Nato planning for unity but dreading chaos

Nato planners have been beavering away at their nice new shiny headquarters in Brussels, drawing up the agenda for the July 11-12 summit and it's looking good. All the right words are being chosen, the final communique has been written in draft form and a great celebration of alliance cohesion, power and unity is just days away. BUT, there is one ingredient that could undermine, damage, destroy and totally ruin all these carefully-laid plans. That ingredient, of course, is President Donald J Trump. Nato has never had to deal with a US president like Trump. He is so unpredictable that he might just walk into the conference room on July 11, kick a few chairs over, shout abuse at everyone and storm out. He sort of did that at the G7 summit of industrialised nations in Quebec last month. Trump speaks his mind. Nothing wrong with that necessarily. But it's the way he does it, and it's quite clear that the rest of the Nato leaders are petrified that Trump will stamp all over the alliance's nice, cosy way of doing things and cause havoc. He has already paved the way by writing some stern, rather nasty letters to a number of alliance countries, including Norway and Germany, to remind them of their obligation to spend more on defence. Well, this is hardly a new message from Washington. American presidents and defence secretaries have been putting out this message for as long as I can remember. The US is fed up with shouldering the major part of the defence-sharing burden. Robert Gates, when he was defence secretary in the Obama administration, even warned the alliance at a meeting in Brussels that the US would start to consider whether to go to the aid of an alliance nation under the Article 5 clause in the Nato Treaty if defence spending was not raised to two per cent of GDP. But somehow when Trump says the same thing, people actually believe it. Again, maybe that's not a bad thing. There are countries, like Germany, who are still nowhere near their two per cent target. But they did all sign up to this target - again - at the Nato summit in Wales in 2014, and those who are well behind have been slowly taking steps to reach that percentage within the next few years. But Trump is still going to make a lo of noise at the Brussels summit next week and if he starts to insult individual leaders, like he did during and after the G7 summit, and threatens to pull US troops out of Germany and elsewhere to save the American taxpayers money, two things will happen. The Nato alliance's immaculately prepared summit communique wlll be torn to shreds, and President Putin who is to meet Trump in Helsinki on July 16, will be overwhelmed with joy. It has been his ambition to cause the break-up of the Nato alliance. He now has Trump on his side, or that's the way it seems. But remember, Trump is unpredictable. He could cause a sensation on July 11 by being very nice to everyone, just so as to wipe that smile off Putin's face.