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Nato leaders will have much to celebrate when they gather in Washington for the alliance’s 75th anniversary this week. Sweden will be welcomed to its first summit as a Nato ally. The leaders will also note progress on defence budgets – in 2024, 23 of the 32 allies will meet Nato’s target of spending 2% of their GDP on defence.
The summit will be the last for the alliance’s long-serving secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg. The well-qualified Mark Rutte, former prime minister of the Netherlands, will move into his office in October.
Stoltenberg has indicated the summit will have three main topics: Ukraine, deterrence and defence, and global partnerships. Each was a priority at the Vilnius summit 12 months ago. Washington will, according to former Nato spokesperson Oana Lungescu, be a “consolidation summit”.
Nato has cultivated global partners since the early 2000s, and focus has turned recently to the Indo-Pacific. American – and to a lesser degree, British and French – military commitment to countries in the region is considerable. But it is not channelled via Nato.
The alliance has low-level bilateral partnerships with Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea (the so-called IP4). Inviting the IP4 leaders to the summit is an act of diplomatic solidarity, showing that Nato is aligned with America’s Pacific allies and partners in the strategic competition with China.
Focus on Ukraine
On Ukraine, expect few surprises. Germany and the US remain sceptical of the feasibility of Ukraine’s ambition to join the alliance. The Biden administration has held fast to the view that a country at war cannot accede to Nato.
Old arguments that Ukraine needs to stamp out corruption have also been resurrected, though this appears churlish. The EU, which places much higher regard on anti-corruption efforts, officially opened accession talks with Ukraine (and Moldova) in late June. And the recent entrants to Nato, North Macedonia and Montenegro, are hardly paragons of clean government.
Pre-summit discussions have been more about metaphors than substance – at Washington, Ukraine is likely to be offered a “strong bridge” to membership (at Vilnius it was simply a “path”). None of this has gone down well in Kyiv.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymr Zelensky, has already taken a swipe at the US for its timidity. En route to Vilnius last year, he caused a diplomatic incident by labelling Nato’s stance on Ukraine as “absurd”.
Wanting to iron out the Washington summit script, Stoltenberg held talks with Zelenskyy last week at Nato headquarters. There was no press statement. Zelensky could well turn up at the summit willing to shoot from the lip again.
However, that possibility may be narrowed by other initiatives on the table. Nato defence ministers have already agreed to a new package dubbed Nato Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine (Nsatu). Based in Wiesbaden, Germany and under direct Nato command, Nsatu is intended to bring greater coordination to the various ad hoc capability and training packages being provided to Ukraine.
But Nsatu will not replace the “Ramstein format” – the main, US-led conduit of coordinated arms deliveries to Ukraine, so named for the air base in Germany at which much of the military aid is assembled.
Arms for Kyiv
Arms supplied to Ukraine are a national prerogative, and so susceptible to the foibles of domestic politics. Worries over the US’s long-term commitment to Ukraine should Donald Trump win the November presidential election have focused minds.
In April, Stoltenberg proposed a US$100 billion (£78 billion), five-year fund for Ukraine – but that level of ambition has bitten the dust. Few allies, even Ukraine’s supporters, want to commit such a large sum upfront.
What remains is a US$40 billion, one-year Nato package to arm Ukraine (Nato’s current Comprehensive Assistance Package is limited to training and non-lethal equipment). Hungary, Nato’s foremost Ukraine sceptic, has already indicated it will opt out of any such plan.
On deterrence and defence, expect a “stocktake” of recent efforts. Since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Nato has reoriented itself towards collective defence and away from out-of-area missions. At the Madrid summit in July 2022, Nato agreed a “new force model”, while at Vilnius it signed off a “family of plans” for Europe’s defence against Russia, and a defence production action plan to boost armaments production.
Ready for action?
Nato, according to one recent analysis, is ready to “fight tonight” if necessary. It’s less clear for how long. Allied armed forces may be attracting more money, but many (including the British) still lack the resources and personnel to wage a protracted, large-scale conventional war.
The 2% guideline is seemingly insufficient – but no consensus exists in Nato to raise it. How to pivot Nato away from its dependence on the US, meanwhile, remains a topic few (other than the mercurial French president Emmanuel Macron) seem willing to address.
One pragmatic route forward – greater Nato-EU cooperation – is unlikely to figure highly at the summit, since Nato’s non-EU members, not least the UK and Turkey, have little interest in that.
So, the Washington summit is hedged with low expectations. Nato’s next summit will be in The Hague in June 2025. By then, Trump could be in the White House and Nato in the cross-hairs of a renewed bout of transatlantic turmoil. If so, the consolidation achieved at Washington will be seen by Nato’s supporters less as a disappointment, more as a mark of progress.
Mark Webber is a Non-resident Senior Fellow with the NATO Defence College in Rome
