NATO | Towards a more European alliance
For more than seven decades, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) has been the cornerstone of Western security architecture. Founded in 1949 as a bulwark
For more than seven decades, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) has been the cornerstone of Western security architecture. Founded in 1949 as a bulwark against Soviet expansion into capitalist Europe, the 32-member military alliance outlived its original purpose by morphing into a vehicle for American power projection not just in Europe but across the globe. In the post-Cold War era, challenges to NATO have come from within and without. The most obvious external threat has been Russia, which sought to check its continued eastward expansion by invading Ukraine. Today, the Russia-Ukraine war, in its fifth year, remains NATO’s foremost priority in the context of its foundational mandate of European security. The threat from within, however, has been more insidious. It can be summed up in three words: the Trump Presidency. Both in his first and current term, President Donald Trump has questioned NATO’s utility for the U.S., and even threatened to exit the alliance. He believes that while NATO’s capabilities, funds, leadership and infrastructure were overwhelmingly American, the U.S. gets out of the alliance far less than it puts into it, in contrast to its European allies, who got to reap its benefits while paying a fraction of the costs. In his deal-centric thinking, NATO seemed like a bad deal for the US. Trump’s simmering resentment appeared to reach a boiling point in April, when his NATO allies ignored his call to join the U.S. in its war of choice against Iran. Notably, Spain and the U.K. (initially) refused access to their military bases for U.S. warplanes, while France refused over-flight rights. Mr. Trump lashed out, calling NATO a “paper tiger” without the U.S. He saw it as NATO’s betrayal of the U.S., stating: “We’ve been there automatically, including Ukraine. Ukraine wasn’t our problem. It was a test, and we were there for them, and we would always have been there for them.
They weren’t there for us.” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio went further: “If NATO is just about us defending Europe if they’re attacked but then denying us basing rights when we need them, that’s not a very good arrangement. That’s a hard one to stay engaged in and say this is good for the United States. So all of that is going to have to be re-examined.” U.S. drawdown This was followed, in June, by a New York Times story based on a leaked communication, which laid out plans for a significant drawdown of U.S. commitments in NATO’s Europe operations. According to the report, the Trump administration planned to “pull a third of the fighter jets it provides NATO for Europe”, along with “reallocating a missile-launching submarine and an aircraft carrier, along with several warships”. These developments set alarm bells ringing in Europe’s strategic corridors, as they seemed to erode the lynchpin of their collective security — the pledge of mutual defence under Article 5. Could they still rely on the U.S. to rescue them in the face of an attack? The U.S. has also scaled down its assistance to the Ukraine war effort, making European allies the principal financier. At the same time, Mr. Trump has been pushing NATO’s European members to spend 5% of their GDP on defence (3.5% on core military requirements plus 1.5% on critical infrastructure). But only five of NATO’s 32 members are on track to meet this target in 2026. Other sources of intra-NATO tensions include Mr. Trump’s obsession with annexing Greenland, a sovereign territory of fellow NATO member Denmark. Mr. Trump also feels frustrated that European security considerations are coming in the way of his developing a more congenial relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Tensions on this front came to the fore in early 2025 when he tried to broker an end to the Ukraine war by directly speaking to Mr. Putin.
The BriefWire