LYSEKIL, Sweden — You can’t see the Russian bear from here, but you can hear its growl.
You also can hear the screech of the American eagle, because the Donald Trump effect has reached Scandinavia.
As a result, leaders of NATO countries meeting later this month in The Hague almost certainly will agree to boost their military spending to 5% of economic output, a direct response to Vladimir Putin’s aggressiveness — and Trump’s complaint that American allies aren’t pulling their weight in the alliance.
So even Sweden, with a long tradition of diplomatic neutrality and full NATO membership for only 15 months, is stepping up. It has announced its intention to devote 3.4% of its domestic production to military expenditures — not quite the new NATO standard, but a $3.8 billion increase is substantial for a small country (population 10,656,633, less than North Carolina).
This reflects the complex and sometimes contradictory positions of Trump. He has railed at American allies for insufficient military spending even as he has questioned the value of, and American commitment to, NATO. In so doing, he’s extended to Europe the very brand of disruption that he’s set in motion in the United States.
The pattern is similar: The more established the custom, the more vital an institution might have been to earlier generations, the more vulnerable it is to the president’s impatience and ire.
The fact that the United States is the largest NATO funder puts it in jeopardy. The fact that the alliance was founded in 1949 puts it in special danger from a president who for years has displayed no respect for established organizations, especially international ones.
“NATO was set up at a different time. NATO was set up when we were a richer country,” Trump said nine years ago. “We’re not a rich country.”
The application of a familiar trope — the United States is being taken for patsies by its putative friends — was almost inevitable once Trump returned to the White House.
By unsettling a defense alliance that has been a mainstay of American foreign policy for more than three-quarters of a century, Trump is forcing American allies from Canada to Sweden to contemplate a future where the American military umbrella no longer protects them — at a time when expansionist impulses from Moscow are a growing threat, especially to nations like Sweden, within striking distance of Russia.
With climate change rendering a Northwest Passage — a mariner’s dream since the 15th century — no longer a fantasy, the ability to sail from the Pacific to the Atlantic has prompted fresh threats from China, which is investing heavily in icebreakers, and from Russia, which is developing its own Arctic regions and refurbishing its airfields in the region.
“We also cannot assume or take for granted that the United States will continue to act in Europe as it has over the past 80 years,” said Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, who added that Trump’s policies are “quite difficult for us in Europe to understand right now.”
Those qualms aren’t confined to Sweden. European Union members this year agreed to lessen their dependence on American weapons. While now two-thirds of their purchases of defense equipment are with American arms manufacturers, the new goal is to have two-thirds come from supplies in the EU, Norway or Ukraine.
“The security architecture that we relied on can no longer be taken for granted,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. There is no ambiguity as to where that endangered security architecture was based.
In recent years, Sweden, whose best-known exports are Ingrid Bergman movies and IKEA furniture, has changed its international identity.
With both a warrior culture (dating to the Vikings and including its defense of its formidable empire in the Great Northern War of 1700-1721) and a pacifist tradition (Cold War neutrality and participation in multiple United Nations peacekeeping operations), it has overhauled its defense profile.
Two years ago, it conducted Aurora 23, its largest military exercise in three decades, an undertaking that included land, sea and air forces sharpening their capabilities to defend the nation in the event of attack, presumably from Russia. Recently it tested new “drone swarm technology” in multinational live-fire Arctic military exercises. These are activities inconceivable when Dag Hammarskjold was secretary-general of the U.N.
What would surprise statesmen of our era are the remarks one of Trump’s Republican presidential predecessors made at the opening of the NATO conference of 1957, exactly in the middle of Hammarskjold’s tenure as secretary-general.
“We must continue to create and sustain within the free world the necessary strength to make certain of the common security,” said Dwight Eisenhower, who was the first supreme commander of NATO before becoming the 34th president. “And all of us must have the assurance that that strength will be used to sustain peace and freedom.”
Remarks like that might be dismissed today as an expression of globalization, a concept currently out of fashion among devoted Trump supporters. If the United States is to have attachments beyond its borders, according to the new orthodoxy, it cannot bear the greatest financial burden.
The MAGA view of NATO is clear: If the alliance is to be tolerated at all, the other members must pay up. The alliance leadership recognizes this new credo and has reacted swiftly and forcefully — and has enlisted the new threats to global stability as the reasons to do so.
“Russia has teamed up with China, North Korea and Iran,” NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said at the NATO parliamentary assembly in Dayton, Ohio, last month. “They are preparing for long-term confrontation.”
In response, NATO is preparing for long-term escalation in defense spending. Some member countries have a long way to go. The spending rate for Canada, for example, is 1.37 percent — about a quarter of the new NATO quota. Prime Minister Mark Carney said recently that Canada could hit 2 percent by 2030. That won’t please Trump, already a vocal Canada critic.
But Trump’s attitude about NATO clearly doesn’t please traditional American allies. Earlier this year, Trump expressed doubts about whether the United States would rush to the defense of a NATO nation under attack.
“It’s common sense, right,” Trump said. “If they don’t pay, I’m not going to defend them.” It might be the most radical statement Trump ever made.
David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( National Perspective: With NATO in Trump’s disfavor, Scandinavian countries are rallying )
Also on site :
- ‘She lit up the classroom’: First British victims of Air India plane crash named after 241 killed
- Increased ICE detentions and deportations create climate of fear and stress
- Numbrix 9 - June 13