President Donald Trump's behavior at the NATO summit in Turkey effectively split the conference in two, a New York Times analysis argued Thursday, creating a pair of completely different political tracks for world affairs.
The U.S. president, wrote Steven Erlanger, "dominated the news cycle with a steady stream of complaints, grievances and insults aimed at his NATO colleagues, with his unpredictable changes of tone and mood, and with his decision during the meeting to unleash new airstrikes against Iran," at times trashing "the alliance itself, some of its leaders, their various failures to show loyalty to him, the Spaniards and the Iranians."
However, as all of this was unfolding, other NATO members worked amongst themselves, to "show [their] commitments to more military spending, more trans-Atlantic industrial cooperation and continued support of Ukraine in its war with Russia," said the report.
“It really is a tale of two summits,” German Marshall Fund fellow Ian Lesser told the Times. “You have all the preexisting concerns about the Trump agenda, some on display yesterday, as he ticked off all his grievances. And then there is the more traditional summit, with a preset agenda, which is a lot about money and how to spend it, which declared support in the communiqué for collective defense and Ukraine, and that was important.”
The existence of these "two summits at once" in "parallel," he added, was an "odd" thing to see — though he added that Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan managed to be a stabilizing presence due to his friendly ties with Trump.
All of this comes after days of drama in which Trump earned heavy mockery for confusing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy with Vladimir Putin, and claiming he was striking targets in the "Islamic Republic of Japan."