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While US President Donald Trump “is always raging at something”, he might not create too much rancor at next week’s NATO summit in Ankara, a longtime US diplomat has said.
Kurt Volker, a former US ambassador to NATO who also served as the first Trump administration’s special representative to Ukraine, told Euronews’ flagship programme Europe Today he believes Trump won’t want to embarrass the summit’s host, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
“Donald Trump is always raging about something: he’s unhappy about European contributions, European defence spending, Iran, whatever it might be,” Volker explained, pointing out that Trump “has a good relationship with Erdoğan, and he doesn’t want to rain on Erdoğan’s parade”.
Trump has lambasted his NATO allies in recent months over some governments’ refusal to support the US and Israel in their join war with Iran, accusing them of abandoning their obligations to support the US as part of the NATO alliance.
Spain and Italy refused access to bases, and France denied Israel access to its airspace for flights carrying weapons for use in Iran.
In May, Trump had a bitter public feud with German Chancellor Frederich Merz after Merz criticised the “ill-conceived” strategy behind the war.
Trump then hastily announced the withdrawal of 5,000 US troops from Germany and denounced his European partners as “cowards”, calling NATO a “paper tiger”.
Allies made the point they were not involved in the planning of the war in Iran, and that it wasn’t related to NATO’s overall defence, but Trump remains angry despite a preliminary peace agreement being signed to end the war.
On Thursday night, just days before the summit, Trump said it was “ridiculous” for the US to keep to its “one-sided” relationship with NATO.
“They were not there for us!!!”, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, saying Washington’s relationship NATO “is not reciprocal”.
Yet Trump has confirmed to reporters that he’d attend the upcoming summit out of respect for Erdoğan, saying he likely would not have gone if it was elsewhere.
“If the summit was not taking place in Turkey, I don’t think I would have gone to it,” Trump said on the margins of a meeting with NATO Secretary General, Mark Rutte at the White House. “I’m going out of respect to President Erdoğan.”
Since becoming president for the second time Trump’s been particularly scathing at allies for not spending enough on defence, often describing Europe as “free riders” when it comes to US military investment.
Volker says Trump’s characterisation of allies as abandoning the US is an “exaggeration” given how they were not consulted ahead of the war.
“The administration right now likes to say that Europe wasn’t there for us,” said Volker, “they didn’t let us use bases and airspace and things like that.”
That’s a bit of an exaggeration. We had to ask and then you could have used them. And we didn’t tell anybody we were going to attack Iran. And then we complained that no one was attacking with us.”