Donald Trump fails to endorse NATO’s mutual defence pledge

By M.S.

IT WOULD have been so easy, but Donald Trump could not bring himself to do it. On May 25th, in a 900-word speech made in front of a monument to 9/11 at NATO’s new headquarters in Brussels, the president failed to mention the alliance’s Article 5—the bedrock commitment to regard an attack on one member country as an attack on all.

The assembled heads of government had expected to receive a dressing down on most member countries' failure to meet the NATO target of spending 2% of GDP on defence. That they got. Many of them agree with Mr Trump on the need to do more and can point to European defence budgets that are have been rising, albeit too slowly, as a consequence of Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine. They will, however, have been irritated by Mr Trump’s repetition of the canard that the spending shortfall means that the money is somehow “owed” and that American taxpayers have been taken for a ride.

It would have been smart of Mr Trump to have encouraged their efforts on spending while taking some of the credit for getting them to sharpen up. If he had then made the Article 5 pledge, the trip would have been deemed a success.

The fact that he did neither of those things means that it was instead pretty disastrous. Having questioned the basis for Article 5 more than once during his campaign for the White House, NATO members—and crucially, the alliance’s Russian adversary—are left wondering whether if push came to shove America would still have their back.

It is all very well for other members of the administration, such as Jim Mattis, the defence secretary, and Mike Pence, the vice president, to say the right things. But it is Mr Trump who would have to make the call if Vladimir Putin was sufficiently emboldened to think it worth having a nibble at one of the Baltic states.

Tactfully, NATO had decided not to put Russia on the agenda of the mini-summit, concentrating instead on the thing Mr Trump cares most about: terrorism. But in other conversations, the Europeans were left quietly appalled by Mr Trump’s apparent insouciance about the Russian threat.

The general discomfort was reflected in the awful optics of the event. During a photo-call, none of the heads of government could bring themselves to speak to Mr Trump, preferring to huddle round Angela Merkel. Mr Putin must have loved every minute of it.