Jen Stoltenberg, NATO’s Secretary General, has made it his mission to keep President Trump sweet with NATO. At the leaders' meeting in the UK last month, Stoltenberg set Trump up for a slam dunk, giving him all the stats he needed to showcase his success squeezing more money out of NATO partners.
Today in Washington, Trump just passed Stoltenberg a far more fraught challenge: Picking up America’s slack in Iraq.
First some background: NATO leads the US-desired mission to train Iraqi forces. When US missiles took out Iranian Quds Force Commander Qasem Soleimani on Friday, Stoltenberg’s troops got swept up in the blowback. Germany was the first to suspend the training, then move some forces out of Iraq. Spain and others followed.
Today, Trump said he was asking NATO to “become much more involved in the Middle East process.”
There are two problems here:
- The Iraqi parliament voted on Sunday to kick foreign troops out of the country, leaving NATO nations scrambling to get a grip on what the vote meant.
- Trump didn’t define “involved.”
Stoltenberg was one of the many leaders to call the Iraqi prime minister in the wake of Soleimani’s killing. Yesterday, they discussed the “security situation in the region, and implications for NATO’s non-combat training mission in Iraq,” according to NATO.
Emerging as Iran’s top demand in this hyper-sensitive diplomatic moment has been the exit of US troops from Iraq.
They might be on to something: Trump made it a central part of his 2016 election campaign to draw down US forces in the Middle East. That doesn’t mean he’ll cave to Iran’s demands now — far from it. Today he announced he will heap yet more sanctions on Iran, of the very type that helped lead to the rising tensions – and rising violence from Iran – that served as a backdrop to the killing of Soleimani last week.
Fraught may be an under statement for Stoltenberg’s next challenge — jumping in to Trump’s saddle as the US President switches horses and heads for the hills. But the veteran Norwegian diplomat has never failed yet and is passionate about peace – and about keeping NATO and its troops alive.
