Letters from an American - July 10, 2024
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July 10th, 2024. In 1949, when leaders of 12 countries, including President Truman,
came together in this very room, history was watching, President Joe Biden said yesterday
evening at the opening of the 2024 NATO Summit, being held from July 9th through July 12th in Washington, D.C.
It had been four years since the surrender of the Axis powers and the end of the most devastating world war the world had ever, ever known.
Biden continued, for a lasting peace and prosperity, they needed a new approach.
They needed to combine their strengths.
They needed an alliance.
That alliance was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,
or NATO, the single greatest, most effective defense alliance
in the history of the world, as Biden said.
The NATO collective defense agreement has
stabilized the world for the past 75 years, thanks to its provision in Article 5 that each of the
NATO allies will consider an attack on one as an attack on all and respond accordingly.
Biden looked back at the alliance's 75 years. Together, we rebuilt Europe from the
ruins of war, held high the torch of liberty during the long decades of the Cold War, he said.
When former adversaries became fellow democracies, we welcomed them into the alliance.
When war broke out in the Balkans, we intervened to restore peace and stop ethnic cleansing. treating an attack on us as an attack on all of us, a breathtaking display of friendship that the American people will never, ever, ever forget.
Biden celebrated that the alliance has continually adapted to a changing world
and noted that it has changed its strategies to stay ahead of threats
and reached out to new partners to become more effective.
Biden noted
that leaders from countries in the Indo-Pacific region had joined the leaders of the 32 NATO
countries at this year's summit. So did the leaders of NATO's partner countries, including Ukraine,
Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, and the European Union. They're here because they have a stake in our success,
and we have a stake in theirs, Biden said. The promise of collective defense was daunting for
opponents in 1949 when the treaty had 12 signatories, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France,
Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom,
and the United States. It is even more daunting now that there are 32, with both Finland and
Sweden having joined the alliance after Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Together, the NATO
countries can marshal about 3,370,000 active duty military personnel and have a collective defense budget of more than $1.2 trillion.
In addition, as Jim Garamone of Department of Defense News noted, the NATO countries share intelligence, training, tactics, and equipment, as well as agreements for permitting
the use of airspace and bases. Our commitment is broad and deep, Biden said. We're willing and
we're able to deter aggression and defend every inch of NATO territory across every domain,
every domain, land, air, sea, cyber, and space. When NATO formed, the main concern of the country's backing it was resisting Soviet aggression. But with the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise
of Russian President Vladimir Putin, NATO turned to resisting Russian aggression.
History calls for our collective strength, Biden said. Autocrats
want to overturn global order, which has, by and large, kept for nearly 80 years and counting.
Biden called out Putin's war of aggression against Ukraine and recalled that NATO had
built a global coalition to stand behind Ukraine, providing weapons and aid, while also moving
troops into the surrounding NATO countries. He announced that the U.S., Germany, the Netherlands,
Romania, and Italy are donating more air defense equipment.
All the allies knew that before this war, Putin thought NATO would break,
Biden said. Today, NATO is stronger
than it's ever been in its history. Biden noted that the world is in a pivotal moment and reminded
his listeners, the fact that NATO remains the bulwark of global security did not happen by
accident. It wasn't inevitable. Again and again, at critical moments, we chose unity
over disunion, progress over retreat, freedom over tyranny, and hope over fear. Again and again,
we stood behind our shared vision of a peaceful and prosperous transatlantic community.
our shared vision of a peaceful and prosperous transatlantic community.
He assured the attendees that an overwhelming bipartisan majority of Americans understand that NATO makes us all safer. The American people know that all the progress we've made in the past 75
years has happened behind the shield of NATO, understanding that without it, we would face
another war in Europe, American troops fighting and dying, dictators spreading chaos, economic
collapse, catastrophe. He assured allies that Americans understand our sacred obligation to NATO and quoted Republican President Ronald Reagan,
who said, if our fellow democracies are not secure, we cannot be secure. If you are threatened,
we are threatened. And if you are not at peace, we cannot be at peace.
And then Biden surprised NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, the former Norwegian prime
minister who is stepping down from his NATO position after serving since 2014 with the
Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Today, NATO is stronger, smarter, and more energized than when you began, Biden said.
And a billion people across Europe and North America, and indeed the whole world,
will reap the rewards of your labor for years to come in the form of security, opportunity,
and greater freedoms. Today, Biden reiterated the theme that alliances happen not by chance,
but by choice. Before the attendees got to work, he explained that the NATO countries
must strengthen their home industrial bases and capacity in order to produce critical defense
equipment more quickly, a deficiency made clear in the struggle to get armaments to Ukraine.
Such readiness will strengthen security, he said, as well as creating stronger supply chains,
a stronger economy, stronger military, and a stronger nation. The Washington Summit Declaration
released today reaffirms NATO as the unique, essential, and indispensable transatlantic forum
to consult, coordinate, and act on all matters related to our individual
and collective security, saying, our commitment to defend one another and every inch of allied
territory at all times, as enshrined in Article 5, is ironclad. It warns that Russia remains the most significant and direct threat to allies' security
and pledges unwavering solidarity with Ukraine. It says that Ukraine's future is in NATO and calls
out Belarus, North Korea, Iran, and China for enabling Putin's war. Indeed, the declaration calls out China even more
directly, warning that it continues to pose systematic challenges to Euro-Atlantic security,
especially by flooding other countries with disinformation.
Russian aggression is a deep concern for NATO countries. So is Trump, who worked to take the U.S. out of NATO when he was in office,
vowed he will accomplish that in a second term,
and in February 2024 told an audience that if he thought NATO countries
weren't contributing enough to their own defense,
he would tell Russia to do whatever the hell they want.
Biden noted yesterday that when he took
office, only nine NATO countries met their target goal of spending two percent of
their gross domestic product on their defense, while this year, 23 will.
Biden was key to rebuilding the NATO
alliance after Trump weakened it, and the leaders at the NATO summit told
foreign policy journalist for The Daily Beast, David Rothkopf, that they were not concerned with Biden's ability to play a leading role in NATO during his second term.
They express confidence in his judgment and have a great deal of confidence in the foreign policy team around him.
But they worry about Trump.
him. But they worry about Trump. Shortly after Biden gave his powerful speech opening the summit,
Trump had his first public event since the June 27 CNN event at his Doral Golf Club. It was a wandering rant, packed as usual with wild lies, but he did touch on the topic of NATO.
I didn't even know what the hell NATO was too much before, but it didn't take me long to
figure it out, like about two minutes, he said. Trump's former national security advisor, John
Bolton, told a reporter that Trump's willingness to undermine NATO is a demonstration of the lack
of seriousness of the way Trump treats the alliance because he doesn't understand it.
seriousness of the way Trump treats the alliance because he doesn't understand it.
Following the NATO summit, Hungary's right-wing prime minister, Viktor Orban, who remains an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, will visit former President Trump at Mar-a-Lago just days
after meeting with Putin in Moscow and with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing.
There is speculation that Orban is acting as an intermediary between Trump and Putin,
for whom the destruction of NATO is a key goal.
Letters from an American was produced at Soundscape Productions,
Dedham, Massachusetts.
Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.