President Donald Trump may have made NATO, the alliance that has been the bedrock of Western security strategy for nearly 80 years, irrelevant.
Trump has made it clear he’s not a NATO fan. He’s backed off his first-term threats to leave the alliance, but has continued his endless complaints that other countries don’t contribute enough to it financially.
More importantly, however, he has called into question whether the US would follow its obligations under NATO’s founding treaty, especially Article 5, which requires members to treat an attack on any member as an attack on them all, and to come to the military aid of any attacked member.
Trump sowed seeds of doubt about whether the US would come to the aid of European nations several times during his 2020 campaign, and has continued to do so in his second term, recently saying 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.”
(Of course, Europe did come to the US’ defense the one and only time Article 5 was ever invoked, after the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Soldiers from over a dozen NATO countries died in the war in Afghanistan that followed.)
Ivo Daalder, who served as US ambassador to NATO during the Obama administration, told me Trump’s statements have “weakened the confidence that allies feel to the point that allies are no longer convinced the United States is committed to Article 5.”
European nations have been pretty clear they’re worried about the US not holding up its end of the NATO deal, and have been scrambling to organize and amp up their military capacities of late.
The trouble is, NATO isn’t just about defense; it’s about creating a deterrent, of making members’ enemies too scared of the alliance’s collective might to launch any attacks in the first place. And Trump’s rhetoric may lead NATO’s enemies to doubt it’s a real alliance to the extent that they are willing to start new, avoidable wars.
So far, Russia — NATO’s chief foe — does seem to still believe in Article 5: Despite billions of dollars in NATO members’ aid crossing Ukraine’s borders, Russia has not directly attacked any NATO country’s territory. But how long will that caution last?
Given the difficulties Russia has had (and is still having) in Ukraine, it’s hard to imagine it launching an all-out invasion of a NATO member. 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. And that’s the real danger of Trump’s ambivalence towards NATO.
