NATO Summit Live Updates: Trump Calls Alliance “Delinquent” on Military Spending

Right Now: President Trump met NATO’s secretary general and criticized alliance members on defense and energy policy.

• President Trump is in Brussels for the start of a seven-day, three-nation European trip that highlights the ways he has utterly transformed United States foreign policy. After the NATO summit meeting, he travels to Britain and then to Finland to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

• Mr. Trump got the NATO meeting off to a confrontational start Wednesday morning, telling the secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, that other nations must spend more on defense and that Germany was “captive to Russia” on energy.

• Mr. Trump has upended generations of American diplomacy, antagonizing and belittling traditional allies over issues like defense and trade, while refraining from criticizing Russia, a traditional adversary.

• The New York Times will have live coverage from Brussels throughout the meeting, from our White House reporters and European correspondents.

In combative start, Trump belittles allies, especially Germany

Mr. Trump kicked off his meetings on a contentious note, calling allies “delinquent” for failing to spend enough on their own defense and attacking Germany as a “captive” of Russia because of its energy dealings.

“Many countries are not paying what they should, and, frankly, many countries owe us a tremendous amount of money from many years back,” Mr. Trump said at a breakfast with Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary general, at the residence of the United States ambassador to Belgium. “They’re delinquent, as far as I’m concerned, because the United States has had to pay for them.”

He singled out Germany for particularly sharp criticism, saying the country was “totally controlled by Russia” because of its dependence on Russian natural gas. The United States spends heavily to defend Germany from Russia, he said, and “Germany goes out and pays billions and billions of dollars a year to Russia.”

In March, Germany gave approval for Gazprom, the Russian energy titan, to construct the Nord Stream 2 pipeline through its waters, a $10 billion project.

“Germany is a captive of Russia” because of the oil and gas issue, Mr. Trump said. “I think it’s something that NATO has to look at.”

Mr. Stoltenberg countered that “despite differences,” NATO was about uniting “to protect and defend each other.”

But Mr. Trump shrugged off the collective defense principle, saying, “How can you be together when a country is getting its energy from the country you want protection against?” — Julie Hirschfeld Davis

On military spending, Trump cites a real imbalance in misleading ways

American presidents have long pressed other NATO nations to increase military spending. But Mr. Trump’s insistence that they owe money to the organization or to the United States misstates how the alliance works, and the figures he cites are misleading.

NATO has a budget to cover shared costs and some equipment that is used in joint operations, and all 29 member countries contribute to it according to their gross national income. None of the allies has failed to pay its contribution.

Mr. Trump’s complaint is that, while NATO has agreed that each member country should spend at least 2 percent of its gross domestic product on defense, most of them do not. But none has failed to comply with that agreement, because the 2 percent figure is a target to be reached by 2024.

According to NATO, all member countries have significantly raised military spending since 2014, and eight of them are expected to meet the goal in 2018.

Mr. Trump tweeted on Monday that the United States accounted for 90 percent of military spending by NATO countries, but the alliance says the real figure is about 67 percent. And most American military spending is not NATO-related.

Even so, the organization says on its website, “there is an overreliance by the alliance as a whole on the United States for the provision of essential capabilities, including for instance, in regard to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; air-to-air refueling; ballistic missile defense; and airborne electronic warfare.”

Mr. Trump has a point about the outsize burden the United States shoulders, a commitment that previous presidents have considered vital. But are other countries in arrears in paying for their defense? No. — Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Steven Erlanger

NATO struggles to deal with its biggest critic: Trump

Even before the meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Stoltenberg, NATO leaders were trying to figure out how to be polite but firm with a United States president who disparages multilateral alliances, and dispenses with the usual platitudes in favor of lashing out on Twitter.

Generations of United States policymakers have seen NATO as a bedrock of Western security, but Mr. Trump describes its members mostly as a bunch of freeloaders, riding on the coattails of American military spending without holding up their end of the deal.

“NATO countries must pay MORE, the United States must pay LESS,” Mr. Trump tweeted on Tuesday, before departing for Brussels. He also reiterated the claim he has used to justify tariffs he recently imposed: That unfair practices are to blame for the U.S. trade deficit with Europe and other regions of the world.

Where his predecessors have spoken warmly of the allies and warned of Russian aggression, Mr. Trump has had harsh words for NATO, which he has called “obsolete,” and member countries like Canada and Germany, while rarely criticizing Russia.

Privately, leaders of other NATO countries wonder if the president just wants to goad them into raising military spending and strengthen the alliance, or if he would prefer to abandon it. Either way, his approach, using overt threats and insults, is a far cry from the usual diplomatic give-and-take, and his counterparts are wary of provoking Mr. Trump.

Aside from military spending, NATO allies are more at odds with American policy than they have been many years, disagreeing on issues like his withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accords, and the trade war he has started.

Perhaps nowhere is European fear about American intentions more pronounced than in the Baltic States — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Long ruled by the Russian giant to the east, these small nations gained their independence in the early 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and they see a very real danger in Russia’s assertiveness under Mr. Putin.

The countries joined NATO in 2004 to ward off that threat, and the alliance has recently stationed troops in the Baltic States as a kind of tripwire for any Russian incursion.

But when asked two years ago, before he was elected, whether the United States would defend the Baltic countries against a Russian attack, Mr. Trump equivocated. “If they fulfill their obligations to us,” he said, “the answer is yes.”

There are significant ethnic Russian minorities in the Baltics, and people there are acutely aware that protecting Russians was the reason the Kremlin gave for its incursions into Ukraine.

As Trump snipes at Europe, a European snipes back

With heads of state taking care not to poke Mr. Trump, Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, has emerged as the Continent’s most prominent and pointed critic of the president.

Mr. Tusk, one of the leaders of the European Union, has no formal role in NATO, but the two groups have a large overlap in membership. On Tuesday they signed a statement of cooperation.

Mr. Tusk has made clear that he is paying close attention to the summit, he has a megaphone, and he’s not afraid to use it. Tweaking and refuting Mr. Trump, often slyly and sometimes quite directly, his comments are widely seen to reflect what other European leaders are thinking but are unwilling to say publicly.

The United States “doesn’t have and won’t have a better ally than EU,” whose members combined spend more on defense than Russia, he tweeted on Wednesday. “I hope you have no doubt this is an investment in our security.”

In June, after Mr. Trump’s angry exit from the Group of 7 summit and his broadside at Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister who played host to that meeting, Mr. Tusk tweeted, “There is a special place in heaven for @JustinTrudeau.”

He used sharper language in May, after Mr. Trump withdrew from the Iran agreement and announced trade sanctions. Mr. Tusk tweeted, “with friends like that who needs enemies.”

Idle thumbs? Meeting rooms will be a Twitter-free zone

Mr. Trump enjoys sending Twitter barbs at his adversaries, but he will be restrained during the NATO summit meeting.

In NATO’s new building, in the massive high-tech meeting room, no mobile phones are allowed — not even for a president. Even if they were permitted, they probably would not work, because NATO jams signals in the building to prevent eavesdropping or hacking.

So at least for the hours he is with other leaders, Mr. Trump will be under a cone of silence.

Mr. Trump will have to wait until he’s outside the NATO building to get to his Twitter account in order to reassure his many followers that he remains the @realdonaldtrump. — Steven Erlanger

A monument to NATO success, or a waste of money? Depends whom you ask.

When he visited the new NATO headquarters building last year, before it was fully opened, Mr. Trump made no secret of his distaste for the structure, which he deemed extravagantly expensive and vulnerable to bombing.

In delivering a speech at the time, he skipped the part of his prepared remarks that called for him to reaffirm Article 5, the commitment by all member nations to mutual defense. He has endorsed the principle, albeit grudgingly.

When Mr. Trump returns this year, he will enter the building after passing two monuments designed to highlight NATO history — a chunk of the Berlin Wall and a chunk of the World Trade Center. After the 2001 attack on the trade center, NATO invoked Article 5 for the only time in its history.

Outside the building are the words “WE ARE ALLIES,” shimmering in two-foot yellow and white letters on fences, and the famous NATO sculpture of a compass flanked by the flags of the 29 members. NATO intends to offer the soon-to-be-named Republic of North Macedonia talks to become the 30th member, once the change is ratified by the parliaments of both Greece and what has until recently been called the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

The new building itself is airy and light, with much modernized communications equipment, although the offices are smaller than in the old building across the way. The main meeting room, where the 29 leaders will meet, with room for many aides behind them, is large and even elegant, with wooden walls and various video screens for classified conferences.

But on a recent visit, allowed to enter the room but not take any photographs, it seemed to me the only thing missing was Peter Sellers in the film “Dr. Strangelove.” — Steven Erlanger

A show of solidarity with Ukraine

NATO leaders are set to meet with their Ukrainian counterparts on Thursday to show solidarity with Kiev, in the face of the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, and Moscow’s continuing military support of rebels in eastern Ukraine.

The meeting is pointed reminder from the West of the principle that one nation should not violate the territorial integrity of another, before Mr. Trump’s meeting with Mr. Putin in Finland. Talks on resolving the dispute in Ukraine have essentially stalled, and Western diplomats do not expect significant progress on the issue at the Helsinki summit meeting.

NATO leaders are also meet with the leaders of Georgia on Thursday, in a similar show of support for Tbilisi against Russia, which has occupied parts of Georgia since 2008.

Ukraine and Georgia will be invited to discuss their progress in security and defense overhauls and their cooperation with NATO.

Membership is a different matter, however. In 2008, at a summit meeting in Bucharest, NATO promised both Ukraine and Georgia eventual membership in the alliance, infuriating Mr. Putin. Those plans have been put on hold. — Steven Erlanger

After NATO: The queen, Theresa May and Vladimir Putin

Military spending and NATO’s stance toward Russia will be central topics at the summit meetings, at a time when leaders of other Western countries worry about a reduced American security role in dealing with Moscow.

Russia is waging a proxy war against Ukraine, has forcibly annexed part of that country, has meddled in other nations’ elections, gives crucial support to the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and stands accused of using a chemical weapon on British soil.

After the NATO meeting, Mr. Trump will travel on Thursday to Britain, where he is scheduled to meet with Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Theresa May. He will spend little time in London, where thousands of people are expected to attend protests against the president, who is not popular in Britain. The American Embassy warned U.S. citizens to “keep a low profile” during his visit because of the protests.

On Saturday, Mr. Trump will travel to Scotland and stay at one of his golf resorts, Trump Turnberry. The next day, he will fly to Helsinki, before his meeting on Monday with Mr. Putin.

With Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign under investigation for links to Russia, and American relations with traditional allies strained, analysts will keep a close eye on whether a friendlier mood prevails when the two presidents meet.