As President Biden and his aides plan NATO’s 75th anniversary, which opens Tuesday afternoon in Washington, the goal is to create an aura of confidence.
The message for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and other potential enemies will be that a larger, more powerful group of Western allies has emerged, after more than two years of war in Ukraine, more dedicated than ever to push back on aggression.
But as 38 world leaders begin arriving on Monday, that confidence is at risk. Even before the official summit began, it has been overshadowed by uncertainty about whether Mr. Biden will remain in the race for a second term, and the possible return of former President Donald J. Trump.
Mr Trump has previously declared NATO “unnecessary”, threatened to pull out of the alliance and more recently said he would allow Russia to do “whatever it wants” to member states deemed not to be contributing enough to the alliance. In recent days, while Mr. Trump has risen in the post-debate polls, Europe’s main allies have begun to discuss whether a second Trump term might be good for the alliance – and whether it can take on Russia without American weapons, money and intelligence-gathering. in the middle.
Mr. Biden will greet the leaders in the spacious Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium a few blocks from the White House on Tuesday night – the same room where the treaty creating NATO was signed in 1949, in a ceremony presided over by President Harry S. Truman. . Mr. Biden was 6 years old at the time, and the Cold War was still going on.
He is now 81 and perhaps the most vocal advocate in Washington for the alliance that has grown from 12 members in 1949 to 32 today as the era of superpower conflict recedes. But when they gather on Tuesday evening, leaders will be watching Mr. Biden’s every move and listening to his every word for a signal that they are focused on America — whether he can run for another four years in office.
Mr. Biden is aware, and said in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC on Friday that he welcomes the scrutiny. “Who will hold NATO like me?” the president asked rhetorically. “I think a good way to judge me,” he says, is to watch him at the top – and see how his allies react. “Let’s hear it. Look at what he said.”
When it comes, NATO leaders admit that the alliance faces an unexpected test: whether it can be trusted to maintain the momentum it has built in support of Ukraine at a time when trust in its most important players has never been more fragile.
And they know that Mr. Putin and Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, are also watching.
“NATO has never, and is not, and will never be given up,” said Jens Stoltenberg, the alliance’s secretary general, on Sunday in a wide-ranging discussion with journalists. “We’ve done it successfully for 75 years. I’m sure we can do it in the future. But it’s about political leadership, about political commitment.
A month before the meeting, the alliance began hedging its bets on a second Trump presidency. It set up a new NATO order to ensure long-term supplies of arms and military aid to Ukraine even if the United States, according to Mr Trump, withdraws.
But in conversations with NATO leaders, it is clear that plans to modernize their forces and prepare for an era that could be marked by decades of confrontation with Russia are not matched by a corresponding increase in the military budget.
More than 20 NATO members have now met their goal of spending 2 percent of gross national product on defense, making good on promises some made in response to Mr. Trump’s demands, and others to the reality of the Russian invasion. That percentage — a goal set more than a decade ago, in an era when terrorism was seen as the biggest threat — seemed unfeasible for the task at hand, many of Mr. Biden’s aides said.
In Europe, Germany has outlined plans to upgrade its military capabilities to prevent Russian aggression, a transformation promised by Chancellor Olaf Scholz in the weeks following the Russian invasion. But Mr. Scholz’s grand plan has not yet been matched with a budget to pay for it, and the politics of bringing the community in has proven so strong that German officials refuse to give a price.
Carl Bildt, co-chairman of the European Council on Foreign Relations and former prime minister of Sweden, recently wrote that European countries “need to double” their budgets “again to fend off the threat of an increasingly desperate Russian regime.”
Despite that, White House officials said Monday that Mr. Biden would not push for new military spending targets.
But the more immediate issue for Mr. Biden and Mr. Scholz is to avoid another public showdown with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine over the question of how his country will join NATO.
Last year, when he traveled to Vilnius, Lithuania, for NATO’s annual meeting, Mr Zelensky expressed his dismay at the lack of a timetable for Ukraine’s entry into the alliance. “It is unprecedented and absurd when the time frame is not set, neither for the invitation nor for the members of Ukraine,” he wrote on social media at the time.
He was temporarily calmed when he arrived, with a commitment from the alliance that Ukraine could go through several hoops that other countries had to go through before they could join.
But for months now, NATO countries have been negotiating on language that would resolve the issue, without risking Ukraine entering the war-torn country.
In recent weeks, negotiators began to settle on a new approach: It is expected that the alliance will declare the last inclusion of Ukraine in NATO “irreversible,” diplomats involved in the talks said.
While “irreversible” sounds definitive, it is okay to deal with Mr. Zelensky’s central demand — the date when his country will fall under the protection of the NATO umbrella.
The case of Mr. Zelensky is, of course, the most shocking. But hardly the only one.
Seventy-five years after NATO was created to counter the threat posed by the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Cold War, some current and future leaders among the alliance’s member states appear sympathetic to Russia’s diplomatic demands despite Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary visited Russia the other day, and in public comments alongside Mr Putin, he did not speak critically of the invasion, or of continued attacks on civilians. He gave instructions to find an opening for peace negotiations on terms similar to Russia’s demands.
The White House criticized the visit on Monday. John F. Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said that Mr. Orban’s visit “definitely seems counterproductive in terms of trying to get things done in Ukraine,” adding, “It’s a concern.”
But to avoid a general split in NATO on the eve of the summit, Mr. Stoltenberg stopped short of criticizing Mr. Orban, noting that “NATO allies interact with Moscow in different ways, at different levels.”
However, he suggested that trying to reach a settlement while Mr. Putin was advancing in Ukraine would not bring peace. “We all want peace,” Mr Stoltenberg said. “You can always end the war by losing the war. But that will not bring peace – that will bring occupation, and occupation is not peace.