It should be a pretty explosive ally dinner. Not at all a clean meeting where the decisions are made in advance and the handshakes, agreed. The NATO summit which begins this Tuesday in Lithuania risks resembling an episode of the reality TV show An almost perfect dinner. And that’s good.
The subjects on the menu of the meeting between the heads of state and government of the 31 member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are all more pungent than each other. Ukraine’s accession to the military alliance. Unequal defense spending between member countries. US President Joe Biden’s decision to supply Ukraine with cluster bombs despite an international convention and US law prohibiting it. We could put four hot pepper emojis next to each of these issues.
And what about the surprise dish thrown on the table by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at the very last minute before removing it! He gave the organization’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, a cold sweat when he demanded on Monday that we “pave Turkey’s access to the European Union” before he “paves Sweden’s access to NATO”. At the end of the evening, the behind-the-scenes negotiations had borne fruit and the way is now open for the Scandinavian country to quickly join the other allies.
The incident is closed, but set the tone for the crucial and stormy meeting.
It is somewhat risky in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine which is daily testing the solidity of NATO, but it is also a reminder of the importance of the organization, which must ensure the security of 1 billion people on three continents, and the issues discussed there.
We are far, far, far from the “brain death” of the military alliance declared by French President Emmanuel Macron in 2019.
Not so long ago, NATO’s future seemed anything but secure. During the summer of 1995, while an intern at the Canadian Mission to the European Union, I had the opportunity to spend a week behind the scenes at the organization’s headquarters in Brussels with a group of students. We had had access to the NATO staff as well as to its political leadership, not very busy in these times of peace. They did not hide the fact that the organization had to find its raison d’être.
It was the time when Francis Fukuyama topped the charts of post-Cold War political thought with his essay declaring the end of history and the victory of liberal democracies. It was the era of the Partnership for Peace, which had been designed to make room for former members of the Warsaw Pact within NATO, but without offering them membership. It was the time when the impoverished Russia of Boris Yeltsin seemed to pose no threat to anyone.
This parenthesis was short-lived. A few months after my internship, NATO was criticized for its role in the bombings in the former Yugoslavia, attracting criticism from observers who no longer saw it as a defense policy, as required by the founding treaty of the NATO, but interventionism.
It was also the NATO allies who lent a hand to the United States in Afghanistan after the attacks of September 11, 2001. The last coalition soldiers left the country at the same time as the Americans in August 2021, in a chaos as disappointing as it is scandalous.
It took the invasion of Ukraine by Russia six months later for NATO to finally regain its main mission: to ensure the common defense of its member states and to be the main forum for discussion on North American security issues. American and European. The Vilnius summit is the best demonstration of this.
Who says discussions also says debates. Canada will have no choice but to participate fully in the one on minimum military expenditure. Jens Stoltenberg would like to see the members’ goal of spending 2% of their gross domestic product made an obligation. The latter will not have an easy task, since only 7 countries out of 31 respect this scale and decisions in NATO are taken by consensus. Nevertheless, we see that the kitchen discussions are fruitful.
Justin Trudeau popped into Riga on Monday, the eve of the summit, to announce that Canada – which spends 1.3% of its GDP on military spending – will double its contribution to Latvia, where it leads a battlegroup.
PHOTO ADRIAN WYLD, THE CANADIAN PRESS
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau chats with Canadian soldiers at the Ādaži military base outside Riga, Latvia.
Will that be enough for the Prime Minister to have a good time at the table on Tuesday and Wednesday? He risks, like many other leaders, putting on his best manners in the hope of not attracting too much attention when the tone goes up.
Yes, the discussions promise to be much livelier than around the endless table where Vladimir Putin holds his meetings in the Kremlin. And that’s good. Protocol and pretense have no place at a family dinner.