The Daily - The (Misunderstood) Story of NATO

Episode Date: July 12, 2018

On a combative opening day of the NATO summit in Brussels, President Trump called other member countries “delinquent” on military spending and attacked Germany as a “captive” of Russia. We examine where his frustration is coming from. Guest: David E. Sanger, a national security correspondent for The New York Times and the author of “The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age.” For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, in a combative opening day of the NATO summit in Brussels, President Trump went after Germany, calling it a captive of Russia and calling other member countries delinquent. Where his frustration is coming from. It's Thursday, July 12th. Michael, the story of NATO really starts with three countries,

the United States, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany. David Sanger is a national security correspondent for The Times. Now, the U.S. and the Soviets, of course, were allies of convenience against Germany. But it all came to a very ugly end as soon as victory in Europe was declared in April 1945. And at that moment, the big concern moved away from a Nazi Germany that could threaten Europe to a Soviet Union that could do so. So right after the war was over, there was a great fear that vulnerable countries that had been initially taken over by the Nazis,

from Poland, Denmark, Belgium, could all fall under the influence of a communist Soviet Union. So over time, the U.S. came around to the idea that the Soviet Union had to be contained. The gravity of the situation which confronts the world today necessitates my appearance before a joint session of the Congress. And Harry Truman went to Congress in 1947 and laid that out. He said, I believe it must be the policy of the United States

to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. And that was really the beginning of the liberal international order, the idea that the United States was going to be a guarantor of freedom around the world. So how did the U.S. actually put that into practice? Well, almost as soon as Truman uttered those words, a series of crises came up. The election, which lasts almost two full days, is held under the watchful eyes of 300,000... The Soviets were meddling in the Italian elections in 1948.

The United States also meddled in those elections. ...both Western powers and Russia exert strong pressure. Czechoslovakia in 1948 is an established democracy... The Soviets overthrew a democratically elected government in Czechoslovakia. On February 25th, informed that the alternative is civil war and aware of unmistakable threats of invasion from the Soviet Union if he does not capitulate, President Banish accepts a communist cabinet.

And then, of course... June 1948, two and one half million people cut off, isolated from the outside world. The Soviets cut off all access to West Berlin. Now their food and fuel for their homes and factories could no longer be brought to them overland. And the United States ended up mounting what became called the Berlin Airlift. The people in the western sector of Berlin have learned to live with the sight and sound of these giant four-engine aircraft. For the past year, this has been their only hope. Which flew in supplies to keep the people of West Berlin alive, and in many ways to keep this one little haven of

democracy alive as well. And David, how does the U.S. respond to this aggression from the Soviet Union? Well, starting in 1948, the Truman administration realized that they were going to actually need to put together some kind of military alliance. If there is anything certain today, if there is anything inevitable in the future, it is the will of the people of the world for freedom and for peace. By April of 1949, Harry Truman had gathered together ministers from around Europe, and they stood in the State Department auditorium and signed this alliance. We will now proceed to the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty. And that created NATO. The treaty shall enter into force between the states which have ratified it, including the ratifications of... And where exactly is NATO?

Well, it's basically just a military alliance to defend Europe against what was the Soviet Union. The North Atlantic Treaty was signed by Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Italy, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Iceland, Canada, and the United States. But the key piece of NATO is something called Article 5 in its founding document. And that basically says... They were sworn to stand together against aggression. An attack against one would be an attack against all.

An attack on one country is an attack on all. And the idea was to create some sense of deterrence so that the Soviets knew that if they tried to pick off even the weakest member of NATO in Europe, they were going to be fighting everyone, including the United States. So, David, this is a military alliance based in Europe, created by the U.S., designed to rebuff a single enemy, the Soviet Union. Yes, that not the only hope of peace. You know, Michael, there was this cheeky line early in NATO's history from General Hastings Ismay, who was the first secretary general of NATO. He said the purpose of NATO was to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.

Leaders of the communist world meet in Warsaw to sign the treaty, which is their answer to NATO. And the Soviets respond by creating their own sort of NATO. It was called the Warsaw Pact, and it had communist nations that were under Soviet influence, Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, of course, East Germany, and they were a military alliance of their own. So you saw these two groups of military allies facing off against each other. The West must at all times maintain its own strength as long as the possibility of aggression exists. Only thus can we safeguard that peace for which the peoples of the world are longing. And how does this new organization, NATO, operate day to day?

How is it funded? How does it function? Well, there isn't a completely separate NATO military force of any kind. They don't have their own army. Instead, they pool together the military forces of each of the member countries. And over time, they learned how to train together and put their doctrine together. But the whole thought is that they just get organized under one European supreme commander appointed by the United States. And, of course, it's the U.S. that's always been at the core of NATO because it had the biggest forces, it had the most money, and it had the most sophisticated intelligence. And, of course, Britain, the United States, and later France had nuclear weapons.

And the whole idea was that if you pull these together, you create a pretty fearsome deterrent. And in fact, that's pretty well worked. What do you mean that it worked? Think about all the wars that didn't happen. We never saw a nuclear war break out in Europe, although it was threatened frequently in the 50 that didn't happen. We never saw a nuclear war breakout in Europe, although it was threatened frequently in the 50s and 60s. And of course, the Soviets knew that the United States was keeping missiles in Turkey, nuclear weapons in Belgium, that in other words, forces were forward deployed

and under some NATO control or could be moved to NATO control fairly quickly. And that made them think twice. So the original idea of NATO, which is the symbolism of all of these countries kind of locking arms militarily and assuring each other that they will go to war to protect one another, this has its desired goal of keeping the Soviet Union at bay. Absolutely. It plain old worked. And it was, in retrospect, a pretty genius invention. It's probably Truman's greatest single legacy. So NATO is working, and the Soviet Union falls in the 1980s. So it seems like that

would be a highly logical time for NATO, which was created to protect Europe against the Soviet Union, to dissolve. Absolutely. I mean, that question came up very quickly after 1989. It really dominated debate in George H.W. Bush's administration as the Soviet Union was breaking apart. And the question was just a very basic one, which is, do we need NATO anymore? We won. You know, we don't have this huge, hulking Soviet Union with the power to expand across Europe. If anything, Russia, which inherited the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons and all of its problems, appeared to be shrinking. So the rationale for NATO was just falling apart.

And there were a lot of people saying it should simply disband, that there was just no political reason anymore and no military reason to hold on to it. But that's not what happened. We'll be right back. David, what happens to NATO after the Soviet Union falls? Well, rather than disband, Michael, it actually expanded.

Many of the former Soviet republics who were suddenly finding themselves independent, Poland and Hungary, the Czech Republic, all the countries that made up, or many of the countries that made up or many of the countries that made up the old Warsaw Pact were suddenly thinking to themselves, they didn't want to be alone. They wanted to be part of the West. And so they applied for membership in NATO. And the big question was, should NATO let them in, even if that risked making Russia paranoid? And how does NATO and the U.S., its lead sponsor, respond to their desire to join? There were debates about individual countries and there were some debates that basically said, if the Russians came and knocked off this tiny little country like Estonia or Latvia or Lithuania, would we really go to war? Would we really invoke Article

5 to come to their defense? But in the end, people decided that the symbolism of having old members of the Warsaw Pact change teams and come over to NATO was worth it, even if their military contribution was pretty tiny. And what does Russia do in response to this expansion of NATO, a group that existed originally to rebuff the old Soviet Union? Well, initially not much until Vladimir Putin became president. And he viewed it as a humiliation. He viewed it as an effort to go steal from Russia, the core of the old Soviet Union. And he was looking for an opportunity to get even.

Putin realized that Article 5 was something that would get invoked if he did a full military attack. But he didn't have the money or really the forces to sustain such an attack. So he had to come up with a really targeted kind of disruption, some way of harassing these countries, some way of undercutting their institutions, some way of making people no longer confident in their governments without actually bringing about an invocation of Article 5. First, he started rebuilding his nuclear forces,

and then he started in with the cyber attacks, a very big one against Estonia. Estonia faced a major crisis in 2007 when it became the first country to experience a massive cyber attack, which took down Estonia's email, bank, and newspaper servers. Another very big one against Georgia. In 2008, paving the way for military action, Russia attacked Georgia's computer infrastructure, crippling the country.

Two countries that, of course, had been all part of the Soviet Union. He did a series of attacks on Ukraine, not a NATO member, but he realized that the fact that they weren't a NATO member meant that NATO was not going to be tempted to come to their defense. And he used it as sort of his petri dish, the place where he could test out a number of ways of disrupting a society. The Russians are fully aware that Microsoft products, like all software, can be used as weapons in cyber warfare. He brought down the electric power grid in Ukraine twice.

And, of course, he meddled a bit in their elections as well. Look at what Russia has done so far. They're accused of having interfered or having tried to interfere in German, French, British and U.S. elections. There's some evidence that he tried to meddle in the Brexit vote in Britain. He attempted and failed to meddle in the last French election. He's been trying this in Germany. And of course, Michael, he made his strongest effort to meddle in elections here in the United States in 2016,

using many of the techniques that he had perfected against NATO and other Eastern European countries and former Soviet states. President Trump is slamming some of America's allies today during a high-stakes NATO summit in Brussels. Okay, so here we are now in 2018, and leaders from the NATO countries have just gathered for a summit in Brussels, and President Trump is continuing to go after the military alliance. What exactly is President Trump's objection to it? Well, President Trump has had several objections to NATO over the years.

His first one is that it's really expensive. And many countries are not paying what they should. And frankly, many countries owe us a tremendous amount of money for many years back where they're delinquent, as far as I'm concerned, because the United States has had to pay for them. And his second one is he doesn't believe that the United States gets very much out of these alliances. We're protecting Germany. We're protecting France. We're protecting everybody. And yet we're paying a lot of money to protect. Now, this has been going on for decades. He simply believes it costs a lot and that the benefits to us are hard to measure and probably negative. And is there any merit

to his argument that the U.S. is giving more than it gets when it comes to NATO. Well, Michael, there's certainly some merit to the argument that the United States gives a lot to NATO and the European countries don't sacrifice as much in their own defense. And that's not an argument that is new to Donald Trump. Our freedom isn't free. And we've got to be willing to pay for the assets, the personnel, the training that's required to make sure that we have a credible NATO force. Barack Obama used to make that argument. And that's why NATO countries got pressed to contribute more to their military forces during Obama's time. So there's nothing new and there's certainly nothing wrong in Donald Trump's fundamental complaint.

What is different is that President Trump is the first American president to say, if this doesn't change on my terms, I may not come to your defense when that moment comes. I may ignore Article 5. Wow. And Trump has actually said that. President Trump said to me and Maggie Haberman during the presidential campaign, when I asked him, would he come to the defense of a small former Soviet state like Estonia or something, if they were attacked by Russia, he said, the first thing I would do is check and see whether they fully paid up in what he calls NATO dues. But what the rest of the world knows is just their spending on defense. So he was essentially saying that if

they call the fire department before the truck was sent out, someone was going to look up and see whether or not they'd paid their taxes. No one's ever heard an American president talk like that before, that in a time of emergency, he might think about not committing American defenses to help a NATO ally. David, from everything you said, a lot of these original NATO countries and later NATO countries rushed to the organization seeking defense from first the Soviet Union and now Russia

and still live under the protective umbrella of NATO. So if they're not willing to pay the amount of money that the U.S. expects of them, isn't that a legitimate grievance on the part of President Trump, given that they still benefit from NATO? He certainly got a very legitimate point, as previous presidents have, that they need to go carry their own weight. Now, their response to this is, hey, we've not only carried our own weight, we've come in and invoked Article 5 to help you. In fact, the only time Article 5 was ever invoked in NATO's history was right after 9-11.

And then NATO countries went in with the United States, some in large numbers and some in pretty small numbers, into both Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, their publics came to later on conclude that the United States had used the 9-11 attacks as a way to justify a truly unwise war in Iraq. And the politics of going into Iraq, that's been pretty poisonous to their future contributions to their defense budgets. And it has made them think twice about the wisdom of simply letting the United States drag them around as NATO decides what conflicts to enter and which ones not to.

As NATO leaders arrived for their two-day summit in Brussels, President Trump rocked the alliance with the accusation that Germany is, quote, totally controlled by Russia. Well, I have to say, I think it's very sad when Germany makes a massive oil and gas deal with Russia, where you're supposed to be guarding against Russia, and Germany goes out and pays billions and billions of dollars a year to Russia. So we started by talking about these three countries, the U.S., Russia, and Germany,

as being the three countries that explain the beginnings of NATO. And I'm struck that the news out of the NATO summit today was that Trump was going after Germany, saying that it was under the control of Russia. But Germany is totally controlled by Russia because they were getting from 60 to 70 percent of their energy from Russia and a new pipeline. David, what was that about? That seems like the ultimate insult to deliver at a NATO summit. Yeah, it was the ultimate insult,

and it may have had more to do with his differences with Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, than it did with any true belief. But the core of the argument was Germany gets an overwhelming amount of its natural gas, the fuel that keeps it warm in the winter, from Russia. And it's now building a new pipeline that will bring it in directly from Russia. And his basic argument is, how can you argue that you're standing up against Russia when you are funding Russia, because Russia is overly dependent on its energy exports, and when you're vulnerable to the Russians who can simply turn off the valve. And what was the reaction from Germany?

It led many to question whether or not President Trump fundamentally believes in the NATO mission. And that's a big question. And I was at a conference of Europeans last weekend where I had never before heard people question whether or not they should go forward thinking that the United States would be the core of a future NATO. And for the first time, I heard them debating, could we continue with a NATO that didn't have the U.S. at the center and one in which the United States wasn't the dominant voice in defense policy. Putin and Trump are to meet in Helsinki, Finland on July 16, just days after the president attends the NATO summit with America's closest allies. The president predicted that meeting Putin, quote, may be the easiest of all the sit-downs he has scheduled on his trip.

David, I want to ask you about what's happening right after this NATO meeting ends, which seems particularly curious given the history that you've just outlined for us. Right after this meeting ends in Brussels, President Trump is going to meet with Putin. What do you make of this timing? The problem isn't the meeting, Michael. The problem in their mind is Donald Trump's message. If he was leaving NATO to stand up to Putin and say, we're not going to tolerate the meddling in elections and we're not going to tolerate the continued occupation of Crimea and the harassment of Ukraine, if that was his message, I think they'd be fine with the meeting happening right after NATO. Their problem is they don't actually believe that Donald Trump is going to stand up to Putin.

And they're somewhat horrified at the imagery of him beating up publicly on television against his allies and then embracing an autocrat who has put dissidents and reporters to death and is increasingly cracking down on his own country. So it seems like we find ourselves in a really interesting place where the country that NATO was formed to protect against is at its most aggressive in decades. And the country that created NATO is seemingly the least committed it's ever been. It's a pretty rich irony that at the moment that we learned that the Cold War may not be over, that it may just be entering a different kind of phase, that the United States is questioning the very premise on which it created NATO, and that the Russians have been successful in sowing more and more discord throughout Europe and helping exaggerate each of these schisms. But no one's exaggerated those schisms more than President Trump himself. Not by questioning whether the NATO nations are contributing enough. That's a perfectly legitimate question to raise.

But questioning whether or not he would even stick with the alliance. And that's the central issue. David, thank you very much. Thank you, Michael. Here's what else you need to know today. Germany is just paying a little bit over 1%, whereas the United States in actual numbers is paying 4.2% of a much larger GDP. So I think that's inappropriate also. of a much larger GDP. So I think that's inappropriate also.

The Times reports that behind closed doors on Wednesday, President Trump suggested that NATO allies increase their military budgets, not to the 2% of their economies that they've previously pledged to work toward, but to 4%, a figure that NATO's Secretary General sought to downplay. Well, I will focus on what we have agreed, and we have agreed to be committed to the pledge increasing defence spending to 2%. And let's start with that. So we have a way to go.

But the president did sign on to a NATO declaration emphasising strength and burden-sharing within the alliance, and harshly criticizing Russia for annexing Crimea. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.