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This week was meant to be a chance for the Nato allies to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the alliance with a much-needed show of unity, not least over future strategy. Instead, the Nato

summit has provided plenty of seasonal pantomime theatrics from heads of state. Their discord matters, because beneath it lies a serious battle for the future direction of the alliance. The

real split emerging within Nato is not between France, Europe and the US, but between those countries who regard Russia as Nato’s prime, existential threat and those whose focus is drifting

towards their own security concerns, be it terrorism for Macron or China for Trump. In that regard Macron and Trump are dangerously close to tacit agreement. A casual observer might have

missed this, as the two leaders reprised the personal enmity of their infamous handshake tussle. This time the two presidents engaged in a 40-minute war of words, culminating in Trump

accusing his French ally of giving “one of the greatest non-answers I have ever heard”. Nonetheless, in a demonstration of kindergarten-level reverse psychology, Macron’s proclamation of

Nato’s “brain death” managed to elicit the closest thing to a robust defence of the Atlantic alliance that Trump has managed to date. The President’s press conference that followed, meant to

last only a few minutes, disintegrated into almost an hour of his now familiar stream of consciousness tirades. It was followed later that evening by the Canadian Prime Minister Justin

Trudeau ’s mockery of Trump’s performance to a crowd of amused fellow Nato leaders. Trump ’s response was to call Trudeau “two-faced” and cancel a second press conference on the last day of

the summit — an unfortunate way of displaying the unity of the alliance . The backdrop to the conference was Trump’s simmering threat of a trade war with France, and by extension the EU, in

retaliation for French taxation of American tech companies. Britain is on course to levy a similar tax in April 2020, which may also attract similar ire from the White House. How much impact

all of this bickering will have is unclear. At one level, at least in the case of France, it is nothing new. From the outset French leaders have railed against the Anglo-American leadership

of Nato. De Gaulle famously pulled France out of Nato’s unified command and, in the immediate post-Cold War era, French leaders have chosen to question the long term utility of Nato in

favour of their own, non-American sources of influence, such as the Franco-German corps and the OSCE. The difference was that during the Cold War this was a disagreement about means, rather

than strategic ends. Apart from the headline grabbing assertion that Nato was “brain-dead”, Macron’s more important and worrying assertion was that Russia was no longer Nato’s principal

antagonist. Instead , he suggested that the principal threat to the alliance was from terrorism. That claim was echoed in Erdogan’s threat to block a Baltic defence plan, unless Nato backed

his fight against Kurdish groups in Syria that he brands “terrorists”. Macron has purposefully conflated Trump’s call for European allies to shoulder more of the burden for their own defence

with his own vision of an assertive, French-led EU conducting out-of-area operations. His scheme has echoes of another time. It recalls the 1990s discussions about repurposing Nato in the

“new world order” that President George H.W. Bush and many others believed would follow the Cold War, when anti-terrorist operations in areas such as the Sahel were under consideration. It

is far from clear that such non-military threats are the primary issue now facing Nato . Russia ’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and new-found willingness to intervene in the Middle East, Latin

America and Africa, not to mention interference in American and European elections, make Macron’s assertion that Russia is a potential partner look both politically and strategically na ï

ve. No one is more supportive of such strategic drift than Vladamir Putin, who used the timing of the Nato summit to suggest that he was eager to talk: “We have repeatedly expressed

readiness to jointly resist real threats…international terrorism, local armed conflicts [and] the danger of uncontrolled proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.” Unsurprisingly,

Macron’s comments have exacerbated a fissure between Western Europe and NATO’s Baltic members. Both the Estonian and Lithuanian defence ministers used the London summit to reiterate that

Russia “is the only external existential threat we have”. This divide is not so easily papered over with Nato’s putative Baltic defence planning. The Romanian defence minister warned about

the vulnerability of the Black Sea. “Nato and the EU need to have a very coherent approach to the whole flank,” he suggested. Since the end of the Cold War it has not been clear whether Nato

has primarily been an alliance of collective territorial defence from Russian military threats, an alliance of collective security whose main purpose is to promote the values of the

Atlantic community throughout Europe, or an alliance of collective interests whose main purpose is to defend against common European and American security interests wherever they may come

from. Perhaps the best outcome of this fractious summit has been to expose these fault lines in the alliance . But Nato remains a long way from the founding vision which ensured the

stability of a traumatised postwar world.