Now Is the Worst Time to Abandon NATO
After decades of over-reliance on the Untied States, European NATO members are finally investing more in their defense. But American politics still threaten the alliance’s future.
FOR THE UNITED STATES, NATO has always presented a paradox. Hastings Ismay, the first secretary general of NATO, famously quipped that the alliance’s purpose was to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” More specifically, the United States joined the major powers of Western Europe together in an unprecedented military and political alliance for three reasons: so they wouldn’t follow foreign policies inimical to America’s interests, so they wouldn’t go to war against each other for the third time in a century, and so they wouldn’t be overrun by the Soviet Union. Since the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949, the paradox has been that the United States wants its NATO allies to support their own defense, but without freelancing too much on their defense policy, or being so capable of defending themselves that they start to menace each other.
But times change, and the likelihood of war in Western Europe—even if the United States’ NATO partners build much stronger militaries—has been substantially reduced. For the past quarter century, the main problem in transatlantic relations has been that Europe wasn’t supporting itself and was too reliant on the United States for protection. Every president of the twenty-first century has encouraged the European members of NATO to spend more on defense. Now, thanks to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, NATO is more focused and united than it has been since the Cold War and European defense outlays are increasing dramatically. Yet the United States, on the cusp of achieving its decades-old goal for NATO, may be about to ruin it.
THE MOST IMPORTANT AND LONGEST-LASTING peacetime military alliance in history was formed and expanded during a period of rapidly escalating tensions between the world’s two superpowers. The North Atlantic Treaty was signed just four months before the first Soviet nuclear test and fourteen months after the Soviet-backed coup in Czechoslovakia. In the early 1950s, when NATO took on the joint military command structure it retains today, the United States was fighting a proxy war with the USSR in Korea, and the countries of Western Europe were increasingly anxious about Soviet aggression and influence.
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Less than five years ago, French President Emmanuel Macron said, “What we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO.” After Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidency, Macron argued that it was time for Europe to establish “military sovereignty,” which would make the continent less dependent on the United States for security. He said Europe was on the “edge of a precipice” and risked losing “control of our destiny” if it didn’t start thinking of itself as an independent geopolitical power. When asked about the effectiveness of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which states that NATO allies will defend a member under attack, Macron said: “I don’t know . . . what will Article 5 mean tomorrow?” He continued: “I’d argue that we should reassess the reality of what NATO is in the light of the commitment of the United States.”
Macron had good reasons for worrying that the United States was “turning its back on us.” During the 2016 campaign, Trump repeatedly described NATO as “obsolete.” This belief was dangerous enough before the invasion of Ukraine, but it now poses a grave and immediate threat to European security—especially given Trump’s chances of recapturing the White House. Trump has repeatedly expressed hostility toward NATO, attacking members for what he regards as insufficient financial contributions and insisting that the United States was “owed . . . vast sums” by allies like Germany. For months after taking office, Trump declined to affirm Article 5, and he has long insisted that the United States should only defend allies that pay their “fair share.” In a 2018 interview with Tucker Carlson, Trump wondered why the United States should defend a small country like Montenegro, which joined NATO in 2017. Officials who served in the Trump administration say he seriously considered withdrawing from NATO altogether.
In a particularly alarming indicator of what a second Trump term would look like, Trump recently said he would “encourage” the Russians to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO members that don’t spend what he regards as a sufficient amount on defense. (The White House described Trump’s comments as “appalling and unhinged.” He is “making it clear that he will abandon our NATO allies,” Biden said.)
European Council President Charles Michel has condemned Trump’s “reckless statements” about NATO and concluded that his hostility to the alliance demonstrates that Europe must “develop its strategic autonomy and invest in its defense.” German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier observed that Trump’s comments “help Russia,” while Polish Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz said, “No election campaign is an excuse for playing with the security of the alliance.” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg agreed, “Any suggestion that allies will not defend each other undermines all of our security, including that of the U.S.” One EU official recently complained: “We cannot flip a coin about our security every four years depending on this or that election, namely the U.S. presidential election.”
IT’S NO WONDER THAT EUROPEAN leaders are yet again discussing the need for security arrangements independent of the United States. For three-quarters of a century, the United States’ commitment to NATO was never in question. Now Trump has introduced doubt where there was once certainty, and it will take a long time to undo the damage he has caused. If American voters fail to keep Trump from returning to the Oval Office, the damage he’ll inflict in his second term will be irrevocable.
After four years of Trump, President Biden attempted to solidify America’s commitment to the alliance. Even before the war, Biden was focused on repairing the United States’ relationship with its European allies, and he observed that the robust support for Ukraine proves that NATO is “more united than ever.” Beyond providing direct support for Ukraine, Washington has increased aid to neighboring countries through loan guarantees and investments that will help allies replace military stockpiles that are being depleted by the war. The United States also sent tens of thousands of troops eastward to countries like Poland and Romania.
Yet despite Biden’s statements and actions, the American commitment to NATO could suddenly unravel if Trump takes office next year. Today, Trump’s desire to abandon NATO is stronger than ever. He insists, “We have to finish the process we began under my administration of fundamentally reevaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission.” One of Trump’s top national security advisers recently suggested that NATO should be a “tiered alliance,” in which members that pay up earn protection and those that don’t are cast aside. Trump’s former national security advisor, John Bolton, believes his “goal here is not to strengthen NATO, it’s to lay the groundwork to get out.”
At the end of 2023, Congress passed a bill which would theoretically prevent the president from unilaterally abandoning NATO. But presidents have withdrawn from many treaties over the years—George W. Bush exited the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, while Trump pulled out of the Open Skies Treaty with Russia in 2020. Lawsuits to prevent treaty withdrawals have been rebuffed by the courts, and any attempt to override Trump if he decides to leave NATO would likely spark a lengthy legal battle.
In the meantime, the cessation of American support for NATO would inflict a potentially mortal blow on the alliance. While Article 5 states that an attack on a single member constitutes an attack on all, there’s no mechanism in place that forces countries to come to the defense of a besieged ally. The commitment is ultimately not legal but political.
Decades of ironclad American commitments have made it clear that the United States would defend its allies in the event of an attack. This is why Biden frequently reiterates that the United States will “defend every inch of NATO territory.” The moment the president declares that this commitment no longer exists, NATO allies that have long relied on the United States would be exposed like never before. Vladimir Putin could take this opportunity to test NATO’s resolve by attacking a small member state like one of the Baltic countries and daring the rest of the alliance to countenance a direct military confrontation with Russia. If NATO were to back down in this scenario, deterrence would collapse.
NATO WAS CREATED IN AN ERA of great power conflict. While it briefly seemed like this era had come to an end in the years following the Cold War, this illusion has been cracking for many years—and it finally shattered with the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. Germany is one of the countries that was most invested in this illusion—successive German governments were convinced that the maintenance of close economic ties with Russia would reduce the likelihood of conflict and increase stability. Meanwhile, Germany tried to outsource its national defense.
Those days are over. In his Zeitenwende (“turning point”) speech on February 22, 2022, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz pledged that Germany would “defend every square meter of NATO territory together with our allies.” He called for a “major national undertaking” to “invest much more in the security of our country.” He announced troop deployments to Eastern Europe and a 100 billion-euro national defense fund. It wouldn’t be long before Germany was sending heavy armor, artillery, and other weapons to Ukraine. Scholz also acknowledged the role of institutions like NATO in maintaining peace and stability in Europe, and recommitted Germany to the principle of multilateralism:
If we want the last thirty years to be more than a historical exception, then we must do everything we can to maintain the cohesion of the European Union, the strength of NATO, to forge even closer relations with our friends, our partners and all those who share our convictions worldwide.
Now would be the worst possible time for the United States to withdraw from NATO and desert Ukraine—which Trump also intends to do. Although just 11 NATO members hit the 2 percent spending target last year, 18 are projected to do so in 2024—including Germany, which will reach the target for the first time. From Germany’s Zeitenwende to Poland doubling its defense spending (to 4 percent of GDP, which is more than the United States) over just a few years, the European commitment to NATO is strengthening. While the United States has given more total aid to Ukraine than any other country, especially in the form of weapons and munitions, many European countries have given far more as a percentage of GDP.
“Without security, everything else is nothing,” wrote Scholz in the Economist last month, emphasizing the need to “strengthen the European pillar of NATO” and counter the growing threat of Russian aggression. To illustrate “how far Europe has come” since World War II, Scholz contrasted the training exercises German armor recently conducted near Pabradė, Lithuania with the moment “Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht marched into Lithuania 83 years ago. . . . This time, German troops came in peace, to defend freedom and to deter an imperialist aggressor together with their Lithuanian allies.”
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Germany altered its constitution to drastically increase defense spending to hit the NATO target of 2 percent of GDP this year. “Our goal,” Scholz writes, “is to turn the Bundeswehr into Europe’s strongest conventional force.” This is a critical part of Germany’s Zeitenwende. There are no more illusions in Berlin about how economic interdependence with Russia will lead to security and stability. Scholz still emphasizes diplomacy, but he says Germany can no longer be “naive” about “talking simply for the sake of talking.” The threats to European security haven’t been clearer since the Cold War, and leaders like Scholz and Macron are preparing their countries—and the rest of the continent—to confront these threats.
Scholz offered some much-needed historical perspective in his essay. There was a time in living memory when German rearmament was a harbinger of world war. Now Germany’s European and American allies are eager to see Berlin drastically expand its military and take a lead role in confronting Russia. When Scholz says he wants to turn the “Bundeswehr into Europe’s strongest conventional force,” his American and European allies feel relief, not fear. We have entered an era in which the idea of war in Western Europe (between, say, Germany and France) is unthinkable. NATO was created to secure peace in Europe—an ambition that would have been difficult to fathom in the ruins of World War II—and it has succeeded beyond what its founders could have imagined.
Just as NATO was formed after the shock of World War II and in the early years of the Cold War, Europe’s Zeitenwendeis a result of a devastating war in Ukraine and a broader geopolitical realignment of democratic and authoritarian countries.
It’s difficult to overstate how dramatic the Zeitenwende was for Germany, given its postwar history of neutrality. However, Scholz described this shift as “both a challenge and an opportunity.” Now that Germany and other NATO allies have shed the post-Cold War illusion that great power conflict is a relic of Europe’s past, they’re committed to strengthening the alliance by making necessary and long-neglected investments in their militaries. This isn’t just a turning point for Germany—it’s a turning point for global security. The democratic world is finally awake to the deadly threats it faces from great authoritarian powers like Russia and China, and it’s difficult to imagine countries like Germany slipping into their old complacency for a very long time.
This is why it would be catastrophic for the United States to pull back from NATO at the very moment when its allies have demonstrated a real willingness to assume more of the burden in confronting the greatest threats to global security and stability.
Consider the effect Trump’s reelection would have on NATO’s newest members, Finland and Sweden, which would immediately confront the possibility that the alliance they joined to guard against Russian aggression was on the verge of dissolution. Imagine the reaction in the Baltic states, which would suddenly face an existential threat if Trump returns to the White House. While European defense spending is on the right trajectory, there’s no replacement for the United States’ military might. Beyond the sheer amount of resources the United States is able to provide, it also spurs other allies to increase their own contributions—such as when Germany only agreed to provide Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine when the United States sent its own M1 Abrams tanks.
The war in Ukraine has demonstrated beyond any doubt that the world has moved into a new and more dangerous era of great power competition. And Scholz is right—NATO allies have a historic opportunity to revivify the institution and prove that the democratic world won’t surrender to authoritarian aggression. American voters can either elect a president who will build on this momentum, support a fellow democracy under siege, and maintain the United States’ commitment to NATO—or a president who will abandon our allies and embolden our enemies.
While Germany and other European democracies faced a historic decision when the war began, American voters will have the course of history in their hands this November. Just as the United States helped to forge the security architecture of the postwar world in the rubble of Europe and with the Soviet threat looming, Americans have a chance to reinforce this architecture for the challenges of the twenty-first century.
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