The latest NATO summit is in the books. This year’s confab in Ankara, Turkey, featured less drama than some had expected. Yes, President Trump demanded Greenland and threatened to cut trade ties with Spain. But he confirmed that the United States would not leave the alliance, at least for now, and pronounced the summit “tremendously successful.” “The unity in that room was incredible,” he told reporters, “really a love, it was sort of pretty wild.”
Together with the revelation that the White House recently nixed a plan to cut the U.S. troop presence in Europe by a third, this must have left our NATO allies feeling pretty good. Their gambit—that a mix of flattery and bigger defense budgets would be enough to keep the U.S. on the continent—appears to have paid off.
This is a pity, because the truth is that our NATO allies are not really rearming. And even were they to do so in earnest, it’s unclear how that would serve America’s national interests.
As was reported before the summit, NATO leaders have held secret discussions on how to effectively trick the president into deferring any major decisions on the alliance until the end of his term. Some have even proposed scrapping the annual summits, in the hopes that this could allow NATO to fly under the radar and make it to 2029 without incident.
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