Alliance returns Russia to the top of the agenda as US president repeatedly suggests that the allies are freeloaders
Washington —
US secretary of state Mike Pompeo said the ministers will work to make sure that Nato is around for the next 70 years and take aim at Russia over its 2014 takeover of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine. The businessman-turned-president, who berated allies at a Nato summit in 2018 at the group’s Brussels headquarters, is pressing member states to meet the alliance’s goal set in 2014 of spending 2% of GDP on defence. Trump has even derisively asked whether it is worth defending small Nato states such as Montenegro.
It marks a stark contrast with the 50th anniversary in 1999, which rattled Russia and sealed off Washington streets in a way that locals still talk about. Heads of state visited Bill Clinton’s White House, new members the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland were inducted, and leaders plotted the next moves in Nato’s bombing campaign in Serbia.
“But the concern is Trump. There is a sort of tangerine cloud hanging over all of this,” said Chollet, executive vice-president at the German Marshall Fund of the US. “They are concerned that the founding member of the alliance has become the most unpredictable, and perhaps most unreliable.” “Just think how concerned the US is with a couple of Russian planes going to Venezuela,” he said. “We also want people to understand that Nato has become a global alliance in ways that have very little to do with the defence of Europe.”
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