By Benn Steil
Monday, April 13, 2026
President Trump is threatening to pull the United States
out of NATO over its members’ refusal to join the U.S.-Israeli war effort
against Iran—an effort undertaken with no prior ally consultation. “Without the
United States, there is no NATO,” warned Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “An
alliance has to be mutually beneficial. It cannot be a one-way street. Let’s
hope we can fix it.
But can we fix it? NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, an
accomplished Trump whisperer, insists all will be fine. The European allies “are doing everything the
United States is asking,” he offered last Thursday, implausibly. But with
Washington’s 77-year commitment to NATO’s Article 5 collective defense
principle now subordinated to an “America First” duty to do what the president
wants, when he wants it, Europe’s least bad option may well be to go its own
way. Europe should begin building its own integrated nuclear deterrent and
unified combat capability—either inside or outside NATO—with a new
intra-European “Article 5.” Whereas an alliance without U.S. participation will
clearly be less powerful, a European grouping without a credible mutual defense
trigger would invite aggression from Russia and other hostile powers.
To be clear, leaving NATO would be a bad U.S. decision.
This is not a matter of liberal idealism or Cold War nostalgia. The only time
Article 5 has ever been invoked was by America’s NATO allies, in solidarity
with the United States after the September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacks on New
York and Washington. More importantly, NATO remains the least costly mechanism
the U.S. has for preventing the emergence of a hostile hegemon in Europe while
preserving forward military access, intelligence sharing, and political
leverage over the world’s richest and most advanced states. But the challenge
of sustaining NATO extends well beyond managing Trump.
The president’s repeated claims that the European Union
was created to “screw the U.S. on trade” are baseless, but it is important
to understand NATO’s role in the development of the union—a union that has long
aspired to geopolitical power without a commensurate homegrown military
foundation. By popular account, NATO’s creation was a U.S. initiative in the
wake of World War II—the centerpiece of a new grand strategy of “containing”
the Soviet Union. Yet George Kennan, containment’s earliest architect at the
State Department, opposed the creation of a military alliance. He sought
instead to make a bold West European reconstruction program the heart of his
security concept.
It was, in fact, France, Britain, Belgium, and the
Netherlands that were the driving forces behind a transatlantic military
alliance. Their argument was that the Marshall Plan’s blueprint for integrating
Europe’s economies—which tied their security to revived German production of
coal, steel, and industrial goods—was dangerous without American guarantees
against both German and Russian aggression. Although the Truman administration
launched the Marshall Plan as an alternative to a continued U.S.
military presence in Europe, it ended up expanding and entrenching one. NATO
became the military guarantor of reconstruction, and it has remained, decade
after decade, the well-armed watchman for the ongoing business of European
integration. American frustration with bearing the greater part of the
associated cost predates Trump’s first term, having begun with the Eisenhower administration.
Today’s crisis in NATO is not just a product of Trump’s
politics—it reflects deeper structural tensions embedded in the alliance’s
post-Cold War evolution. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991,
the Clinton administration faced a hugely consequential decision: whether to
keep NATO and its composition as it was, to disband the alliance (like the
Warsaw Pact), to replace it with a body that included Russia, or to expand
it—perhaps up to Russia’s borders. Counterfactuals have limits, but post-Cold
War history unfolded largely as Kennan—opining well into his 90s—warned it
would under Clinton’s chosen option: expansion.
Clinton was a consummate political salesman. Yet it
proved impossible simultaneously to convince East Europeans that NATO would
protect them from Russia, to convince the Russians that expansion had nothing
to do with them, and to convince Americans that expansion would be cheap—since
NATO had no enemy.
In 1997, Kennan warned that “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error
of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.” He predicted it would
“inflame nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian
opinion,” “have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy,”
“restore the atmosphere of cold war to East-West relations,” and “impel Russian
foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.” Compare these
predictions with those of NATO expansion’s most prominent advocate in the State
Department. “[Y]ears from now,” Richard Holbrooke wrote in 1998, “people will look back at
the debate and wonder what all the fuss was about. They will notice that
nothing has changed in Russia’s relationship with the West.” Holbrooke’s
confidence was profoundly misplaced.
NATO’s membership has doubled since 1999, from 16 to 32.
There are two standard defenses of the enlargement. One is that it was intended
only to stabilize Eastern Europe politically. NATO never had plans, or even the
capacity, to invade Russia, and so its expansion was never more than a pretext
for Russian aggression. But this argument misses the point. The issue was never
invasion, but the behavior of border states acting more confrontationally under
the assumption of automatic U.S. backing. In 2015, for example, Turkey shot
down a Russian fighter jet that had crossed briefly into its airspace from
Syria, where it was bombing opponents of the Assad regime. Turkey could claim
self-defense and lack of territorial ambition, but it also acted knowing it had
a call on Article 5 support. “Turkish airspace … is NATO airspace,” Ankara
declared afterward. Russia took notice. “Turkey has not set itself up” as the
actor, “but the North Atlantic alliance as a whole,” observed then-Prime
Minister Dmitry Medvedev. “This is extremely irresponsible.” It is difficult,
if not impossible, to imagine Turkey taking such radical action absent the
belief that Washington had its back.
The second defense of expansion is that, absent forward
alliance guarantees, Russia would be free to overrun its neighbors. But this
rests on a highly compressed view of how Russian power is actually exercised.
Russian interventions have not taken the form of sudden mass invasions; they
have entailed political crises, force mobilizations, and escalating signals
that unfold over weeks or months. The United States possesses unmatched
intelligence capabilities and global power-projection forces. It does not require
permanent alliance expansion to detect emerging threats or to respond
decisively once they become clear.
Seen this way, the choice facing the United States in the
1990s was not between expansion and insecurity, but between competing models of
post-Cold War order—one aiming at consolidating victory, the other at advancing
the mothballed “One World” policy vison developed under Franklin Roosevelt.
Neither model was without risk, but it cannot be ignored that the choice of the
former was a factor in the creation of dangerous Russian counter-alliances in
Asia and the Middle East.
A final problem with the NATO status quo is that too few
Americans understand what their country’s membership entails. A 2024 Pew study found that only 30 percent of Americans could
correctly identify elementary facts about NATO’s membership and purpose, while
31 percent could not answer any basic questions correctly. This ignorance
creates political constraints for any president seeking to justify why the
United States must fight to defend, say, Latvia or Montenegro.
Trump’s threats to withdraw from NATO are rash and
misguided. Nonetheless, the U.S. desire to shift resources away from European
defense is longstanding and, given mounting pressures in the Middle East and
Asia, likely to intensify. It is therefore high time for Europe to extend its
political and economic union into a credible military one.
No comments:
Post a Comment