Trump Expected to Endorse NATO Mutual Aid Pledge, Ending Silence

Trump Expected to Endorse NATO Mutual Aid Pledge, Ending Silence

Trump Expected to Endorse NATO Mutual Aid Pledge, Ending Silence, Mr. Trump will make the promise in Brussels at the start of three days of meetings with European heads of state, according to the official, who was briefed on the president’s planned remarks. The speech will come as Mr. Trump unveils a memorial to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the only time in the 28-nation military alliance’s history that the mutual defense pledge, known as Article 5, has been invoked.

Since his inauguration, Mr. Trump had repeatedly refused to endorse Article 5, a thunderous silence that rattled American allies and raised fears about NATO’s future at a time of increasing tension with Russia and terrorist attacks like the one in Manchester, England, on Monday.

Even before taking office, Mr. Trump expressed skepticism about the NATO’s role in ensuring security on the European continent, and the financial costs that the United States bears in maintaining the alliance’s military might.

In an interview with The New York Times just before officially claiming the Republican nomination last July, Mr. Trump said that if he was elected, the United States would come to the defense of the Baltic States against a Russian invasion only if those small countries spent more on their military and contributed more to the alliance.

“If they fulfill their obligations to us,” Mr. Trump said in the interview, “the answer is yes.”

Mr. Trump’s speeches often remain in flux until the last minute, and he is well known for deviating from his prepared text by adding, removing or changing passages even as he reads them on his teleprompter screen. So he may yet change his mind and omit an explicit statement of support for Article 5.

But the administration official said that Mr. Trump now appears ready to reassure NATO allies that the United States will not place conditions on its adherence to Article 5, which states the principle that an attack on any one member is an attack on all.

European leaders have feared a historic American retreat from the collective defense pact that created the NATO alliance, signed by President Harry Truman 68 years ago in the wake of World War II. They worried, in particular, that Mr. Trump’s silence on Article 5 was inviting further aggression from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, whose troops seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and have helped destabilize eastern Ukraine since then.

“It could raise grave doubts about the credibility of the American security guarantee and provide Russia with an incentive to probe vulnerable Baltic States,” Thomas Wright, a Brookings Institution scholar, wrote earlier this week, before Mr. Trump began his first foreign trip as president.

The NATO leaders who will meet on Thursday face other difficult questions as well, including how many troops the United States will contribute to replenish the alliance’s forces fighting in Afghanistan. Right now, the international security force assisting the Afghan army has about 13,000 troops; about 8,400 of them are American. Mr. Trump is considering proposals to send as many as 5,000 more, including Special Operation forces.

Mr. Trump is scheduled to speak Thursday afternoon at NATO’s new headquarters, a gleaming $1.2 billion facility that he will help dedicate with a part of the World Trade Center in New York that was destroyed in the Sept. 11 attack.

The alliance invoked Article 5 the next day, telling the United Nations on Sept. 12, 2001, that if the attack had come from outside the United States, it would be covered by the mutual defense pact. NATO later affirmed that decision when Al Qaeda was identified as the group responsible.

“By invoking Article 5, NATO members showed their solidarity toward the United States and condemned, in the strongest possible way, the terrorist attacks against the United States,” the alliance says on its website.

Endorsing Article 5 would align Mr. Trump with every previous American president since the treaty was signed. All of them publicly reaffirmed that the United States would come to the aid of a NATO member that came under attack. But it would follow more than a year of criticism and complaints by Mr. Trump that NATO was taking advantage of the United States and that other member states were not pulling their weight.

In a March 2016 interview with The Times, Mr. Trump said that NATO was obsolete, that Russia was no longer the threat it had once been, that other NATO nations were not contributing their fair share, and that they were not fighting terrorism as aggressively as the United States does.

He made similar remarks at a campaign rally in July 2016. “I want them to pay,” he said then. “I don’t want to be taken advantage of.” He added, “We’re protecting countries that most of the people in this room have never even heard of and we end up in World War III. Give me a break.”

Under the NATO charter, each member nation pledges to spend 2 percent of its gross domestic product on defense, but many nations have fallen short of that level for years. Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary general, said earlier this year that the alliance was working to increase compliance.

“Fair burden sharing has been my top priority since taking office,” Mr. Stoltenberg said at a joint news conference with Mr. Trump at the White House. “We are now working to keep up the momentum, including by developing national plans outlining how to make good on what we agreed in 2014.”

Mr. Trump has also complained that NATO does too little to help the United States and individual European nations fight terrorism, a concern that he is likely to underscore on Thursday.

“Right now we don’t have somebody looking at terror, and we should be looking at terror,” Mr. Trump said of the alliance in the March 2016 interview.

Since his election, though, the president has said that his criticisms have brought positive changes at the military alliance.

“I complained about that a long time ago, and they made a change, and now they do fight terrorism,” the president said during the news conference with Mr. Stoltenberg. “I said it was obsolete; it’s no longer obsolete.”