The results of the US presidential election were greeted with a cathedral-like silence at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) headquarters in Brussels on Wednesday, November 6. While the winner, Donald Trump, peppered his campaign with threats of withdrawing from NATO, to which the US is the main contributor, the 32 members of the Alliance are preparing for the return of a Trump era with an anxious wait-and-see attitude and pragmatism. “It’s a bit like the calm before the storm,” one NATO diplomat, who lived through the Republican’s first election in 2016, said.
Trump’s election was well anticipated at NATO. “Given the campaign and the very close polls, it was expected. It’s nothing like 2016 when everyone was in shock,” a diplomat from an Eastern flank country told Le Monde. Since the summer and Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, NATO began to seriously prepare for the possibility of Trump’s return. The result will take up a large part of the weekly meeting on Monday, November 11, of the new Secretary General Mark Rutte with all deputies and the Chairman of NATO’s Military Committee, Admiral Rob Bauer.
Rutte, who took office on October 1 as head of the alliance, was partly appointed with this in mind. The former Dutch prime minister, in office from 2010 to 2024, rubbed shoulders extensively with Trump during his years in power between 2017 and 2021. Rutte will know how to be both agile and firm vis-à-vis the incumbent in the White House, a European diplomat said.
90,000 US troops in Europe
But even if the most optimistic hope that “the organization will emerge stronger” from this ordeal, Trump’s arrival in power is still a great leap into the unknown, many sources admit. Will the new president follow through on his threats to stop protecting “deadbeat” countries that don’t contribute 2% of their GDP to defense spending in the event of an attack? Will he mothball the organization while the war in Ukraine, which he promised to stop in “24 hours,” is still raging?
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The only certainty is that a massive withdrawal of US troops deployed in Europe is not the scenario favored in the immediate future by Trump’s teams. Since 2014 and Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the number of US troops on the continent has risen from 60,000 to around 90,000. Washington has also invested in the creation or expansion of several military sites, notably in Eastern flank countries.
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Publish date : 2024-11-09 01:45:00
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