U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the 75th anniversary of NATO at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, on July 9.Evan Vucci/The Associated Press
U.S. President Joe Biden vowed that “Ukraine will prevail” in its war against Russia, kicking off a NATO summit in Washington with a speech meant to project strength even as he fights to stop his own Democratic Party from forcing him to end his re-election bid.
Speaking Tuesday to the leaders of NATO’s 32 member countries at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, the neoclassical building where the alliance was founded 75 years ago, Mr. Biden said the group was its largest and wealthiest ever.
“Before the war, Putin thought NATO would break. Today, NATO is stronger than it’s ever been in its history,” Mr. Biden told the summit, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “The war will end with Ukraine remaining a free and independent country. Russia will not prevail. Ukraine will prevail.”
The summit is unfolding as Mr. Biden faces demands from some Democrats, including members of Congress, that he step aside after his shambolic debate performance against former president Donald Trump last month. The debate raised concerns that Mr. Biden, 81, is suffering from age-related cognitive and physical decline.
On Tuesday, Senate Democrats met to discuss whether Mr. Biden should remain at the top of their presidential ticket, but made no public statements.
Mr. Biden said in his speech that 23 NATO members were on track to fulfill a decade-old commitment to spend 2 per cent of GDP on defence, a rise from nine in 2020. Canada is not one of them.
“The remaining countries that have not yet reached that milestone” of 2 per cent, Mr. Biden said, “will get there soon.”
The alliance has also expanded since Mr. Putin’s invasion, with Sweden and Finland signing up.
Mr. Biden’s NATO speech, which he read from a teleprompter, went off without serious incident, though the President occasionally stumbled over some words. It also seemed designed to personally jab Mr. Putin over his military’s incompetence. “Kyiv, remember, fellows and ladies, was supposed to fall in five days. Remember? It’s still standing two years later,” he said.
Mr. Biden also announced the latest tranche of military supplies for Ukraine, five air-defence systems to be supplied by the U.S., Germany, the Netherlands, Romania and Italy.
Outgoing NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, who received a presidential medal of freedom from Mr. Biden, called the alliance the longest-lasting such military pact in history. He cautioned, however, that it faced continued threats.
“Our alliance should not be taken for granted,” he said. NATO was “not a given” when it was founded and “it is not a given now.”
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a NATO leader, visited Moscow and Beijing in the days before the summit to push a Ukrainian peace plan with Mr. Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Donald Trump has also raised fears he wants to cede Ukrainian territory to Russia by promising to swiftly end the war if elected.
The prospect of Mr. Trump recapturing the White House in November loomed over the alliance’s meeting. An isolationist, he has criticized U.S. military aid to Ukraine and threatened to encourage Russian invasions of NATO members who do not pay their fair share of defence costs.
Earlier Tuesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau used his first public speech of the summit to warn that the world is more unstable now than at any point since the alliance was founded.
“The long peace after the Second World War is over. We’re living in an increasingly dangerous, unstable and complex world,” he told a gathering at the Canadian embassy in Washington to mark the launch of the Climate Change and Security Centre of Excellence, a Montreal-based NATO organization focused on fighting climate change.
Mr. Trudeau named “resurgent authoritarian forces,” cyber warfare, regional conflicts and climate change as “growing threats to our collective security.”
Canada’s failure to meet the 2-per-cent defence spending threshold drew Mr. Trump’s ire during his presidency.
Mr. Trudeau had a rocky relationship with Mr. Trump, who during his presidency hit Canada with steel and aluminum tariffs, frequently threatened to end continental free trade and tried to force Ottawa to accept protectionist changes to the North American free-trade agreement.
John Podesta, Mr. Biden’s climate change envoy and a high-ranking Democratic political aide since the 1990s, said in an interview on the sidelines of the climate event that the President is “determined to defeat Trump.”
He demurred when asked about Mr. Trump or whether Mr. Biden should stay in the race.
“The current president has done an absolutely remarkable job and I think that the leadership of the Democratic Party recognizes that and, as he’s said, he’s determined to defeat Trump,” Mr. Podesta said. “I have restrictions on what I can say, but I think he’s made his views clear about his ability and determination to stay in this race.”
Mr. Podesta said there are “vast differences between the two” presidential candidates and “those choices are in front of the American people.”