American tycoon Donald Trump promises, if he returns to the White House, that
the United States would abandon Ukraine
and stop transferring funds and weapons to it. Since these weapons began arriving in Ukraine, shipments have been coordinated by
US agents from the German Ramstein air base
, one of the main US bases in Europe. Trump, who believes that the best way to end the war
is to stop arming Ukraine
, could block this framework, the NATO hierarchy believes, which is why this Thursday they presented to the foreign ministers of the 32 member states a plan to make it NATO itself from Brussels, and not the United States, will coordinate arms deliveries.
To do this, NATO
should open its mechanisms to more countries
because more than 50 have participated in the meetings at the German base in Ramstein. The change would mean that NATO as an organization would have
more involvement in the conflict
, something that even Now he was resisting. And he still must convince the United States to give up that coordination because it would give up influence and control over what is sent to Ukraine and when it is sent.
Furthermore, the Secretary General of the Atlantic Alliance,
Jens Stoltenberg , believes that it is time for
a Ukrainian diplomatic “mission” to exist
at NATO headquarters in Brussels
. It is the formula prior to a diplomatic delegation from a Member State and would serve to prepare Ukraine's accession to the military bloc. The idea is supported by the United States and especially the countries of Eastern Europe, but
it has not yet generated the necessary consensus
to implement it.
A 100 billion dollar fund
The other big idea of the NATO foreign ministers' summit this Wednesday and Thursday is
the creation of a $100 billion
arms fund for Ukraine from 2024 to 2028.
It would
multiply the military aid of the European Union by four
(to which the bilateral aid of each EU Member State must be added) and raises even more doubts. A Belgian diplomat told
'Clarín'
that "we should not promise what is not going to be fulfilled" and governments are already making calculations of how much it will cost them: 30,000 million for the United States, 20,000 for Germany, 10,000 for France, 7,000 for Italy, 5,000 for Spain, among others.
The Secretary General of the Atlantic Alliance, Jens Stoltenberg. Photo: EFE
One way to make national diplomacies swallow is for those 100 billion to include the bilateral financial aid commitments already announced.
Trump's ghost
Stoltenberg does it not because there is a lack of money to buy weapons (the biggest problem is not money but that there are no weapons or ammunition to buy because the European military industry is incapable of producing at the speed that Ukraine shoots) but to
prepare the stage. of an eventual arrival of Donald Trump
. The magnate's main complaint towards NATO is that European governments
have not put in the money they should have put in
and the United States bears most of the cost of the military organization.
The Spanish Foreign Minister, José Manuel Albares, said that he thought it was a bad idea (others spoke in the same sense) because the same money would be counted twice, that of the European Union and that of NATO. And he recalled that, unlike the European Union,
NATO does not have its own budgets
other than for its administrative functioning.
NATO summit at Brussels headquarters. Photo: AP
Nor does it have, Albares recalled,
“a way of issuing debt to obtain funds
, unlike the European Union.” NATO's annual budget does not reach 5 billion dollars when the European Union manages more than 160 billion euros each year and in recent years has gone into debt to finance funds worth nearly one trillion euros.
The foreign ministers also made preparations for the big annual summit, which this time will be in Washington between July 9 and 11. One of the big decisions is
whether to agree to start negotiating Ukraine's entry
into the military bloc.
The Ukrainians have had
the formal invitation since 2008
, but no one expects to integrate a country at war with Russia
because it would automatically lead to a Russia-NATO war. Stoltenberg always tries to encourage the Ukrainians by saying that the question is not if they will enter, but when they will enter.
Ukraine's neighbors such as the Baltic States or Poland are pushing to advance as quickly as possible in the country's accession to NATO, but others, including some of the weight of the United States and Germany, drag their feet and do not want formal commitments. None of them announce that they will close the door forever, but they don't want to open it completely for now.