During his first foreign trip since he was elected, U.S. President Donald Trump didn't look too out of place in Saudi Arabia or even in the Vatican. In Brussels, however, he was a befuddled elephant in a china shop, doing his best to convince European leaders that the U.S. was clueless on key cooperation issues.
It was bad enough that he shoved aside Montenegro Prime Minister Dusko Markovic to be in the front row during a North Atlantic Trade Organization photo opportunity; Markovic, whose country has just been welcomed into NATO, graciously said that the U.S. president belonged out front. It was awful enough that he used a memorial opening ceremony to make a politically contentious speech in which he railed against NATO members' low defense spending and, unlike any of his predecessors, avoided explicitly affirming NATO's pledge of mutual defense — the very Article 5 of the treaty that the memorial was supposed to commemorate.
One would expect a novice political leader in his first six months since being elected to climb a steep learning curve; instead Trump appeared to demonstrate a persistent unwillingness to learn. Despite having been told repeatedly that NATO member states had pledged to spend 2 percent of economic output on defense individually, not to pay that amount into some common pool, Trump repeated the canard that under-spenders "owe massive amounts of money from past years and not paying in those past years." There appears to be no way to explain to him that no NATO member is in arrears to the military bloc's budget.