On the face of it, it was a busy Nato summit, not short of outcomes: badly needed air defence systems and fighter jets for Ukraine and a commitment that Kyiv was on an “irreversible path” to membership – plus a cross-alliance warning to China for its discreet help to Russia as it continues its assault on Ukraine.
Yet, behind the activity lurks the cliff-edge of the US election. In the Washington heat, the worry is not so much about Joe Biden’s health, but the Democrats’ ability to defeat Donald Trump in the November election. The reality is that Nato will struggle if the US is sceptical, fitful or unengaged.
During the last Trump presidency, Nato survived by hunkering down, making minimal commitments during a period of less geopolitical uncertainty. This time, with a major war continuing on the edge of Europe, a dysfunctional Nato is not obviously an attractive option, but it nevertheless lingers.
Karin von Hippel, the director general of the Royal United Services Institute thinktank, said: “Everybody is worried about Trump, everybody is worried about US commitments to Nato. Last time around Trump couldn’t do much damage because he didn’t understand how the bureaucracy works. But now he does.”
The plan had been for Biden to promote Nato, to Americans and to the world, at a summit in the US capital to mark the 75th year of the alliance. Speaking in the Mellon auditorium, the very room Nato’s founding treaty was signed in 1949, Biden emphasised the alliance’s durability could not be taken for granted – a point aimed at Trump.
“Let’s remember: the fact that Nato remains the bulwark of global security did not happen by accident. It wasn’t inevitable. Again and again, at critical moments, we chose unity over disunion, progress over retreat, freedom over tyranny, and hope over fear,” the president said on Tuesday night.
Yet at the same time, US media was dominated by concerns about Biden’s health and fitness for the presidency, and while his speech was delivered forcefully enough, a lengthy struggle to tie a sash bearing the presidential medal of freedom on to the outgoing Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, was a graphic reminder of the problem.
In the same speech, Biden announced that Ukraine would receive four new Patriot missile defence systems. However, the reality is that Ukraine has been asking publicly for extra air defence since April – a need tragically underlined on Monday when 44 were killed in attacks by Moscow, including the strike on a children’s hospital in Kyiv.
A day later, Denmark, the Netherlands and the US declared that the first of about 85 F-16 fighters were in the process of being transferred to Ukraine – more than 18 months after the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, began pressing for them.
Few believe F-16s, as they arrive, can be a gamechanger in isolation – and though the hope is they can suppress attacks from air-launched glide bombs, they may at first be used to pick off Russian drones as they fly over Ukrainian airspace, a necessary but relatively basic task.
Ukraine has received weapon systems from the west that nobody would have thought possible immediately after Russia first launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, but the political fanfare that greets each new arrival has so far been followed by relative disappointment on the battlefield.
That risks reinforcing the idea that no amount of military aid can help Kyiv recover its lost territories and somehow win the war, though it misses the more important argument that without US military aid, Ukraine risks starting to lose.
When fresh US aid was withheld by Trump allies in Congress for months in the spring, Ukraine first lost Avdiivka in February, then border territory near Kharkiv in May, before sufficient supplies started coming through.
Nato allies in Washington did agree some positive diplomatic language on Ukraine’s eventual membership, describing the country as on an “irreversible path” to joining in the summit communique. Artful though this was, however, in practical terms Kyiv is no nearer joining, and the reality is that Russia’s invasion is now preventing Ukraine becoming a member, because Nato does not want to join in the war.
A key tactic of the Biden White House has been to link concerns about China, one of the few bipartisan issues in the US, with Nato, traditionally focused on the Euro-Atlantic. That all 32 allies could agree on describing China’s discreet supply of military components and chemicals to Russia as a “decisive enabler” of the war in Ukraine was a success from the point of alliance unity, Von Hippel said.
Such statements are unlikely to persuade Beijing to change its mind – “This is a hard nut to crack,” Von Hippel said – but anything that puts off China from supplying weapons to Russia can be defined as a success for the west. Depending on the results of the US election, come the next summit in The Hague, a year from now, such moments of diplomatic unity may prove harder to coordinate.
