Title: Trump says Germany 'is captive to Russia' in fiery opening salvo against NATO Source:
WaPo URL Source:[None] Published:Jul 11, 2018 Author:Michael Birnbaum and Seung Min Kim Post Date:2018-07-11 09:06:35 by Tooconservative Keywords:None Views:2898 Comments:35
BRUSSELS — President Trump unleashed a blistering attack Wednesday on Germany and other NATO allies, wasting no time to take the offensive before a week of high-stakes diplomacy on both sides of the former Cold War divide.
The series of meetings — beginning with NATO and capped by a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin — has been largely framed around Trump’s claims that Washington bears an unfair burden to help protect its allies.
“Germany, as far as I’m concerned, is captive to Russia because it’s getting so much of its energy from Russia,” Trump told NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, in a fiery on-camera exchange that was among the harshest in the history of the post-World War II alliance.
“We have to talk about the billions and billions of dollars that’s being paid to the country we’re supposed to be protecting you against,” Trump said, referring to European purchases of Russian natural gas.
Trump has complained bitterly about Europe’s lagging defense spending, saying that NATO nations were taking advantage of U.S. military largesse at the same time they were offering unfair trade terms to U.S. businesses.
A favorite target of his ire has been Germany, which has not met its NATO spending commitments and is beginning construction on a second natural gas pipeline to Russia. Germany and other European NATO partners argue, however, that they have boosted contributions to the military alliance and plan to kick in even more in coming years.
The accusation of Russian influence may have been particularly biting to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who grew up in Communist-controlled East Germany.
“I myself experienced that a part of Germany that was controlled by the Soviet Union, and I am very happy today that we are united in freedom as the Federal Republic of Germany,” Merkel told reporters as she entered NATO. “We decide our own policies and make our own decisions.”
The U.S. leader traveled to Europe saying that a Monday summit with Putin will be the easiest of his week of diplomacy — an unusual assertion that upended NATO leaders’ belief that the alliance should project a strong and united front against a strategic rival.
Trump has preferred to take aim at allies.
Even Stoltenberg — a mild-mannered former Norwegian prime minister who has cultivated a positive relationship with Trump — appeared reduced to spluttering as Trump cut him off after he started to explain that allies traded with Russia even during the Cold War. Earlier in the exchange, Trump demanded credit from Stoltenberg for forcing an increase of NATO defense budgets.
“It was also because of your leadership,” Stoltenberg told Trump. Budget increases started after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, and they have accelerated in the Trump era in response to the U.S. president’s criticism.
“We’re supposed to protect Germany but they’re getting their energy from Russia,” Trump told Stoltenberg, as aides on both the U.S. and NATO side of a long table shifted in their seats and sat stonefaced. Chief of Staff John Kelly jerked his head away as U.S. Ambassador to NATO Kay Bailey Hutchison looked up at the ceiling. “So explain that,” Trump said. “And it can’t be explained and you know that.”
Trump’s criticism set off immediate anxiety in Germany. Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung headlined its story: “It is not only bad, it is catastrophic.”
Germany’s energy relationship with Russia has long frustrated Washington and Eastern Europe, who fear that the Nordstream pipeline that bypasses the Baltic nations and Poland could be used to cut them off from crucial energy supplies. Former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is a top executive at the Russian-government-controlled company that runs the Nordstream pipeline.
Trump’s laser-focus on Germany has unsettled Berlin, which had grown accustomed to a strong relationship with then-president Obama. Trump plans to meet one-on-one Wednesday afternoon with Merkel, where he will reiterate the same tough message to her face, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said.
Trump is in Brussels for two days of NATO meetings. Following that, he will travel to England to meet with British Prime Minister Theresa May, spend the weekend at one of his private golf clubs in Scotland. Finally, he will head to Helsinki for a summit with Putin.
NATO members have agreed to a long list of efforts they believe will strengthen the alliance against Russia and other rivals, making it easier to speed military forces across Europe and toughen its counterterrorism initiatives.
But many diplomats fear Trump’s anger over defense spending will overshadow the summit. Some even worry that he might withhold his signature from an agreement that has already been approved by national security adviser John Bolton, repeating a move he made last month at the Group of Seven summit in Canada.
That would send the alliance into a tailspin, damaging security by opening the question of whether NATO’s most powerful member is still willing to defend its allies if one were attacked.
NATO leaders also fear what concessions Trump could make to Putin.
Trump has raised the possibility of pulling U.S. troops from Germany. At the G-7 summit, he told leaders that he believed Crimea belonged with Russia because most of its residents are Russian-speaking, another position that would upend much of the West’s security decisions against Russia since 2014.
After meeting with Trump, Stoltenberg tried to paper over the differences, saying that the bottom line is that NATO is getting stronger.
“President Trump has plain speaking, sometimes very direct pointing at specific allies, but when it comes to the whole message we all agree that NATO has to share the burden in a fair way,” Stoltenberg said during a conference at NATO headquarters that is running alongside the summit.
“My main task is to keep all of our allies together,” Stoltenberg added.
WaPo had some pre-emptive whining before Trump even went to Europe, whining in an op-ed, naturally quoting their own editorial board and some mostly worthless EUroweenies. Norway heads NATO now and they are among the 4 NATO allies who do pay their share of NATO so this is a headache for that Norwegian, trying to hold things together.
President Trump arrived in Brussels with a clear message: It is time America stopped footing Europe's bill. His complaint is not new for European leaders, who have weathered Trump’s attacks on the transatlantic system for more than a year, but it is becoming more and more troubling.
The NATO summit that starts Wednesday will be shadowed entirely by Trump's irritation with the alliance and the inability or unwillingness of many of its members to set their military budgets at the recommended 2 percent of gross domestic product. Ahead of Trump's arrival in Brussels, he issued tweets linking his antipathy toward NATO with his broader anger over trade relations with the European Union:
Getting ready to leave for Europe. First meeting - NATO. The U.S. is spending many times more than any other country in order to protect them. Not fair to the U.S. taxpayer. On top of that we lose $151 Billion on Trade with the European Union. Charge us big Tariffs (& Barriers)!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 10, 2018
NATO countries must pay MORE, the United States must pay LESS. Very Unfair!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 10, 2018
European observers are worried by Trump's linkage of the two issues, a position still based on a misunderstanding of how the alliance works. “If it’s really a threat linking security to trade, that can destroy the basis of NATO,” said Stefano Stefanini, a former Italian ambassador to NATO, to my colleague Michael Birnbaum.
“The fear is not only that Mr. Trump will spoil the ‘unity’ of the summit with harangues before flying to Helsinki for a far friendlier meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin,” observed The Washington Post’s editorial board. “It is that, having shrugged off the strong support for NATO among his national security team, he is bent on wrecking a multilateral organization he regards as obsolete and a means for European nations to freeload at the expense of the United States.”
Meanwhile, Trump has also made a habit of rebuffing allies like French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel on issues including trade, climate change and the Iran deal. The tariffs he has slapped on European steel and aluminum, which took effect on Friday, seem likely to trigger a trade war.
Such moves have “been corrosive to relations with allies who increasingly believe that Trump — on trade, NATO and diplomacy — is undercutting the post-World War II order in pursuit of short-term, and likely illusory, wins,” my colleagues reported over the weekend.
“It’s like your parents questioning their love for you,” said Norbert Röttgen, the chairman of the foreign-affairs committee in Germany’s Parliament, to the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser last month. “It’s already penetrated the subconscious.”
After Brussels, Trump heads to Britain for a meeting with British Prime Minister Theresa May, whose government could be on the brink of collapse over internal disputes over Brexit. He will then travel to Helsinki for his first formal summit with Putin, a meeting Trump himself has quipped may be “the easiest of all.”
Despite the Trump administration’s insistence that its “America First” agenda does not really mean “America Alone,” Glasser noted, “increasingly, it is.”
In the months to come, Trump's stop in Brussels may only be remembered as a footnote to the Putin meeting. “Because the meeting occurs after the NATO summit, any achievements in Brussels could be easily wiped out by promises Trump makes to Putin on a whim,” wrote Rachel Rizzo of the Center for New American Security in Washington. “Given Trump’s negotiating style, allies are rightly concerned that he may tell Putin that he will remove some U.S. troops from Eastern Europe, or halt U.S. participation in NATO exercises as a sign of good will. This would send European allies into a frenzy.”
There are also fears Trump could somehow recognize Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea. “It’s such a fundamental issue,” a senior NATO diplomat told Birnbaum. “It would legitimize a whole range of actions. If you have the power, the raw conventional military power, you can do what you want.”
“Now I’m depressed,” the diplomat added. “The fact that we’re even thinking about it.”
Some American allies have tried to push back. Ahead of Trump's arrival, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg offered a polite, if anodyne, defense of the alliance, published by the Wall Street Journal.
“After many years of decline, allies have ended the cuts and started to increase national defense spending,” he wrote, arguing indeed Europe is doing far more to buttress its own collective security. “Last year NATO allies boosted their defense budgets by a combined 5.2 percent, the biggest increase, in real terms, in a quarter of a century. Now 2018 will be the fourth consecutive year of rising spending.”
Stoltenberg concluded “it’s no secret that there are differences among NATO countries on serious issues such as trade, climate change and the Iran nuclear deal,” but he insisted the West’s shared history has “taught a simple yet powerful lesson: United, we are stronger and safer.”
Some analysts do not believe it is worth appeasing Trump's “bullying.” Europe's new efforts to beef up its own defense outlays will never satisfy the president, they argue.
“If the Europeans parked a brand-new aircraft carrier off the coast of Mar-a-Lago and tossed the keys onto the 18th green, Trump would simply charge them greens fees,” wrote Jeremy Shapiro of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “In the end, he doesn’t believe in the idea that America should defend Europe, so why should the United States pay anything at all? He is only interested in it if it brings in a profit.”
European Council President Donald Tusk, who has been outspoken in his criticism of Trump, made no apologies in a speech on Tuesday, where he mounted a defense of Europe before the start of the NATO summit.
“Dear President Trump: America does not have and will not have a better ally than Europe. Today Europeans spend on defense many times more than Russia and as much as China,” Tusk said. He urged Trump to think more clearly about “who is your strategic friend and who is your strategic problem,” a direct nod to the coming summit with Putin.
“Dear America, appreciate your allies,” Tusk said. “After all, you don’t have that many.”
France spends about as much as Britain, but pensions in France are all from the state, so there is no military pension cost in that.
France is the most militarily powerful European state outside of Russia, thanks to nukes, an aircraft carrier, attack subs and an experienced military they keep in tune by deploying it all over Africa.
The key to European security without the US is France - not Germany for cultural reasons, and not the UK, for different cultural reasons.
