United States president Barack Obama lands in Wales today for the Nato summit at the most precarious time in his foreign policy leadership, with Russia refusing to bow to sanctions over Ukraine and the president admitting he has no strategy to tackle Islamic militants in the Middle East.
As Obama withdraws from unpopular Bush-led conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan in what Harvard professor Niall Ferguson has called a "geopolitical taper", the reluctant foreign policy president is seeking to build new regional partnerships and reinforce existing ones framed within a US policy of retreat that his critics say has emboldened the country's enemies.
Reassurance is the theme of Obama's European trip as he seeks to assure nervous allies that the US is still committed to protecting eastern Europe and bolstering Nato's forces in the face of Russian aggression. There is deep anxiety among former Soviet bloc countries that Moscow may have ambitions further afield and that the US should be doing more to respond.
Certainly, the Obama administration’s decision to respond to Russia’s “incursion” into Ukraine – the president has notably refused to call it an invasion even though Russian troops are now fighting inside the Ukrainian border – with economic weapons and diplomatic pressure and to rule out military force has done little to quell Russian president Vladimir Putin’s expansionist urges.
Ukraine’s crisis has forced Nato to return to its 65-year- old original mission goal at the organisation’s first major summit since 2012: defend Europe’s eastern frontier against Kremlin expansionism.
Obama met the presidents of the three Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, in the Estonian capital Tallinn yesterday ahead of the summit of Nato leaders at Newport in Wales today.
The stop was a show of support for countries that, like Ukraine, have Russian populations, but which, unlike Ukraine, fall under the North Atlantic Treaty. That offers them Nato’s article five cover of security that if one member is attacked all are attacked.
“It is clearly not accidental that the president has decided to stop in Estonia on the way to the Nato summit,” Charles Kupchan, senior director for European Affairs on Obama’s National Security Council, said last week. “The two stops are essentially part of the same effort to send a message to the Russians that their behaviour is unacceptable.”
The Obama administration official said the president’s message to Estonia was that the article five pledge constituted “an iron-clad guarantee of your security”.
The summit is not expected to stop at vocal support. Nato is set to agree plans to develop a rapid-response military force of 4,000 troops so it can deal with what the White House calls “hybrid warfare and other asymmetric threats” – in essence, to create a responding force to prevent a repeat of the covert Russian forces that spilled into Ukraine over another border in eastern Europe.
In addition, Nato members will discuss new permanent defences along Europe’s eastern border with Russia in the Baltics, Poland and Romania that would house rotating Nato troops.
This is likely to stoke further tensions with Moscow given Nato’s 1997 agreement with Russia which promised not to base “substantial combat forces” in central and eastern Europe, though Russia’s actions in Ukraine have, it could be argued, made such co-operative arrangements void.
Even though Ukraine is not a member of Nato, Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko will travel to
the summit through the establishment of the Nato-Ukraine commission that gives Kiev a seat at a table with western leaders.
Though the UK last week raised its terror threat level to “substantial”, Obama is not as concerned for US security and will bring his slow-build plan to build a coalition to fight the Islamic extremists to the summit.
He is playing a long game on Iraq, refusing to be drawn unilaterally into a conflict he believes the US’s military can easily win but from which the US cannot easily withdraw.
The American public appears unhappy with the time or effort Obama takes to deal with foreign policy challenges. A majority of Americans remain unhappy with how he is confronting world problems, with 54 per cent polled by Pew Research and USA Today late last month saying Obama was "not tough enough" on foreign policy and national security.
Events in Ukraine seem to leave Nato – and America’s evolved foreign-policy role within the organisation – at a crossroads as it prepares to bolster its response to imminent security threats to its members.