Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, is a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center and host of the weekly podcast “World Review with Ivo Daalder.” He writes POLITICO’s From Across the Pond column.
Can NATO be saved? I’ve been asked this question with increasing frequency since U.S. President Donald Trump began repeatedly denigrating the alliance, and then threatening to withdraw from it altogether.
My answer? Yes. But not the same NATO we’ve come to know over the last 77 years. To survive the onslaught of U.S. criticism, a very different alliance will need to emerge — and soon.
Some of the U.S. president’s hostility was to be expected. Trump has been disparaging U.S. security alliances for decades, dating all the way back to his famous Playboy interview in 1990, when he called on allies to pay the U.S. for the security it was providing. As a real-estate mogul, Trump felt the burden of having allies outweighed the benefits, and that has remained his view as president.
In 2017, he entered the White House declaring NATO “obsolete.” More recently, he’s called it a “paper tiger,” “useless,” and with NATO allies now refusing to join his attack on Iran — and some even denying the U.S. military access to their airspace and bases — the president has gone even further.
For Trump, the Iran war was a test for NATO, and it failed. “We will remember,” he said, insisting that “we’ll come to their rescue but they will never come to ours.” And when asked whether he would consider withdrawing from the alliance earlier this month, he said it was “beyond reconsideration.”
Still, commentators assume Trump cannot make good on this threat without congressional authorization. Indeed, a 2023 law co-sponsored by then-Senator and current Secretary of State Marco Rubio prohibits the president from withdrawing from NATO without winning a two-thirds vote in the Senate or a law passed by Congress. Neither is likely to happen.
However, the constitutionality of that law is questionable. Presidents have withdrawn from treaties before — including George W. Bush from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 and Trump himself from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019. And if Congress sued the president were he to withdraw from NATO, it’s highly unlikely the Supreme Court would rule against him in the exercise of his executive authority.
Plus, even without a formal withdrawal, there are many actions Trump can take to undermine NATO from within.
For one, his many negative statements — including false accusations that NATO allies would never come to America’s defense, when all of them did so at great cost and sacrifice after 9/11 — already call his commitment to collective defense into question.
In addition, he could order to reduce troops and capabilities deployed in Europe, remove the U.S. military from the NATO command structure — including the highest post, which a U.S. officer has occupied ever since Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower first took command in 1950 — and refuse to participate in NATO deliberations, which would effectively halt any and all decisions that require allied consensus.
As for Article 5, which declares that allies shall regard an armed attack against one of them “as an armed attack against all,” that same article also makes clear that it is up to each ally “to take such action as it deems necessary.” Simply sending helmets or night-vision goggles fits within that literal definition.
In other words, there are many ways to erode NATO — or at least U.S. commitment to collective defense. That is the reality staring America’s allies in the face.
They’ve tried to help Trump understand why NATO matters — not only for them but for the U.S. too. They’ve tried through flattery, increased spending, frequent calls and visits… None of it has worked.
That means allies now have a clear set of choices: First, they can try to wait out Trump in the hopes that the next president will reassert U.S. leadership of and commitment to NATO. It worked during his first term, but it’s unclear if it would work again. Something fundamental has been broken, and European trust in America is part of that.
The second option is opting for self-reliance and creating a truly European defense and deterrence posture outside of NATO to ensure strategic independence from the U.S. But that would be a fool’s errand. No existing or new purely European structure will have the operational, logistical or institutional know-how to organize a collective defense effort.
Which leaves the third option: NATO — the alliance that has guided Europe’s collective defense effort since 1950 — but as I said, a very different NATO.
The alliance that has evolved over the past 75 years is not only U.S.-led, it is U.S.-centered. America’s military, intelligence and diplomatic contribution is the skeletal system that has kept its body upright and ready to go.
Replacing that U.S. core will not be easy. But it’s not impossible.
Europe and Canada have the collective resources, military experience, productive capacity, technical wherewithal and, increasingly, the political determination necessary to replace the U.S. at the core of the alliance system.
NATO countries have committed to increase their defense spending close to Cold War levels. They’re opting for different forms of conscription to raise force levels, and they’re accelerating defense production at a rate unseen for four decades. While they’re behind the U.S. in innovation and technology, they are catching up, not least through cooperative development with Ukrainian firms, which have outpaced defense innovation and production across the globe.
They’ve also embarked on cooperative ventures outside of but complementary to NATO. Think of the U.K.-led Joint Expeditionary Force, the EU-funded Security Action for Europe program, which encourages the joint procurement of European-made equipment, and France’s decision to engage in bilateral discussions on extending its nuclear deterrent to European allies.
What NATO allies need now is time to turn their determination and resources into actual military capabilities. The problem is, that kind of time is measured in years — perhaps five or more — not months. Moreover, the speed of a successful transformation will be determined by the degree of U.S. cooperation. More cooperation means more rapid change, and vice versa.
Nonetheless, a more European NATO is long overdue. It’s unfortunate that it took the first anti-NATO U.S. president to bring about this transformation. But in the end, both Europe and NATO will be better for it.
