Elephant in room at NATO: would Trump blow it up?

WASHINGTON, United States — Western leaders are celebrating 75 years of NATO with an elephant in the room -- will Donald Trump, who could again be the US president within months, blow the alliance up?

This week's summit in Washington will look, without saying so explicitly, to "Trump-proof" NATO by expanding the role of the alliance itself -- especially in supporting Ukraine, whose fight against Russia has drawn skepticism from the Republican candidate.

US President Joe Biden and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg have both trumpeted the 32-nation bloc as the most successful military alliance in history, pointing to its role countering the Soviet Union and later protecting new European democracies after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Trump, whose motto is "America First" and has voiced admiration in the past for Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, has seen NATO from a dramatically different lens, accusing allies of freeloading off an overstretched and costly US military.

In campaign remarks attacked by Biden, the New York real estate developer said he would encourage Russia to "do whatever the hell they want" if NATO allies do not "pay (their) bills."

What exactly Trump meant -- if he was serious or making threats to force Europeans to cough up more money -- remains open to debate.

In a March television interview, British anti-immigration politician Nigel Farage asked Trump if the United States would fulfill its NATO commitments if allies "start to play fair," to which Trump replied, "Yes. 100 percent."

But John Bolton, a hawkish Republican who was Trump's national security advisor and later became an outspoken critic, has said that Trump is complaining about NATO allies' spending not as a way to cajole them into putting up more money but rather as a pretext to start a US withdrawal.

Bolton in a memoir recounted that Trump at a 2018 NATO summit said "we will walk out" and "not defend" countries that do not meet spending goals.

Even short of withdrawing from NATO, Trump could signal to Moscow that he would not care about NATO's key Article Five -- that an attack on one ally is an attack on all.

While president, Trump raised eyebrows when he described people in