NATO Could Effectively Die This June
Trump's negotiations and German elections may augur the end of collective security as we've known it.
Libertarians, progressives, and national conservatives who've been pining for a de-Americanization of European military security are experiencing their most newsworthy week on that front in at least three decades.
The Trump administration's ongoing negotiations and public messaging around a potential Russia-Ukraine peace deal, along with the weekend electoral victory of Germany's Christian Democratic Union (CDU), have led to the bluntest talk since April 1993 about a future without Washington's mutual defense commitments to the easternmost members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
"My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the U.S.A.," presumptive German chancellor Friedrich Merz said just after his long-prominent CDU—along with its Bavaria-only partner, the Christian Social Union—beat out the White House-favored Alternative for Germany* (AfD), 28.6 percent to 20.8 percent. "I never thought I would have to say something like this….But after [President] Donald Trump's statements last week at the latest, it is clear that the Americans—at least this part of the Americans, this administration—are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe."
Trump's recent statements and actions have included blaming NATO expansion for Russia's invasion of Ukraine ("That's probably the reason the whole thing started," he said Wednesday), rejecting a G7 statement criticizing Russia as the "aggressor," joining a rogue's gallery of international authoritarians in voting against a United Nations resolution condemning Russia and supporting Ukraine's territorial integrity, telling Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Zelensky, "You should have never started it," and browbeating Kyiv into an agreement to exploit mineral rights. In advance of serious ceasefire negotiations, Washington has already floated Russian sanctions relief and diplomatic normalization while ruling out U.S. peacekeeping troops and Ukrainian NATO membership.
Vice President J.D. Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fanned out to European capitals this month delivering what Hegseth characterized as a "stark" message to America's treaty allies: "Now is the time to invest [in defense], because you can't make an assumption that America's presence will last forever."
Rhetorically, anyway, the message appears to have sunk in. Prior to each embarking to Washington this week for Ukraine-focused meetings with Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced significant ramp-ups in defense spending—from 2 percent to 5 percent (conditionally) in Macron's case, and from 2 percent to 2.5 percent up toward 3 percent in Starmer's.
"[The] transatlantic relationship," former NATO secretary-general (2009-2014) Anders Fogh Rasmussen wrote in The Economist this week, "is crumbling before our eyes….After 80 years of American-backed security, we Europeans must now shoulder the burden of securing peace on our own continent."
That realization has come three years—and three decades—too late. Like domestic neoconservatives who didn't understand why we couldn't just keep troops in Iraq until the 22nd century, European policymakers have long acted as if American money, weaponry, and public sentiment would never run out. This has allowed them to spend less money on defense, and more time criticizing Washington leadership from the sidelines.
"I'm…pleased," Trump said at a joint press conference with the French leader this week, "that President Macron agrees that the cost and burden of securing the peace must be borne by the nations of Europe, not alone by the United States. And Europe must take that central role in ensuring long-term security of Ukraine."
But the details of this aspirational burden-shifting are filled with more land mines than Ukraine's farmland, beginning with the three-headed beast of putative policy deciders (France, Germany, and the U.K.) that make the trolls in The Hobbit look cooperative by comparison.
That troika of former combatants is a main reason why NATO persisted and then expanded after the end of the Cold War. Prior to Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the last time the European continent saw widespread bloodshed was the collapse and resulting ethnic/separatist wars of former Yugoslavia, to which London/Paris/Bonn had diametrically opposing approaches from one another. Roughly, France wanted to keep the old country together, Germany sped toward recognition of breakaway Slovenia and Croatia, and the U.K. pushed for peacekeeping troops; meanwhile, tens of thousands were killed, including a shocking number of unarmed civilians.
The internecine carnage only ceased after aggressive U.S. military and diplomatic intervention, leading many—including Central European leaders who had initially sought a security feature absent from both Moscow and Washington—to conclude that America post-Cold War was, in Madeline Albright's fateful words, the "indispensable nation."
So are the European Union's three pillars ready to assume some real-world responsibility? Don't count your chickens yet.
Macron, reinforcing the long tradition of French exceptionalism within NATO, has for years been pushing for a Gallic-led European successor bloc to the transatlantic alliance's critical function as a security guarantor. Until very recently, Germany and England have balked, due to a mixture of Franco-wariness and a desire to nurture the special relationships with Washington. Meanwhile, the French president has mastered the art of simultaneously talking tough while always managing to not spend overly significant money and manpower on European defense, all while both flattering Trump and trying to play him.
In his visit to Washington this week, Macron, out of one side of his mouth, continuously stressed European-provided "security guarantees" for Ukraine, while, out of the other, he spoke of American "solidarity" with those guarantees in such a way that would ensure French troops wouldn't have to actually enforce much of anything:
We want peace swiftly, but we don't want an agreement that is weak. The fact that there are Europeans that are ready to engage to provide for these security guarantees, and now there's a clear American message that the U.S. as an ally is ready to provide that solidarity for that approach. That's a turning point in my view.
Today when we talk about troops, we're talking about sending them in after we've negotiated a lasting peace. And once we have that solid lasting peace, that's part of an agreement signed by Ukraine, signed by Russia and for which we will provide the guarantees.
[W]e've worked with our militaries not to go to the front lines, not to go into occupied territories, but as a show of support to show that we have a negotiated peace signed by both sides and that is a peace we will preserve.
So, these would be peaceful deployments of troops, not for combat. These would be deployments of an assurance force, they would be limited, but they show solidarity.
The question is whether—or in what form the US will contribute….We need to answer this call for Europeans to be more engaged and Americans will be there still in solidarity.
Then there is the not-insignificant problem of an eight-decade buildup of American-led dominance on strategy, military technology, and nuclear weapons.
"Europe must…ensure it can act independently of America. This will require significant investments in capabilities such as air [defense], refuelling and other logistics that sustain military operations—and for which Europe is almost entirely reliant on America," Rasmussen wrote. "Roughly 80% of its [defense] procurement is from outside Europe—primarily from the United States. Europe's [defense] companies, spread across different countries and reliant on small national orders, lack the scale required to compete with their American counterparts. As a result, the continent produces less of what it needs—often at a greater cost. This must change quickly."
Depending on Trump's negotiations with Russia, those changes could happen more quickly than people think. Having effectively granted Moscow a veto over its independent neighbors seeking to join the only multinational organization that has thus far been able to provide the security guarantee of a mutual defense pact, the president could conceivably walk back from NATO's Article 5 assurances of defending members from attack, which is already sending tremors across the Baltics and other Russia-bordering nations. (On Thursday, Trump said of Article 5, "I support it….I don't think we're going to have any reason for it.")
Germany's Merz, for one, is talking as if Article 5 is indeed dead.
"I am very curious to see how we are heading toward the NATO summit at the end of June," Merz said after the election. "Whether we will still be talking about NATO in its current form, or whether we will have to establish an independent European defense capability much more quickly."
- CORRECTION: Originally misstated as "Alliance for Democracy."
