Even the Best-Case Scenario for What Trump Does at the NATO Summit Is Pretty Grim

Heather Hurlburt wrote for New York Magazine about how the recent NATO summit and President Trump's participation in it are emblematic of broader weakening within the institution:

The idea that there can be a positive or neutral summit that strengthens the alliance, or somehow signals to Moscow that NATO is united, is ridiculous. It marks the kind of diplomatic thinking that Trump satirizes. What will be clear after the summit was already clear, if one wanted to see it, before: There is not a unified group of powerful countries ready to counter Russian geopolitical pressures on Europe and the Middle East. Countries on the Russian periphery cannot count on NATO support to chart future directions away from Moscow. North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean won’t be getting infusions of stability from NATO, which also cannot offer a counterweight to Turkish president Recep Erdogan’s nationalist rhetoric.

Donald Trump didn’t do all of this alone — the rise of Moscow-sympathizing nationalist governments in Central Europe, and the U.K.’s self-inflicted Brexit wound also sapped NATO’s ability to offer what it claims to stand for. (The United Kingdom lost its foreign minister two days before Trump’s arrival, and its prime minister may face a vote of no confidence as he departs.) So did decades of European governments agreeing in word, but not in deed, with Washington’s calls for stronger shared defenses. And so, too, did the defenders of NATO who are still, with good intentions, repeating its Cold War–era purposes without explaining to Americans what the alliance’s informal founding creed of keeping “Russia out, America in, and Germany down” even means anymore, with Russia in our Facebook feeds and Angela Merkel the leader of the free world.

But the question to ask today is if there is anything that Trump can be induced to negotiate for.