A couple of Wall Street Journal news writers wrote in their piece of last Sunday extensively about the growing rift between the US and the rest of the NATO members. They centered their piece on President Donald Trump’s (R) drive to gain control over Greenland, but there are a number of aspects to that which the news writers have chosen to ignore, even though those aspects are central to NATO’s future and to Trump’s (and my, I add) lack of faith in it.
NATO, which was founded on a sense of a common destiny among Western democracies, has relied as much on trust and political cohesion as on its military infrastructure. The belief that the US was deeply committed to its European allies and would defend them against an attack has been the foundation of NATO’s credibility and its power to deter enemies.
That trust and commitment are now in serious doubt.
The problem, though, is that trust must work both ways. NATO members have an obligation, both by treaty and by their own voluntarily made statements of commitment to increase their defense spending to 2% of their GDP. When Trump I took office, only a couple of members other than the US were meeting those commitments; the rest weren’t even trying. Trump’s openly expressed contempt for NATO then got six more nations—count ’em—to take steps to increase their spending to meet their commitment. Then Germany, one of those six, in its very next budget, welched on its renewed commitment.
Today, after Trump II got the rest of the members, in the face of Russia’s renewed invasion of Ukraine, to agree to increase their defense spending further, to 5% of their GDP, fully a third of those members still do not—will not—meet their increased commitment. Spain actually is explicitly excused from its commitment.
Most European governments fear that a full-blown rift could lead to Trump declaring the end of NATO, which would force them to build their own military alliance without the US—a costly challenge for countries struggling with chronically low economic growth and strained public finances.
National security, national defense, isn’t cheap, except when other nations can freeload off US treasure and promises of US blood being spent. It’s made harder for nations that choose explicitly to freeload off us in order to spend that money on welfare, including welfare for millions of illegal aliens flooding across the Mediterranean Sea or up the land bridge through Turkey into Europe; on disarming their economies’ energy capacity by switching from cheap hydrocarbon- and nuclear-generated energy (France is the sole exception) to unreliable solar- and wind-sourced energy; and on paying welfare to folks who retire while young (this time, France is an especial violator).
These are nations that should have been building their own national defense capabilities all along. Had they been doing so, they would be better situated today to honor their NATO-based mutual commitments.
Europeans have for years argued that while they didn’t spend as much on arms as the US, they consistently stood by it and defended Western interests.
The sole time that NATO invoked its founding treaty’s mutual-defense clause, known as Article 5, was to support the US after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Several of them did send small forces to assist us in Afghanistan. That was all they were able to spare from their shrunken defense establishments, even against a terrorist guerilla enemy. It certainly wouldn’t have been enough to help us against a peer enemy’s attack on us.
In conjunction with that, the news writers offered this bald statistic:
In Afghanistan, Denmark incurred the highest per capita fatality rate among all NATO countries, including the US.
Was that rate, though, driven by the hostile environment in which the Danes were operating? Or was it driven by the Danish troops being inadequately trained for operating in a hostile, terrorist guerilla environment? Or was it driven by some other factor? The news writers chose to ignore the context surrounding that statistic.
Now, the administration has essentially said that past efforts don’t affect current US thinking. “Just because you did something smart 25 years ago doesn’t mean you can’t do something dumb now,” Vice President JD Vance told Fox News recently.
Well, yeah. Mutual defense isn’t a one-and-done affair, although Europe’s members seem to think a commitment to mutual defense is.
During his re-election campaign in 2024, Trump said he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to allies that don’t meet spending targets.
Actually, he didn’t encourage Russia, he just suggested he wouldn’t commit US forces to defend those nations—who already betraying their fellow members by declining to meet their own commitments to the alliance. Why should we spill our blood, burn our money defending such betrayers, was his thinking—as a prod to get them to start honoring their commitments. That led to all of NATO’s members (again, excepting Spain) agreeing to that increase to 5% of GDP in defense spending, including for NATO. Despite that agreement, though, those nations still haven’t passed budgets containing that increase.
Before a NATO summit last June, when asked if he stood by the pact, Trump replied: “Depends on your definition. There are numerous definitions of Article 5.” Last week, he wrote on Truth Social: “I DOUBT NATO WOULD BE THERE FOR US IF WE REALLY NEEDED THEM.”
How can they, with their denuded defense establishments? The rest of NATO is incapable of supporting us in a war inflicted on us by Russia or the People’s Republic of China beyond words—which is all that NATO’s Article V requires, anyway. Words might well “be there for us,” but they have nothing material, with the sole exception of France and the UK with their nuclear weapons. But would they risk themselves by using them in support of us?
Oana Lungescu, Romania’s staunchest anti-communist and erstwhile NATO spokeswoman:
Ultimately this is only damaging America’s standing in the world, and America—like Europe—needs friends and allies in this more dangerous world….”
The latter is true enough, but there are diminishing returns to supporting “friends and allies” who pay only lip service to their obligations. In the end, too, how many allies and friends do we have, really? Mostly (entirely?) what we have is a collection of nations who might be allies of convenience in a particular crisis, with those nations defining their convenience.
NATO is showing its uselessness and its utter untrustworthiness. Today, fully a third of NATO members still are not even trying to meet their defense spending commitments to NATO. This is a betrayal of their fellow members by those shirking nations, even as those shirkers expect their fellows to spend their treasure and blood defending these in the event of an attack. Further, these shirkers are betraying their own people with their conscious decision to render themselves defenseless and dependent on the generosity and blood of allies whom they’ve been betraying.
Why should the US be expected to trust an alliance to come to our aid when so many members cannot support themselves and so many members cannot be trusted in any event? At bottom, too, Europe’s NATO members never have trusted us. Germany, for example, called us liars in the 1950s when we were moving to base nuclear missiles in Germany, saying they didn’t believe us when we committed to defend Europe against a Russia Soviet Union-led Warsaw Pact invasion at the risk of nuclear attack on our homeland.
The only thing missing is a move to stand up a mutual defense arrangement including nations with a current memory of what it’s like being prostrate under Russian jackboots and the US—an arrangement with the Three Seas Initiative nations, for instance. Possibly, such an arrangement is being developed, and no one is leaking about it until it’s ready to be announced. That would be good.
