And they know that Mr. Putin and Xi Jinping, China’s leader, are watching as well.
“NATO has never been, and is not, and will never be, a given,” Jens Stoltenberg, the outgoing secretary general of the alliance, said on Sunday in a wide-ranging discussion with journalists. “We have done so successfully 75 years. I’m confident that we can do so also in the future. But it’s about political leadership, it’s about political commitment.”
Months before the meeting, the alliance began hedging its bets in case of a second Trump presidency. It is setting up a new NATO command to ensure a long-term supply of arms and military aid to Ukraine even if the United States, under Mr. Trump, pulls back.
But in conversations with NATO leaders, it is clear that their plans to modernize their forces and prepare for an era that could be marked by decades of confrontation with Russia are not matched by commensurate increases in their military budgets.
More than 20 NATO members have now reached the goal of spending 2 percent of their gross national product on defense, making good on pledges that some made in response to Mr. Trump’s demands, and others to the realities of Russia’s invasion. That percentage — a goal established more than a decade ago, in an era when terrorism appeared to be the biggest threat — seems wildly undersized to the task at hand, many of Mr. Biden’s aides say.
In Europe, Germany has described plans for upgrading its military capabilities to deter Russian aggression, a transformation promised by Chancellor Olaf Scholz in the weeks after the Russian invasion. But Mr. Scholz’s grand plans have yet to be matched by a budget to pay for them, and the politics of bringing the public along have proved so fraught that German officials resist putting a price tag on them.
