members of the alliance if they were attacked by Russia. “We should leave no room for miscalculation or misunderstanding in Moscow, about our readiness and our commitment, our resolve to protect allies,” Stoltenberg said. “NATO has the capabilities, we have the resolve to protect and defend all allies,” he continued. “We don’t see any imminent threat against any NATO ally.” Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz also criticised Trump’s comments. His Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said the Republican hopeful risked damaging transatlantic relations and could “ultimately saw off the branch on which America is sitting”. The government in Berlin has boosted defence spending since 2022 and is allocating the equivalent of 71.8 billion euros ($76.8bn) on defence this year through regular and special budget outlays. The total defence spending sum is classified. That will see Germany meet the 2 percent of GDP target for the first time since the end of the Cold War.
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