NATO would seek early summit with Biden, if elected, envoys say
Joe Biden is seen in Europe as offering a shift in US policy away from Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ approach.
The NATO military alliance is considering a summit in March in Brussels to welcome a new US president if Democrat candidate Joe Biden wins, diplomats and officials said, with a gathering in the first half of next year if Donald Trump is re-elected.
While the United States-led alliance agreed last year to hold a summit in 2021, a meeting in the spring would be an early chance to repair transatlantic ties if Biden were to be voted into the White House on November 3, after a bruising four years under Trump.
Trump has said that the Western alliance is “obsolete” and some allies are “delinquent” as well as issuing a veiled threat in July 2018 to pull the US out of the alliance.
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Biden, who leads in opinion polls, is seen in Europe as offering a shift in US policy away from Trump’s “America First” agenda, which has undermined European priorities on issues from climate to the Iran nuclear deal.
“Most allies want a Biden victory next month, but they would obviously work with a re-elected Trump administration,” one diplomat at NATO’s Brussels headquarters said.
A March summit “would give Biden a platform to bring Europe and North America back together and also give NATO a chance to put the Trump era behind it”, a second diplomat said.
Two officials echoed that statement. They and the two diplomats also said if Trump were re-elected, NATO would seek to hold a summit in early summer, but that there was less urgency because he had already attended NATO summits and his position was seen as likely to harden.
The now 30-member North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which was created in 1949 to confront the threat of the erstwhile communist Soviet Union, declined to comment.
In a potential twist of fate, any NATO summit next year is likely to hear the results of a report commissioned in 2019 on reforms to the alliance, after Trump questioned its relevance.
Any summit plans would have to consider coronavirus pandemic restrictions that have complicated in-person gatherings of government leaders, diplomats said. Last week, three leaders were forced to leave a European Union summit in Brussels because of COVID-19 infection risks.