NATO survived Trump in Ankara, but it still has its work cut out.
NATO survived Trump in Ankara, but it still has its work cut out.
N ATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte and the rest of Washington’s European and Canadian allies closed out this year’s annual NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, with a long exhale. From their perspective, the meeting wasn’t the disaster so many anticipated it to be. President Trump, for instance, didn’t announce a U.S. pullout from the alliance despite his frequent flirtations with doing so. He agreed to grant Ukraine a U.S. license so Kyiv can start producing its own Patriot missile interceptors, and he signed onto the communique reiterating that Article 5, the most important commandment in the NATO church, is alive and well.
Even so, the summitry was shaken apart by moments of Trumpian outrage. The U.S. president used his public remarks throughout the two-day event to gripe about how the United States was being treated unfairly by allies who should be champing at the bit to aid Washington any way they can. Spain, the perpetual defense laggard that refuses to abide by NATO’s own spending benchmarks, was singled out as a “terrible partner.” Trump also lit into Italy and the United Kingdom, yet again, for refusing to assist Washington’s war with Iran.
Despite those predictable grievances, Rutte’s attempts to keep Trump interested in the alliance have succeeded for the time being. But the optimal phrase here is “for the time being.” In the age of Trump, nothing is settled for long. Old disputes — like the status of Greenland— never go away, and power, not virtue signaling, is the name of the game. Incessant flattery will only get Washington’s NATO allies so far. If anyone was expecting this summit to produce permanent bonhomie between the United States and the rest of the transatlantic alliance, they were fooling themselves.
Before Trump came along, NATO was the closest thing to a sacred cow that geopolitics could conjure up. During the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, expanding NATO into Central and Eastern Europe and consolidating democracy in the former Soviet-occupied states was as important as building up the military capacity to deter Russian aggression — if not more so. Summitry took on a familiar pattern, with heads of state grasping each other’s hands with smiles on their faces, talking about the sanctity of collective defense, and issuing bland statements about the need for revisionist states to start behaving. And when intra-alliance disagreements emerged, they were dealt with behind closed doors, lest the unity and resolve NATO was seeking to project were undermined in any way.
This playbook is no longer operable. Old assumptions about NATO and America’s place in it have been thrown by the wayside, replaced with lingering questions about how committed Washington is to fighting off a still hypothetical Russian military incursion into the alliance’s eastern flank. Values and ideals no longer matter, or at least are far less significant than military capacity, leverage, money, and loyalty. Resolving intra-alliance spats in private is now considered the old way of doing business, as Trump deliberately exploits his presence in front of the cameras to pressure NATO’s members into meeting their defense spending obligations. Nobody can accuse Trump of failing in this regard; last year, NATO more than doubled its previous defense spending benchmark to 5 percent of GDP, in large measure to keep him happy. With the exception of a few laggards like Spain, Slovenia, Albania, and the politically turbulent United Kingdom, most of the alliance’s members are on their way to achieving this over the next decade.
Still, what Washington’s NATO allies don’t seem to understand is that Trump is hardly one to take the win and go home. Instead, he takes the win, sells it as confirmation that his hard-ball tactics are working, and ups the ante by making more demands on a cornucopia of issues. Whereas previous U.S. presidents viewed American leadership in NATO as a calling, Trump views it as a card to wield in order to compel allies into buying more U.S. arms and serving as force multipliers to whatever policy initiative he’s focused on that day. The strategy has served Trump in the short term. It’s no coincidence that Europe and Canada started shaking the cobwebs off their defense industries after Trump threatened to simply walk away from the alliance altogether. It’s also no coincidence that NATO suddenly became more interested in safeguarding its position in the Arctic, declaring a brand new security initiative there, after Trump harped on an outright U.S. annexation of Greenland and even began floating a U.S. military operation to achieve it.
No amount of flattery from Rutte or the Europeans will change this trend. Indeed, it’s likely to continue as long as Trump is in sitting in the Oval Office. NATO therefore has a choice: It can complain about the current predicament and hope things go back to normal in a post-Trump world, or it can put in the hard work required to reform the institution writ large. The former is a gamble; the latter is a realistic way to stay relevant into the future.
What would reform look like? To put it simply: NATO must make itself more European and less reliant on the United States. Preparations in pursuit of this goal must start immediately and the execution must be swift. While it’s highly unlikely Washington will formally withdraw from an alliance of its own creation, it’s quite plausible that future U.S. administrations will take less interest in the continent’s defense. In fact, we may already be at that point. The U.S. National Security Strategy and U.S. National Defense Strategy both prioritize the Western Hemisphere and Western Pacific, not Europe, as the regions most critical to U.S. grand strategy going forward. The White House is operationalizing this shift as we speak. In October, the Pentagon pulled some U.S. forces from Romania. In May, the Pentagon decided to withdraw about 5,000 U.S. troops from Germany and canceled the rotational deployment of long-range Tomahawk missiles there. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a six-month review of the U.S. force posture in Europe a month later, which could very well result in further reductions.
Europeanizing NATO is therefore not only a smart play but an absolute necessity going forward. Some European governments are begrudgingly acknowledging this and planning for the day when the United States is, if not no longer around, less of a visible player than it historically has been. Those plans must continue and, ideally, be accelerated. Pan-European military projects should be scaled up. European land, air and, naval forces should be given primary responsibility for the conventional defense of NATO’s eastern flank. European generals should be commanding those forces rather than Americans. And most of all, NATO’s major non-U.S. members, including Germany, France, Britain, and Poland, should spend the additional money in their defense budget on the items — long-range strike platforms, air-to-air refueling capacity, munitions, intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance — that are critical during times of war.
Trump is forcing the issue, as he should. NATO’s interests aren’t served by depending so much on a single member. Neither are America’s.