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PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Good evening.
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BIDEN: Welcome.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
This week at the White House, President Joe Biden noted some history.
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BIDEN: In 1949, leaders of 12 countries, including President Truman, came together in this very room. History was watching.
SUMMERS: This was four years after World War II, and those 12 leaders from Europe and North America created an agreement largely to deter Soviet expansion.
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BIDEN: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the single greatest, most effective defense alliance in the history of the world.
SUMMERS: Known by its acronym, NATO - that makes NATO 75 years old this year. It is now 32 members strong, and as heads of state and diplomats from those countries gather here in Washington this week for a NATO summit, history is circling back.
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PRESIDENT VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY: Russia always knows where its missiles hit - always.
SUMMERS: Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is also in Washington this week. Hours after Biden spoke, he gave a speech where he decried a recent Russian air strike that hit a children's hospital, killing 43 people and wounding nearly 200. Ukraine is not yet a NATO country, but over two years into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, NATO allies generally believe, like they did in 1949, that Russia is a security threat to their world order.
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BAIBA BRAZE: The problem is Russia. The policy of Russia is war. It's not going to go away for the next few years.
SUMMERS: Latvia happens to share a border with Russia, and its foreign minister, Baiba Braze, also came to town.
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BRAZE: We need the U.S. to be with us on that.
SUMMERS: She and other foreign ministers need the wealthiest and most powerful nation in NATO, the U.S., to not waver on supporting Ukraine. They're not as worried about the current presidential administration, which just announced new military aid.
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BIDEN: Today I'm announcing an historic donation of air defensive equipment for Ukraine. The United States, Germany...
SUMMERS: What they worry about is Biden's presumptive opponent in November's election, who has suggested that he would not defend a member nation against a Russian attack if it had not spent enough on its own defense. Here's Donald Trump at a campaign rally in South Carolina earlier this year.
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DONALD TRUMP: No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.
SUMMERS: Since Biden took office, more countries are now spending at least the targeted 2% of their GDPs on their defense budgets. It's over two-thirds of NATO members. Still, Trump's transactional approach to foreign policy and his coziness with Russian leader Vladimir Putin represent unknowns for NATO members. CONSIDER THIS - this week's NATO Summit finds the military alliance preoccupied with what's happening in Ukraine. But the member nations are also watching how their hosts in the U.S. decide to be an ally.
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SUMMERS: From NPR, I'm Juana Summers.
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SUMMERS: It's CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. I'm Juana Summers. Consider a map of NATO's members, then Zoom in to the countries closest to Russia in Northern and Eastern Europe - so Finland, Norway, the Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Add in nearby Sweden and Denmark, plus Iceland, and you have the members of a regional bloc called the Nordic-Baltic Eight - eight small to medium-sized countries in the shadow of a more powerful neighbor Russia.
In recent years, most of them have made it a point to spend more on defense as they watch what's happening in Ukraine with fear for their own countries. And in that sense, they speak as one voice at the NATO Summit this week here in Washington. Before the summit officially kicked off, my cohost Mary Louise Kelly sat down in person with top diplomats from those eight nations for a discussion hosted by the Atlantic Council.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, BYLINE: My first question was to the newest members of NATO, Sweden and Finland. Do you feel safer now inside the alliance? Here's how Sweden's foreign minister, Tobias Billstrom, answered.
TOBIAS BILLSTROM: Indeed, we do. And let me say very briefly that Sweden joining NATO was, of course, coming home. This was the end of a process which started in 1994 when we became members of the Partnership for Peace. And when we now became fully fledged members on the 7 of March, that was indeed a crowning achievement.
PASI RAJALA: For us, we have always been accustomed to taking care of our security on our own - for 100 years. So this is a big mind shift for us Finns to understand that we're no longer alone, that we're this wonderful group of allies and the United States and other allies. We felt secure before, but now we're even more secure.
KELLY: Finnish state secretary Pasi Rajala. The foreign ministers knew they were speaking to Americans who might not see Russia's war in Ukraine as a top priority. Lithuania's foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, on the other hand, is very closely following what is happening in Eastern Ukraine.
GABRIELIUS LANDSBERGIS: The whole security landscape is being shaped in Kharkiv. Lithuanian security landscape is being shaped in Kharkiv. The way that the war will go on, the way that Ukrainians were able to resist and push back on Russians, it will affect directly on my country's security.
KELLY: Yeah.
LANDSBERGIS: And that's why if you take the countries who spend the most on their own security, it would be these countries. So this tells you the whole story.
THORDIS KOLBRUN REYKFJORD GYLFADOTTIR: And I think the U.S. also need to recognize that paying the insurance is always a smarter business than not doing so, and then end up in a situation that is so much more dramatic on all fronts, more costly, both in currency and in lives and in just the rule-based order. And there, the interest of the United States really lies.
KELLY: The international rules-based order is a priority, as you heard there, for Iceland's foreign minister, Thordis Kolbrun Reykfjord Gylfadottir. Iceland has a population smaller than any U.S. state and is the only NATO member with no standing army. The U.S., on the other hand, outspends every country in the world on its military, by a lot. The Nordic-Baltic nations agree that NATO doesn't work without the U.S. But there was laughter in the room when I asked what they make of American politics from across the Atlantic. Again, here's me questioning the foreign ministers of Sweden and Lithuania.
As you know, we have political uncertainty and instability here. Our presidential race is in greater flux than anyone might have imagined for July of 2024. To what extent does political uncertainty domestically in the biggest, richest member of NATO influence what the alliance can do in terms of ambitions, in terms of capabilities?
BILLSTROM: First of all, I think that we all have full agreement, I think, here that the Transatlantic link and the U.S. participation in NATO is, of course, indispensable. That goes without saying. But on top of that, I think that we all take our own responsibility very seriously, regardless of the outcome of U.S. elections. And also, just on a side note, there is a tendency sometimes in European media to be very focused on the election outcome for the White House. But we all know that the Congress and the Senate has a lot to say when it comes to foreign and security policy. And a president has a lot of power in the U.S., but you are not a Chinese or a Russian president. You have to think about what the Congress thinks about this.
KELLY: Although Congress, of course, has just held up Ukraine aid for many months, to the detriment of Ukraine's ability to fight.
BILLSTROM: Well, again, that's democracy, of course, and we can argue about this. So I'm not going to play down it, but that's democracy as well.
LANDSBERGIS: You know, a couple of weeks ago, I had to comment on the upcoming elections in France and how that will affect the future of Europe or future of NATO and all that. Democracies are messy. In some cases, you would like them to be more - you know, more predictable, but they're just that. And if we look back into history, you know, First World War, Second World War, it took a while for allies to come together. Now when you read any history book about the first or Second World War, you don't read about the messiness of elections and democratic processes. You read about - how did we see the war? Did we come forward and did we provide the right answer? Or did we not? And at this point, I think that the main thing is that, unfortunately, we're not exactly there where we should be in order to meet the threat that Russians and its allies pose to an alliance. And we still - I think that the last chapter of this historic inflection point is not yet written.
KELLY: What I'm hearing from all of you is there's a need to safeguard assistance to Ukraine. Ukraine needs to win. So I ask the next question with genuine curiosity - is there a need to Trump-proof NATO? He has suggested, as you know, that he's not going to prioritize assistance to you Ukraine. How are y'all thinking about that? Minister Rasmussen?
LARS LOKKE RASMUSSEN: Yeah, I wonder whether it's possible to Trump-proof anything. I had the honor in my former capacity as prime minister to participate in one of those summits years ago with President Trump, where he, you know, read out the total list of allies and their spending on defense. And he wasn't really satisfied for very good reasons because we made a promise in Wales many years ago to Obama, and we didn't deliver on that...
KELLY: Side note - back in 2014, NATO members made a promise to increase military spending to at least 2% of GDP by this year. And that is what Denmark's foreign minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, is referring to.
RASMUSSEN: ...The 2% targets. But things have changed now, and two-thirds of the allies now, we meet these criterias (ph). I think we should - instead of discussing whether we can Trump-proof things, we should discuss whether we could future-proof things. And that will give us an upper hand towards anyone in the White House in the future.
KELLY: Foreign diplomats from Denmark, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland, all brought together by the Atlantic Council as this week's NATO Summit kicks off.
SUMMERS: This episode was produced by Megan Lim and Brianna Scott. It was edited by Patrick Jarenwattananon and Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.
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SUMMERS: It's CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. I'm Juana Summers.
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