LONDON - Donald Trump heads to Helsinki Sunday for a summit meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, leaving his NATO allies — including Britain — bruised and once again scratching their heads about how to cope with an unconventional, freewheeling U.S. President who appears unsentimental about the Western alliance and discounts diplomatic niceties.
After midweek encounters in Brussels, where Trump accused Europeans of being delinquent and reportedly hinted the U.S. might withdraw from NATO unless they increase their defense spending rapidly, some European officials say the Continent now needs to start thinking about defense plans independent of NATO.
Cross-border European defense initiatives already planned, such as a quick-reaction Anglo-French expeditionary force, are likely to be advanced more quickly by European governments in the wake of this week's NATO summit.
"Europe has spent the past 18 months experimenting with an array of tactics to influence President Donald Trump, but so far neither Angela Merkel's tough talk nor Emmanuel Macron's red-carpet treatment has fundamentally changed Trump's policy decisions," noted Leslie Vinjamuri of Britain's Chatham House.
European officials say they were floundering in their efforts to contain Trump, and they fear a bigger bust-up next year, if, as is certain, not all of the alliance's European members have increased by the end of 2018 their defense spending to at least two percent of their national GDPs.
In a post-summit briefing, Denmark's defense minister Claus Hjort Frederiksen complained of the difficulty "to decode what policy the American president is promoting." He added: "There is a complete unpredictability in this, and one of the things you need in this alliance is predictability towards Russia."
But other European officials say they see calculation underpinning Trump's approach at international summits, arguing it is straight out of his 1987 book The Art of the Deal, which recommends rough-house negotiating tactics, including wrong-footing opponents and demanding much more than you are ready to settle for.
President Trump argues his confrontational deal-making style is working. For years a succession of U.S. presidents — from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama — have tried to cajole European allies to increase their military spending, but no U.S. leader has been more abrasive about it than Trump.
This week he claimed victory in persuading European members of NATO to increase their defense spending more quickly than they had agreed before. European leaders dispute his claim, saying they are on track to meet by 2024 a target of spending of at least two percent of their GDPs in line with a pledge they made in 2014 when Obama was in office.
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The U.S. President has his defenders when it comes to his table-thumping approach to NATO — both in the U.S. and Europe — who say Trump's tough tactics will be the only way to ensure the alliance's European members do take on a greater share of the defense burden. They place the blame for the regular transatlantic spats since Trump came into office on the failure of Europe's political class to take long-standing American grievances about military burden-sharing — as well high European Union tariffs on U.S. goods — more seriously.
Many in Britain's military and intelligence establishments are also supportive of Trump's complaints. A group of eight former British military and intelligence chiefs, who worry Britain could slip from being a tier one' military power, argued in a midweek newspaper advertisement published this week that Trump's criticism of the Europeans (and Canadians) over burden-sharing was valid. They argued the threats Britain faces demands increased military expenditure, even though Britain is one of only four European countries that already meets the two percent target.
Combat readiness across the board among European militaries is woefully inadequate.
Last February, the German parliament's military commissioner issued a scathing report on the readiness of Germany's armed forces, noting that only a fraction of crucial weapons systems was operational. At the end of 2017, Six out of six of the navy's submarines were out of commission and none of the air force's 14 large transport planes were available for deployment due to repairs. More than 20,000 officer and non-commissioned officer positions were unfilled.