Joe Biden heads to Europe amid questions over cluster munitions and Nato unity

Joe Biden heads to Europe on Sunday for a swift tour dominated by the war in Ukraine, with membership of the expanding Nato military alliance and the US approval of cluster munitions likely to be key talking points. His national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said the trip would “showcase the president’s leadership on the world stage”.

The US president will arrive at night in London, ahead of meetings with the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and King Charles, and then head to a key Nato summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, before travelling to Helsinki to welcome Nato’s newest member, Finland.

Despite Sunak’s shaky political standing on the domestic front, he has fostered close ties with Biden and it will be their sixth meeting since Sunak took office in October last year. The prime minister’s office said in a statement on Saturday that the UK was “Europe’s leading Nato ally [and] the United States’ most important trade, defence and diplomatic partner”. It added: “As we face new and unprecedented challenges to our physical and economic security, our alliances are more important than ever.”

Sunak’s tenure has been a nice change of pace after “there were some concerns about Boris Johnson being a loose cannon”, according to Max Bergmann, a former state department official who leads the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Biden will meet the king at Windsor Castle for the first time since Charles’s coronation, where they are expected to discuss the climate crisis, an issue that has been a focus for both leaders, and how to finance initiatives to address the problem. When the two men met at the Cop26 climate summit in Scotland two years ago, Biden praised Charles’s leadership on the subject, telling him: “We need you badly.”

From Tuesday, Biden will spend two days in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, which is hosting the annual Nato summit. He will participate in meetings with leaders and deliver a speech from Vilnius University.

It is likely the US president will face questions as to why he has approved the provision of cluster munitions to Ukraine, a weapon that more than two-thirds of Nato members have banned because it has a record for causing indiscriminate civilian casualties, with unexploded munitions potentially causing fatalities decades later.

For the alliance’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, the summit “will send a clear message: Nato stands united and Russia’s aggression will not pay”. But Nato has also struggled to bridge divides over important issues. Finland was welcomed into the alliance this year, but Sweden’s membership has been held up by Turkey and Hungary.

There are also disagreements over how quickly to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join Nato. Countries on the alliance’s eastern flank want to move quickly, viewing it as a way to deter Russian aggression. The US and others advocate a more cautious approach. Biden himself noted in a CNN interview that aired on Friday: “I don’t think there is unanimity in Nato about whether or not to bring Ukraine into the Nato family now, at this moment, in the middle of a war … If the war is going on, then we’re all in war. We’re at war with Russia, if that were the case.”

US senator Thom Tillis, who will attend the summit leading a bipartisan delegation, likened the alliance to a gathering of dozens of family members who bicker and clash but nonetheless remain united.

“At the end of the day, you know you’re family,” said Tillis. “It’s the strongest military alliance in our history and I think it only has gotten stronger as a result of US leadership, as the result of Stoltenberg’s leadership and as the result of the threat from [Russia’s president] Vladimir Putin to all of the Nato allies and other countries in Europe and around the world and to the international order,” he said.

Next, Biden will visit Helsinki. The stop is a bit of a victory lap, but could also be a reminder of unfinished business.

The Nordic country in April became the 31st member of Nato, ending its history of non-alignment and demonstrating how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has backfired in Europe.

Finland was supposed to join alongside its neighbour Sweden, whose admission has stalled because of Turkey and Hungary. Nato requires unanimous consent of all its members to expand.

The Swedish prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, visited the White House on Wednesday and met Biden to keep up the pressure for membership. But there is little hope that the issue will be resolved in Vilnius.

The White House is billing Biden’s visit to Helsinki as a “US-Nordic leaders summit” and will be a much different occasion from the last time a US president visited Helsinki five years ago.

During that trip, Donald Trump held a news conference with Putin and brushed off concerns about Russian meddling in Trump’s election victory.

Now Biden is heading to the city to demonstrate how his administration has held the line against Moscow and expanded western defences.

With Associated Press and Reuters