Not since Yalta has Russia received a greater gift that Trump’s weakening of NATO. So poor Mark Rutte, the obsequious secretary general, rushed to Washington to lick a bit more spittle. It is madness.
Walking away from the World Health Organization after the greatest pandemic in memory and ripping up global trade were foolish. Undermining the Dept. of Education and the Federal Emergency Management Authority is reckless. Blocking USAID was cruel. But when it comes to crimes against America, President Trump’s threats to bolt NATO are the winner.
Trump’s threats had NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte bolting to Washington this week in emergency mode. Rutte described the closed-door White House meeting Wednesday as “frank” — and the alliance clearly remains in crisis as Trump fumes over the Europeans’ refusal to join the now-paused war against Iran.
There are reports that Trump wants to pull US troops out of some NATO countries (Spain, with its leftist government, may attract special scrutiny) — which in theory is his right even if bolting the alliance may not be as simple as he may think.
Trump and his aides clearly believe that the alliance was tested in this war, and failed the test. Not crazy, as Iran did block the Strait of Hormuz, harming the entire world’s economy. NATO’s members feel that they were not consulted and had no obligation to follow America’s lead. But Trump has been bristling at NATO for years, well before the Iran war, and in January he threatened to invade Greenland, which would have been war against member country Denmark.
So it is no small feat for Rutte to keep things from falling apart further. Luckily, the former Dutch prime minister, who once agreed to call Trump “daddy,” is considered an expert handler of the combustible president.
Trump’s antipathy to the alliance is madness. He is openly questioning the alliance that makes American power projection possible in the widest sense, far wider than Iran – a colossal strategic illiteracy.
Let’s start with the basics — what NATO is and what Trump gets wrong — and work up to the excruciating cost of Trump’s confoundingly foolish posture.
NATO is not the charity that Trump has convinced the most gullible of our citizens that it is. NATO is rather an excellent bargain for the United States. For a tiny fraction of its defense budget, America gets something no rival can replicate: a network of bases, partners, intelligence sharing, and interoperability across Europe — the most economically and militarily capable collection of democracies on Earth.
The US gets forward positioning, logistical depth, and allies who multiply its power. That is why NATO has endured for more than seven decades. It is one of the most successful strategic investments in modern history – a system designed to prevent great-power war, deter adversaries, and extend American influence without direct conquest.
This is the infrastructure of global leadership – the echo of a time when we wanted it and also thought it would do good for humanity, not just for America’s ability to grab assets.
The oft-repeated claim that the United States “pays for NATO” is simply false. Washington contributes roughly 16 percent of NATO’s common budget — amounting to less than 0.1 percent of America’s defense spending. What it does spend on its military more broadly reflects its status as a global superpower (and, indeed, a country that even before World War II sought to dominate the Americas).
When Trump talks about NATO’s “cost,” he relies on a simple sleight of hand. He points to the roughly $1.2 trillion that NATO countries spend on their militaries and treats it as if that money is being paid into NATO itself—as if the United States, which indeed accounts for about two-thirds of the figure, is footing some vast alliance bill. It isn’t.
NATO’s actual shared budget—the only money countries collectively contribute to the alliance—is about $4 billion a year. The vastly larger figure is what each country spends on its own military, under its own command, for its own purposes. The United States would spend the overwhelming majority of the over $800 billion defense budget whether NATO existed or not, because it is a global superpower. NATO just helps organize and augment that.
Meanwhile, US defense firms depend heavily on European procurement and joint production related to NATO modernization, anchoring the US defense industry. European arms imports surged in 2020–24, that more than half of Europe’s arms imports in that period came from the United States, and that US global export share rose to 43 percent.
In the broader sense, transatlantic trade reached $2 trillion in 2024, making it the largest and most integrated economic relationship in the world, supporting American jobs and markets. Europe – whose nations are the bulk of NATO – is in general the largest source of inward flows into the American economy, with transatlantic investment exceeding $5 trillion and supporting more than 16 million jobs on both sides of the Atlantic.
Trump’s dangerous posture has been to denigrate the allies, seeming to encourage Russia to attack members who don’t meet spending targets, and now openly musing about a pullout from the alliance.
The current confrontation with Iran does not expose NATO’s weakness, as Trump suggests, but rather his basic misunderstanding of what NATO is. The alliance is not a coalition for wars of choice but a defensive pact whose Article V says an attack on one would be viewed as an attack on all. The United States was not attacked but rather initiated military action – and there is no more obligation for allies to join such a campaign than for America to join a war started by Romania. I would have liked to see European nations join the war – but I am aware that Trump has been insulting and demeaning them for over a year, and did not consult with them prior to the Feb. 28 attack.
Trump now is tweeting that the alliance is a “paper tiger” – and he has told an interviewer that “Putin knows it.” Well, if Putin thinks that of NATO, it is because Trump has called it “obsolete” – and in for long, confounding weeks in January refused to rule out force against an alliance member, Denmark, in his desire to seize Greenland. Europeans, as I know from attending numerous NATO-themed conferences this year, are enraged, and wondering if the United States can even be trusted again.
America once had huge stores of goodwill around the world. It still has that in Israel and in parts of the Gulf – but even in those places, not so much among thinking people who understand how unserious Trump is. The goodwill has been squandered among every other ally. To be indifferent to this is to suggest that goodwill counts for nothing.
Trump probably actually thinks that. In his worldview, alliances are not enduring commitments but temporary arrangements, subordinate to raw power. Everything is always negotiable and little attaches to values.
But that is not how NATO works and is the opposite of why it exists. The alliance was built to replace the law of the jungle with a system of mutual defense among democracies. It has succeeded. For more than 70 years, it has helped prevent major war in Europe, deter authoritarian expansion, and anchor a broader system of stability and prosperity.
Dismantling it — or even treating it as disposable —does not make America stronger. It accelerates a shift toward a more chaotic world, where power is exercised without constraint, alliances are fleeting, and everyone is alone.
Luckily, there is also a practical reality that Trump appears to ignore. Leaving NATO is not something a president can simply decide on a whim. The treaty allows for withdrawal with one year’s notice. But in the United States, Congress has moved to restrict a president’s ability to exit without legislative approval. Any unilateral attempt would likely trigger a constitutional clash. Beyond that, NATO is an embedded system of bases, command structures, and integrated planning that would take years to unwind. A wiser successor – almost every imaginable successor – would cancel a plan so idiotic.
Whatever Trump does, the rest of the alliance will probably keep its powder dry, waiting for the nightmare to end. Also, the Europeans are clearly taking steps to wean themselves off any dependence on the United States. Their defense spending has vastly increased in recent years. They have taken up the task of helping Ukraine, replacing the aid that Trump has yanked, because he basically supports Putin in the war.
Even when Trump is gone, this betrayal — that fact that it was even possible, and Americans did not take to the streets — will be hard to erase.
So Trump can weaken NATO for sure, and has, by behaving as he has. This makes war against America more likely. This makes America weaker. This will not save money, and it is making the rest of the world think America has lost its mind.
As for Putin, not since Stalin was basically handed Eastern Europe in the wake of World War II has a leader in Moscow been handed a greater gift. China’s Xi Jinping is certainly laughing with pleasure as well. This sordid, ridiculous crisis is like a conspiracy by the White House against the United States.
