Throughout his first term as president, Donald Trump repeatedly threatened to leave NATO, an alliance that in his view allows other countries who don’t spend enough on their own defense to get a free ride on US security guarantees. His former national security adviser John Bolton has written that he believes Trump would have followed through on the threat if he’d been reelected in 2020.
This term, though, despite deepening tensions with Europe, Trump hasn’t said much about leaving the alliance. His secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has avowed, “The United States remains committed to the NATO alliance and to the defense partnership with Europe. Full stop.”
At this point, the better question is whether Trump has effectively made the alliance irrelevant. The US is still a NATO member. But Trump has consistently undermined its core principle that members will treat any attack on another member’s territory as an attack on their own, and come to the attacked member’s aid.
This principle of mutual defense only works if both the allies and their adversaries believe that it’s credible — that countries would actually put the lives of their own citizens on the line to defend allies.
In the case of Trump and NATO, the guarantee is getting a lot harder to believe.
“Would Donald Trump choose to go and fight for Estonia?” said Dalibor Rohac, a senior fellow and expert on European politics at the American Enterprise Institute. “I think at some level, it requires a suspension of disbelief to think that he would.”
Trump’s second term has already been far more alarming, from a European perspective than the first, thanks to actions including Trump’s abrupt pivot toward Russia in the Ukraine war, the Oval Office humiliation of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, his new tariffs, JD Vance’s combative speech at the Munich Security Conference, the territorial threats toward NATO members Canada and Denmark, and reports that the president is considering redeploying troops from Germany to Russia-friendly Hungary.
European leaders might have thought of Trump’s first term as an aberration, a bizarre four years followed by a return to normalcy. His return to the White House made clear they may be dealing with a very different United States going forward — one whose security commitments can’t be taken for granted in the long run, even if Trump is replaced by another Joe Biden-style transatlanticist in four years.
Recent statements from European leaders suggest they are not so confident about the credibility of America’s commitment to the alliance. “I want to believe that the US will stand by our side, but we have to be ready for that not to be the case,” French President Emmanuel Macron said in a recent televised speech to the nation.
“Strategic autonomy” from Washington has long been a priority for Macron, and something of a French tradition dating back to the formation of the alliance. It was more surprising to hear Germany’s likely incoming Chancellor Friedrich Merz, hailing from a center-right party with a strong transatlanticist tradition, say that “After Donald Trump’s statements…it is clear that the Americans are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe” and that Europe must work as quickly as possible to “achieve independence from the US.”
Some of this work will involve steps to increase defense spending, military readiness, and aid to Ukraine that are already underway. There have also been increasing conversations on the continent about developing an independent nuclear deterrent, outside of Washington’s control.
Either way, it’s clear that the alliance that has been the bedrock of Western security strategy for nearly 80 years is no longer what it was. Without actually leaving it, Trump may have simply made NATO irrelevant.
Does the heart of the NATO treaty even still exist?
The core of the NATO alliance is spelled out in Article 5 of the alliance’s founding treaty: “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.”
In the event of such an attack, each member pledges to “such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”
In practice, this guarantee was an effective deterrent to first the Soviet Union, and then Russia, because of the involvement of the United States, the NATO country with by far the largest conventional military and nuclear arsenal.
Washington has had fierce disagreements with other NATO members in the past: the war in Iraq, for example. Trump is also hardly the first president to suggest that America’s core interests lie elsewhere — Barack Obama also tried to execute a “pivot to Asia” — or that European countries should take more responsibility for their own defense.
But the current hostility to the very idea of the alliance is unprecedented. “It has been core to every administration until now to affirm in a positive way that the United States is committed to the defense of Europe, that it is committed to Article 5,” said Ivo Daalder, who served as US ambassador to NATO during the Obama administration. “That is the cornerstone of our engagement in the world.”
But, Daalder added, “Trump has, from 2016 onwards, put question marks behind that commitment.”
It’s not just Trump’s threats to leave the alliance. He has called into question whether the US would follow its obligations under the treaty at all. In 2020, he reportedly told European officials, in a closed-door meeting, “You need to understand that if Europe is under attack, we will never come to help you and to support you.”
During his 2020 campaign, he said he would invite Russia to do “whatever the hell you want” to “delinquent” members of the alliance.
During a recent meeting with reporters in the Oval Office, Trump said his “biggest problem” with NATO is that he doubts whether the mutual defense clause would work in practice, saying, “If the United States was in trouble and we called them, we said, we got a problem…do you think they’re going to come and protect us? They’re supposed to. I’m not so sure.”
Article 5 has been invoked exactly once since NATO’s founding in 1949: after the 9/11 attacks on the United States. The alliance did come to America’s aid. Soldiers from over a dozen NATO countries died in the war in Afghanistan that followed.
The other ostensible reason for Trump’s ire during his first term was the failure of most NATO members to meet a target, set in 2014, of spending at least 2 percent of their GDP on defense. In 2021, just six member countries hit that goal.
But things have changed since then: 23 of the alliance’s 32 members now meet the 2 percent target.
Trump can, with some justification, take a victory lap for this change (though Vladimir Putin surely deserves more credit). And during a meeting at the White House last week, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte praised him for prodding members to spend more. But Trump has also upped the ante, saying European countries should be spending 5 percent on defense, more than any NATO country, including the United States currently spends.
NBC recently reported that Trump is considering calibrating America’s NATO membership so that it is not bound to defend countries that don’t meet a set spending target.
It’s hard to imagine how this would work in practice. The countries on NATO’s Eastern flank, like Poland and the Baltic countries, which are the most concerned about being attacked by Russia, are already spending the most on defense. (Officials from these countries often point out that they spend more, as a percentage of GDP, than the United States.) And the right-wing parties in Europe that the Trump administration has publicly aligned itself with, including Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz and France’s National Rally, are the ones blocking higher defense spending at both a national and continent-wide level.
Trump’s calls for higher spending often seem less like a genuine policy demand than a cudgel to wield against an alliance he doesn’t much care for in the first place.
Trump’s statements, Daalder said, have “weakened the confidence that allies feel to the point that, I would argue, allies now are no longer convinced that, in fact, the United States is committed to Article 5.”
And if they are no longer convinced, it’s fair to ask whether Article 5, de facto, still exists.
Europe’s nuclear future
For the moment, “the dominant strategy for European governments is to kind of try to act as if NATO didn’t exist and make sure that they are ready to face the dangers alone,” Rohac said.
Some of this will involve increasing defense spending and increasing and building up conventional capabilities. Parties in Germany, for instance, agreed this week to a historic deal to exempt defense spending from the country’s constitutionally enshrined limits on government borrowing.
But from its founding, the NATO alliance and Article 5 have also been tied to nuclear strategy and French President Charles de Gaulle’s famous question of whether the US would be willing to “trade New York for Paris” in the event of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
“The ability of the United States to reassure allies that it’s willing to destroy itself in a nuclear war to defend them is a difficult case to make under the best of circumstances,” Daalder said. “It’s a nearly impossible case to make under the present circumstances.”
Even before Trump returned to office, there had been increasing debate on the continent about whether Europe needs to build out nuclear deterrence independent of Washington. Currently, two European countries have nuclear weapons of their own. Britain’s are assigned to NATO, and experts question whether its program could even survive without US support; France has a fully independent deterrent.
The US also maintains an arsenal of around 100 B61 gravity bombs — the smallest nukes in the US arsenal but still big enough to kill thousands if detonated over a city — in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Turkey.
In his recent speech, Macron repeated an offer he has made several times in the past to extend the protection of France’s nuclear arsenal to other European countries. In a recent speech, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said he was taking Macron’s offer seriously and that Poland “must reach for the most modern capabilities also related to nuclear weapons and modern unconventional weapons.”
The ability to rely on the US for nuclear deterrence is one reason far fewer countries have nuclear weapons today than many expected at the dawn of the nuclear age. For instance, the US convinced what was then West Germany to renounce the development of nuclear weapons of its own in exchange for protection under the US nuclear umbrella.
But if allies concluded that extended deterrence is a sham, further proliferation seems inevitable.
Russia is watching
If NATO allies their doubts about the reliability of Article 5, it seems inevitable that the alliance’s adversaries may start to doubt it as well.
The war in Ukraine has, in many ways, been the ultimate demonstration of the value of NATO: Despite billions of dollars in weapons and aid crossing Ukraine’s borders, Russia has not directly attacked Poland or any other NATO country’s territory. Hostile as he may be to NATO, Putin does appear to respect Article 5.
But for how long? “With the threats that Russia is voicing toward the Baltic states, toward Poland, toward Finland, of course we are worried,” Lithuanian Defense Minister Dovile Sakaliene said during a meeting with reporters on a recent visit to Washington. “Their military capability is growing even while waging full-scale war in Ukraine.”
Given the difficulties it’s had and is still having in Ukraine, it’s hard to imagine Russia launching an all-out invasion of another country, let alone a NATO member, in the next few years. But Russia has been carrying out more alleged “gray zone” attacks on Western countries, ranging from election interference to maritime sabotage to arson.
Responding and deterring attacks like these is already a challenge, given the difficulties involved in definitely attributing them to Russia and the fact that they fall short of the kind of armed aggression envisioned in the NATO treaty. But they could well get more aggressive if NATO’s commitment to mutual defense starts to look less ironclad.
A future, more Europe-led NATO would likely be focused more on the alliance’s original purpose of deterring Russian aggression on the continent, rather than the overseas deployments in places like Afghanistan and Libya.
For some European policymakers, there is a silver lining to Trump’s attitude Though they may not appreciate the crudeness of his approach, many concede he has a point that Europe should take greater responsibility for its own defense and make more of the decisions about its own defense priorities, rather than letting Washington set them.
But that’s going to require a new way of thinking.
“What will we do for leadership?” asked Nick Witney, a British former diplomat and EU official, now with the European Council on Foreign Relations. “For 80 years, that’s always been easily solved. We go and ask the Americans, and whatever they say, that’s what we should do.”
The past 80 years may have been an era in which Europe felt uncomfortably dependent on the US for security, but it’s also been a period of unprecedented peace on the continent. A future with less American presence in the alliance will require new ways of thinking and risk old sources of trust reemerging. Some policymakers have raised concerns about the rest of Europe relying on French nuclear weapons as a deterrent, given the real possibility France too could be governed by Russia-friendly right-wing populists in a few years
Trump’s actions and statements undoubtedly call the future of US participation in NATO into question, Witney added. But “no one quite wants to let go of the security blanket.”
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