It feels like we are worlds away from the time when French President Emmanuel Macron declared NATO “brain dead” on the eve of its London summit in 2019. Since then, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has revived and reinvigorated the North Atlantic alliance like never before in its 74-year history, as demonstrated by the enthusiasm for its summit this week in Lithuania.Macron had argued that the alliance had bickered needlessly on burden-sharing when its members had no shared vision or common objectives regarding security in Europe, claiming that terrorism was the common enemy that “hit all our countries”, not China or Russia. He also insisted that Europe had to become more autonomous in the security sphere because the United States was becoming less reliable.President Donald Trump had heightened tensions over NATO’s burden-sharing, falsely accusing European members of lowering their military spending and undermining the alliance’s basic tenet of collective security. He even threatened to withdraw the US from the alliance. Indeed, NATO had barely survived four years of Trump.
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