After Donald Trump blew up the G-20 meeting, it looks like his advisors decided that shouldn’t happen at the NATO meeting.
Senior American national security officials, seeking to prevent President Trump from upending a formal policy agreement at last month’s NATO meeting, pushed the military alliance’s ambassadors to complete it before the forum even began.
The work to preserve the North Atlantic Treaty Organization agreement, which is usually subject to intense 11th-hour negotiations, came just weeks after Mr. Trump refused to sign off on a communiqué from the June meeting of the Group of 7 in Canada. (New York Times)
According to the article, which cites “European diplomats and American officials” as the sources, it was John Bolton who insisted on completing the “communiqué — renamed for the meeting as a declaration.”
All kinds of fascinating things to unpack in this. Could it be that Bolton doesn’t want to burn down the international order? And the diplomats and officials who spoke to the Times reporters know that this could upset Trump, which could lead to any number of untoward results. But most interesting is the continuing split between Trump and the government, in which Trump tries to undermine Western alliances and the government tries to preserve them or Trump cozies up to Putin and the government slams sanctions on him.
On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that now that the spectacle is over, Trump doesn’t care about outcomes, so the sources figure we might as well know what is going on.
I guess we’ll see in tomorrow’s tweet storm.