Rest in peace the Atlantic Alliance: created by America’s Greatest Generation but undone by one of its worst

When Donald Trump was first elected President of the United States in 2016, the NATO ambassadors sitting in the North Atlantic Council sensed they were in for a rough ride. The US ambassador at the time, Doug Lute, was dispatched to Washington to sound out the Trump camp on what their national security strategy and priorities for NATO would be. His findings were not encouraging. Nor were they surprising. On the campaign trail, candidate Trump had made clear his distaste for foreign entanglements, for feckless European allies unwilling to pay for their own defence and for NATO, which committed the US to provide security for Europe while getting, in Trump’s view, little or nothing in return. Despite Article 5 of the NATO Treaty obliging all 32 allies to come to each other’s defence in cases of armed aggression, Trump threatened to withdraw that guarantee from allies he believed were delinquent in meeting their NATO spending and capability targets. He made no secret of his boredom and impatience with NATO diplomacy and its practice of give and take in consultations and consensus building; and he clearly was unenthusiastic about supporting or leading an alliance configured against his friend and fellow authoritarian in Moscow, Vladimir Putin, with whom the President was hoping to do lucrative trade and energy deals. NATO had to wait four years until Democrat Joe Biden succeeded Trump in the White House before the US deployed 70,000 additional troops in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and incursions into the Ukrainian Donbas.

Yet 10 years ago as Trump’s first term got underway, there was anxiety but no panic. Trump was surrounded by the “adults in the room” a number of old-timer generals and senior diplomats who knew their way around the international security scene and appreciated the value of NATO. Surely they would keep Trump in check and over time convince him to take a less confrontational and more constructive approach towards the European allies?

NATO moreover was not a fossilised institution incapable of reform. It had demonstrated at numerous periods during the seven decades of its existence that it could adapt to changing circumstances: it had changed its military strategy to be less reliant on nuclear weapons, had pursued arms control and detente with the Soviet Union, had formed security partnerships with former Communist adversaries and countries as far afield as the Asia-Pacific, and it had gone “out-of-area” to intervene in the Western Balkans, Afghanistan and Libya, combat piracy in the Gulf of Aden as well as establishing a training mission in Iraq.

Indeed, the only time that the alliance invoked its core treaty provision, Article 5, was to come to the defence of the US after the 9/11 terrorist attacks against New York and Washington, and ultimately to send European troops to fight alongside their American ally in Afghanistan. At that time, the European allies offered to send forces to Afghanistan immediately to support the US response, but it was US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, who casually dismissed the offer with the famous retort that “it was the mission that determines the coalition and not the other way round”.

In more recent times, NATO has created new structures and expertise to handle emerging security challenges such as terrorism, cyber-attacks, energy supplies, disruptive technologies and even the security implications of climate change. Hybrid warfare, or state interference below the Article Five threshold of actual military attack, has become a major activity as well, and a spur for NATO to cooperate more with other institutions, notably the European Union. The alliance has been written off, proclaimed “brain dead” by President Macron, and criticised as either too powerful or too weak by politicians of all stripes and colours throughout its history. Indeed, the first book entitled “The End of the Alliance” (by the US academic, Ronald Steel) appeared as far back as 1962.

Yet NATO has proved to be resilient and capable of moving with the times. If Trump was demanding what many previous US Presidents had also wanted, namely a more balanced alliance with the Europeans contributing more to their own defence and becoming less reliant on American help, that struck many European allies as a reasonable, and in truth unavoidable, task, even if they did not appreciate the language of threats and ultimatums in which Trump wrapped it. If defence budgets and burden-sharing were the principal reasons why Trump didn’t like NATO, then perhaps by addressing these traditional US concerns head on, European allies would make Trump warm to the alliance and progressively acknowledge and appreciate its value.

NATO has always been based on a “transatlantic bargain” whereby the US and Europe believe they have a basic understanding of what each side expects of the other. By helping America to fight the global war on terror and taking over more of the day-to-day conventional defence of Europe (buying billions worth of US weapons and military hardware in the process), the Allies felt with reason that they were keeping up their end of the bargain. Albeit at the last minute and with some creative accounting, all 32 allies met by the deadline in 2024 the NATO Defence Investment Pledge to spend a minimum of 2% of their GDP on defence that they made at the Alliance’s Wales summit in 2014. After Trump returned to the White House in 2025, the Allies agreed at their summit in The Hague to increase this commitment to 3.5% of GDP by 2035 with a further 1.5% to invest in military related infrastructure. Some allies in Eastern Europe are already close to this target. The Europeans have also strengthened their military presence on the alliance’s eastern borders by deploying multinational battalions, which some, like Germany in Lithuania, are turning into armoured brigades. They have demonstrated through exercises their capability to reinforce each other over thousands of kilometres at short notice even without US logistical support.

As the US has pulled back from numerous NATO command positions, the Europeans have stepped up to replace them. The UK is taking over the Joint Forces Command, Atlantic in Norfolk, Virginia, and Italy the Joint Forces Command, Mediterranean headquartered in Naples. The US Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth (who styles himself Secretary of War as if war were somehow a goal that governments should actively pursue) has pushed the Europeans to provide for their own conventional defence by 2030. The additional funds that European allies are now investing in modernising their armed forces, buying new aircraft, tanks and missiles, and in ramping up their armaments production and stockpiles are being complemented by the re-introduction of conscription (now implemented in 11 European countries), forms of voluntary national service and strong border defences against aircraft, drones and land incursions. Enhanced maritime protection of critical undersea infrastructure and the monitoring of Russian intelligence gathering in the Baltic, North Sea and Mediterranean form part of this effort.

Above all, Europe has taken over nearly 100% of the financial and military assistance to Ukraine. The US has (until the Iran war at least) sold weapons like Patriot missile defence interceptors to European countries, which have then transferred them on to Kyiv. It is NATO that has managed these weapons transfers, together with the spare parts and training of the Ukrainian operators, by setting up its PURL (Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List) coordination unit at a US base at Wiesbaden in Germany. NATO HQ in Brussels is the venue for the meetings of defence ministers in the Ukraine Defence Contact Group, which meets with the Ukrainian defence minister and armed forces chiefs to match Ukraine’s urgent needs with available supplies. This group is currently chaired by the UK and Germany, as the Pentagon stepped down from this role after the Trump administration took office.

Although Trump often likes to call his European allies “delinquent”, it is in fact the US that has become the delinquent factor in NATO and causing far more damage than the alleged failings of any of the other 31 allies. One reason is the President’s inability to send a consistent message to his allies. One day he expresses satisfaction that he has “saved” NATO and made it stronger by forcing the Europeans (and Canada) to significantly increase their defence spending. Yet on other occasions, and at a moment when these new investments are being to show results in terms of higher NATO response levels and better-maintained equipment, Trump dismisses the alliance as a “paper tiger” and adds that “Putin knows this”. At the last NATO summit in The Hague, Trump reassured allies of the US commitment to NATO’s collective defence. Yet just months later he was once again expressing doubts about the firmness of this commitment. He invited Russia to attack NATO allies that were not spending enough on defence, in his view, and has said that Washington will only come to the aid of those allies whom he deems to be sufficiently loyal and accommodating.

Many times over, Trump has presented his usual caricatural and even false vision of NATO in which the US does everything for the Europeans, but the Europeans never lift a finger to help the US (“they were tested and they failed “). When reminded of the thousands of European troops sent to Afghanistan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks (a NATO led mission) to help the US, Trump played light with the European death toll. He accused European forces of ducking the fight by hiding in the back lines – a claim hardly borne out by the European casualty figures, which were the proportional equivalent of those of the US. Moreover, it was the US that finally insisted on withdrawing from Afghanistan, obliging the European allies to follow suit.

Yet the biggest rift in the transatlantic relationship has occurred over Greenland. It still seems surreal that a US administration would contest the sovereignty of its long-standing and loyal ally, Denmark, over its own territory and even threaten an illegal military invasion to take control of Greenland. Trump’s territorial claims went hand-in-hand with a disinformation campaign to denigrate Denmark in the eyes of Greenlanders, accused of a colonial-style mistreatment of its subjects. This has clearly backfired as opinion polls show overwhelmingly that Greenlanders do not want to be incorporated into the US. They prefer a managed process of independence but one that preserves ties to Denmark and the EU.

What has upset the European allies the most is that Trump used false claims of an unwillingness by Denmark and Europe to defend Greenland while playing up a fictitious near-term Russian military threat to the territory, without presenting any evidence. Russian naval activity off the coast of Greenland has been slight in recent years. Responding to Trump’s threats, both to deter a unilateral US move and to convince Trump that they were taking the defence of NATO Greenland seriously, the NATO allies launched a new Arctic Sentry mission in the High North and conducted the Cold Response exercise in Northern Norway. The aim here is to track and respond to Russian surface fleet and submarine activity in the region. Meanwhile, Denmark and its Nordic allies together with France have sent ships and troops to Greenland for training and exercises. Denmark has undertaken to spend €8bn to upgrade military infrastructure (such as radars, airfields and coastal batteries) in Greenland.

For the European allies, this deployment of forces was an unwelcome and unnecessary diversion of military resources away from NATO’s eastern flank and from preparations for a possible UK-France-led reassurance force to be sent to Ukraine to implement a peace agreement between Kyiv and Moscow. After all, it is here that the Russian threat to Europe’s security really does matter, making it, unsurprisingly, the alliance’s overwhelming strategic priority. But what has damaged NATO is the single failure of the Trump administration to share this threat perception.

For the President, the war in Ukraine has been a tribal quarrel between two equally irrational and ungrateful neighbours, digging up senseless historical disputes, and both determined to keep on fighting for no understandable reason, despite enormous losses on both sides. But as Trump perceives that one side (Russia) has the upper hand over the other (Ukraine), his peacemaking efforts are based on forcing the weaker side to accept its defeat long before it has actually happened and make all the major territorial (and other) concessions. The notion of punishing the aggressor rather than the victim has not occurred to him.

Meanwhile, the President has halted US financial and military assistance to Kyiv, except where the US can make money on its weapons sales or benefit where Ukraine has something to offer, as for instance in drone technology and AI-driven innovation. It is ironic that 880 Patriot PAC 2 and 3 air defence missiles were fired during the first ten days of America’s war against Iran – more than during the four years of Russia’s invasion. Trump’s strange inability to see Putin’s aggression against Ukraine for what it is – an attempt not only to destroy one of America’s closest partner countries but also NATO and the entire European security order – and to lift the US political, military and economic response to a level commensurate with the gravity of the Russian threat, has inflicted the greatest harm on the alliance. For how can a collective defence organisation like NATO survive when its leading member, the US, sees its European allies as a greater civilisational threat than its ideological adversaries and military competitors?

Denmark has been on the receiving end of US disrespect and outlandish claims, but Europe as a whole has just received another dressing down in the form of Vice President JD Vance travelling to Hungary to speak at an election rally in favour of (now former) prime minister Viktor Orbán. As in his Munich speech last year, Vance castigated the EU for upholding liberal as opposed to Orbán’s “national and Christian values”, rejecting the Brussels bureaucracy as a foreign Diktat, along with the multiethnic and multicultural society and outdated norms of international law and multilateral cooperation beyond the immediate search for national self-interest. Without a hint of irony, and giving no evidence, Vance accused the EU of political meddling in the Hungarian elections. For an alliance based on common values, it is corrosive to hear the EU described as a threat to the US and the latter constantly harp on all that makes it different rather than similar to Europe. It is as if fighting exaggerated culture wars with both domestic opponents and foreign allies is more important for the ideologues in Washington than preventing and stopping real wars.

A speech by US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, at last February’s Munich Security Conference had to reach deep into history and vague references to Renaissance literature to find examples of European-American understanding of Europe’s “civilisational erasure” and enfeeblement at the hands of mass migration. But Hungarian voters have now shown their rejection of both Moscow and MAGA in finally voting Orbán and his Fidesz party out of office after 16 years in power. Faced with a choice between Russia and an authoritarian regime at home producing corruption and declining living standards, Hungarians have opted for the EU, the end of polarisation and a proper functioning democracy. Apart from being bad news for Putin and Trump, the Hungarian election result is welcome news for Zelensky who can hopefully look forward to EU aid packages and sanctions against Russia to be approved without endless Hungarian vetoes and delaying tactics. Trump has tried to divide Europe but Hungary has brought it closer together.

Yet instead of learning from past crises, Trump keeps on replaying them. His latest attempt to embroil Europe in a conflict based on an invented threat has come in the Middle East and the war in Iran. In five weeks of military operations against the Islamic Republic, the US spent $2bn a day and requested a $200bn defence supplemental to replenish its diminished weapons stockpiles. It fired over 11,000 missiles against Iran and carried out over 300 air strike packages every day. The bulk of the US Air Force and navy, including two aircraft carriers, elements of the 82nd Airborne Division and two Marine Expeditionary Units, were deployed to the Gulf. With this level of effort committed to NATO, Europe could be defended against Russia for at least a decade, whereas the US has used up a lot of its capabilities in a conflict with Iran that was unprovoked, unnecessary and has no clear objectives.

The Iran war has placed the European allies in an impossible position. NATO was not consulted by Trump ahead of his attack on Iran, nor asked to play any specific role. The excuse given by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, that Trump needed to preserve operational secrecy and therefore could not consult, doesn’t hold water. The US had positioned enormous military assets in the Gulf against Iran making their eventual use against the Islamic Republic more than probable, especially once the President’s ultimatums to Tehran to abandon all its nuclear programmes were not met. Yet Trump did not make any specific requests to NATO for military support or air or naval capabilities. At the beginning of operation Epic Fury, he insisted that the US had the overwhelming strength to do everything by itself (and with the Israelis, of course ). European contributions were not only unnecessary but also useless as they were not up to the job. The UK aircraft carrier offered by Prime Minister Keir Starmer was dismissed as “a toy” and the Royal Navy insulted by Trump and Hegseth on numerous occasions.

But as the US air strikes ground on, Iran refused to surrender and oil and gas prices soared, Trump changed his tune. Europeans suddenly became the scapegoats. They were “cowards” and wanted to arrive on the scene only after the US had already won the war. NATO was accused of failing an exam that had never been put to it and without anyone knowing what the exam questions were. In truth, Trump’s problem was not with NATO as such but with a very small number of European allies hosting the airbases on their territory that the US Air Force wanted to use. Essentially, the UK with Fairford and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, Italy with Signonella in Sicily, Germany with Ramstein and Spain with Torrejon.

With the exception of Spain, these allies have given permission to the Pentagon to use these bases and for overflights, although requesting that the normal clearance procedures should be used and for defensive missions only (although how the offensive/defensive distinction is applied in practice is far from clear). These European allies might have hesitated at the beginning, but the White House and Pentagon should have anticipated that they would not get an automatic response. The US had not consulted in advance, there was no UN mandate or legal basis for Epic Fury, no clear strategy or objectives for the US operation and the political and public opinion environment would inevitably put constraints on what European leaders could say in public or offer immediately. This was a moment for some skilful behind the scenes diplomacy by the US rather than to make public demands and criticisms that pushed European leaders into a corner. This said, it is admittedly always difficult for European leaders to deny the US full use of its bases in Europe as the existence of those bases is an argument often used by supporters of NATO in the US as a reason to maintain a close security partnership with Europe.

As it happens, European allies have ultimately given a lot of support to the US. France and the UK sent fighter aircraft and air defence to the UAE which have shot down Iranian missiles and drones aimed at the Gulf States. The much-derided Spain has been defending NATO ally Türkiye with its Patriot batteries deployed near the Syrian border. France, the UK and Greece have sent ships to the eastern Mediterranean to protect Cyprus, and the UK has convened a coalition of 40 nations to begin detailed military planning for a European-led maritime operation to keep open the Strait of Hormuz for commercial shipping. It seems that this is the European contribution that Trump desires the most.

The President likes to point out that Europe is more reliant on oil and gas transiting through Hormuz than the US. Yet in reality, he has put obstacles in the way of a European contribution. The US has not attended the meetings of the coalition. Trump has suggested that no international mission is needed as following the US victory over Iran the Strait of Hormuz will reopen naturally. He has also said that the US Navy can do the job by itself or that he will do a deal with Tehran so that it will share with Washington the tolls that it collects on commercial vessels using the Strait. Now, Trump says that the US will follow Tehran in implementing a blockade of the Strait, particularly aimed at closing Iran’s ports. This suggests an escalation by the US and a continuation of hostilities whereas Europe is planning a mission based on a durable ceasefire and a legal mandate. To put European warships in the Strait in wartime serves no purpose. Commercial shipping companies will refuse to use the Strait or be denied insurance, demining will be difficult if not impossible and the number of tankers that European warships could escort safely through the Strait every day would be too small to make a difference to global energy supplies and the price of oil and gas. European warships cannot protect themselves and commercial vessels at the same time. It is impossible to plan a serious military operation on the basis of Trump’s avalanche of Truth Social posts, and all the more so when the message changes every day and you don’t know which ones represent US policy and which ones are purely the President letting off steam.

NATO has frequently been the victim of transatlantic differences over conflicts beyond its treaty area, even though it was never designed to be the seventh cavalry for every US military adventure, no matter how misconceived. President Lyndon Johnson begged UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson for “a band of Scottish bagpipers” to demonstrate solidarity with the US in Vietnam (Wilson refused). There were rifts between Washington and London over the Falklands campaign against Argentina in 1982. In the 1990s, European allies on the ground in Bosnia as part of the UN peacekeeping force (UNPROFOR) were deeply frustrated with the refusal of the Clinton administration to engage, except by occasional and ineffective air strikes delivered from the safety of 15,000 feet. George W. Bush tried hard but failed to receive European support for his controversial and ultimately catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003, except for the UK’s Tony Blair, determined to preserve the “special relationship” at any cost. More recently, President Obama was keen at first to stay out of the conflict in Libya, let the UK and France take the lead, with the US content to “lead from behind”.

In truth, periods of transatlantic harmony in handling out-of-area conflicts (for instance in Kosovo in 1999 and Afghanistan after 2003) have been rarer than periods of friction. But in all these cases the allies eventually came together, and the transatlantic security relationship was stronger for it. The Pentagon went around the State Department and helped the UK militarily in the Falklands. US Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, came to the North Atlantic Council in 1994 and told the allies that “NATO is more important than Bosnia”. To avoid further rifts in the alliance, the US would change its policy and commit to ground troops to back up, or extract in extremis the European peacekeepers. Obama came round in Libya and provided intelligence support, refuelling aircraft and US cruise missiles and offensive cyber capabilities to take out Gadhafi’s air defence. European troops eventually went to Iraq to help the US train the new Iraqi security forces and to keep tabs on ISIS. And Washington changed its mind on Afghanistan and decided that coalitions were not such a bad thing after all. In 2003 NATO took over the international stabilisation force (ISAF) in Kabul. The conclusion of this history is that there would be transatlantic differences from time to time, even severe ones, but at the end of the day intelligent leaders and astute diplomats in capitals would find pragmatic ways to bring the alliance back together. The transatlantic security relationship in NATO was too multifaceted and fundamental to both sides to be sacrificed on the altar of passing foreign policy disagreements. To quote Warren Christopher yet again: “NATO is more important than Bosnia”.

Now ‘America First’ has replaced ‘NATO First’. Rather than protect NATO from foreign conflicts and out of area shocks beyond its remit, the Trump administration seems determined to use the Iran war both as excuse and lever to inflict maximum harm on the alliance. Trump has repeated that America will never have support from its allies in the future and has said that most Americans would understand (and support) a US withdrawal from NATO (although this is not borne out by opinion polls). Both Trump and Rubio have announced that they are going to conduct an in-depth review of NATO to assess the alliance’s usefulness to the US and the contributions of individual allies to Trump’s war against Iran. This criticism is surprising coming from Rubio who traditionally has been a supporter of NATO and a sponsor in the US Senate of a bill back in 2022 to prevent a US President from withdrawing from NATO without the consent of the Senate. A few days ago, Trump and his spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, were again openly speculating on an imminent US withdrawal from NATO.

It was not the first time that Trump was supposedly on the brink of doing this. Former US National Security Advisor John Bolton has reported that Trump was going to announce the US withdrawal at the NATO summit in Brussels in July 2018 but was pulled back at the last minute by Bolton and his fellow senior officials on the trip. How serious Trump is about actually pulling the US out of the alliance is hard to tell. But his close collaborators have reported that his frustration with the Europeans is at an all-time high and that he regards NATO as broken beyond repair. His threats came at the very moment when the NATO Secretary General, Mark Rutte, was in Washington for a long-planned visit. The celebrated Trump-whisperer tried his best once more to mollify the irascible US President by accepting his criticisms of some allies (too slow to respond) while defending the support given to Washington by others. Yet it is far from clear to what extent his meeting with Trump (all in private and with no joint press event) has ended the crisis in NATO, at least for now. Trump certainly has not toned down the rhetoric since Rutte flew back to Brussels.

It will not be easy for Trump to withdraw the US legally from the alliance. It would have to give one year’s notice (to itself, as it happens, as the repository of the NATO treaty) and then negotiate with NATO HQ a host of agreements relating to financial commitments, compensation for cancelling technical and communications contracts, sorting out status of forces agreements in NATO member states, disposal of property and the like. It will not be easy to disentangle a multitude of arrangements and common systems built up over the eight decades of NATO’s existence. Congress and the Senate, as the custodians of international treaties, will insist on having its say, and many Republicans will join Democrats in firmly resisting a US withdrawal from NATO. American support for the alliance is also well above 50%, according to the Pew Research Center, despite Trump constantly hammering the alliance.

An easier route for the President to take would be to continue to undermine NATO’s credibility and hollow out its collective defence structures. This process is already underway. Rubio and Hegseth no longer bother to show up at NATO ministerial meetings. The Pentagon has withdrawn a US rotating brigade from Romania. It is handing over to the Europeans some senior NATO command positions although (to the relief of allies) Trump did agree to appoint a new US Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (SACEUR). But the US gave up the high-profile political post of Deputy Secretary General and pulled ships and aircraft from NATO exercises. Its commitment to a future reassurance force in Ukraine subsequent to a ceasefire has remained vague and there has been little joint planning with the UK and France to constitute the reassurance force.

Notwithstanding these steps the US could go much further. The Pentagon’s upcoming Global Posture Review could be used as a pretext to pull whole US brigades with their armour and logistics out of Europe, although some observers believe that moving them from “unfriendly countries”, like Germany and Italy, to more “friendly” ones, like Poland, is also on the cards. In moving US forces closer to the Russian threat this would not necessarily be a bad thing for NATO. But moving whole brigades with all their equipment and support structures is never quick, easy or cheap, and the Pentagon, needing to rebuild missile stocks and replace damaged equipment from its Gulf operations, may well have other investment priorities. Some US bases like Ramstein are mini-US cities and carry out a range of tasks, from space operations and missile defence to fighter and bomber missions. Trump could withdraw US forces from NATO exercises or seek to change US military commitments and roles in the alliance’s regional defence plans. He could order the SACEUR to return to the US handing over NATO’s operational command to Europe, while taking away US strategic enablers like air and missile defence, intelligence, data fusion, space observation and early warning and cyber offensive and defensive capabilities. To underscore his pique with NATO he could simply not show up at the alliance’s next summit in Ankara in early July. Yet in truth Trump does not need to take any concrete action to undermine NATO. Simply criticising the alliance and telling the world that the US will renege on its treaty commitments are enough to make NATO look weak and divided in the eyes of its adversaries, and first and foremost Russia. As deterrence decays, the chances increase that NATO will be challenged.

All of this is intensely frustrating for the European allies who see Trump constantly shifting the goalposts of what he expects from NATO while demanding ever more for ever less. Their major effort to defend Greenland has not prevented the President from returning to the issue of American ownership once he has been disappointed by the European response on Iran. There is now a widespread sense that trying to please or placate Trump to keep the US in the alliance almost at any price doesn’t work. The President may change his rhetoric and blow hot and cold; but he will not recommit in practice. The trust in US reliability has gone and will not be restored. Even the most fervent transatlanticists in NATO capitals and the diehards of European dependency on the US now acknowledge that the old NATO model is no longer viable and Europe needs to move in a different direction. What does this mean?

First, that NATO must look at how European and Canadian capabilities can meet their force planning targets and commitments to the alliance’s regional defence plans without US contributions. This was already the plan of the European allies looking at the 2030 timeframe, but this work must now be accelerated. A specific NATO investment plan is needed for how the Europeans can replace the key strategic enablers that the US has traditionally provided. The price tag that is often put on this by think tanks like the International Institute of Strategic Studies to the tune of $1tn is clearly a lot of money. But this figure includes all the forces and equipment of US home-based forces that could be sent to Europe during a conflict. If we take the US forces permanently in Europe or earmarked to rotate there regularly, the figure becomes around $280bn. Still a lot but given rising European defence budgets and EU-funded multinational capability programmes, it is eminently achievable over the next four years.

The one area in which the US forces in Europe are often ahead of their European counterparts is in their high levels of readiness with unit autonomy, modern equipment and logistics and robust firepower from a standing start. So, within NATO, the force planning process must get European frontline and immediate reserve units up to US military standards by 2030, tested and verified through demanding computerised war gaming and field exercises. Of course, it would be wrong for Europe to push the US out of NATO and a future US administration may want to re-engage, even if not to the same extent as in NATO’s heyday.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon would no doubt want to keep its bases, radars, port access and facilities in Europe if mainly on a bilateral basis rather than lose all this expensive and valuable infrastructure. US European Command (EUCOM) in Stuttgart may well disappear if the Pentagon chooses to reduce its European land footprint; but emergency access to air and naval bases will remain crucial for US military operations towards the Middle East Africa and Southwest Asia. Europeans will need to be able to duplicate NATO’s traditionally US-dominated command structure, on land, sea and air. For instance, the role of Deputy SACEUR, traditionally held by a British four-star, could be enhanced alongside the US SACEUR to enable that individual to function as overall NATO commander in wartime (and rotated among the largest European military powers). Europe could also offer to host US military stockpiles in NATO if the US agrees to transatlantic joint planning on US reinforcements to Europe in wartime and to maintain a joint US-European agency looking at innovation and new technologies along the lines of the current Allied Command Transformation headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia.

Even if Americans and Europeans are no longer destined to fight together, it is still in the European interest to maintain cooperation on issues like innovation, technology, experimentation and lessons learned from operations.

Finally, and although Trump and the Pentagon have had little to say on nuclear deterrence through NATO, the European dialogue on nuclear deterrence initiated by President Macron and involving in the first instance Germany and the UK needs to be quietly but vigorously pursued. Throughout NATO’s history, commentators have ridiculed the notion of a NATO without the US, stressing that the Europeans could never under any scenario defend themselves without the US. Mark Rutte recently took this line in addressing the European Parliament. But there are several things wrong with this reasoning. First, it sends exactly the wrong message to Moscow about the seriousness of European rearmament and collective solidarity. Second, it assumes that the US is happy to continue to bankroll NATO and play the leading role in its defence. Clearly harder to argue today. And finally, it assumes that financially and technically Europe is so backwards that it cannot replace the US military capabilities currently in Europe. Yet with political will and organisation the Europeans can. And as the Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski, aptly puts it: “we don’t have to be as good as the Americans, just better than the Russians”.

The birth of NATO in 1949 was a minor miracle. The US turned its back on isolationism and committed to only the second military alliance in its history. It gave Europe an open-ended conventional and nuclear protection guarantee despite the risks that this posed to the US itself. For eight decades it stayed the course, having originally conceived NATO as a short-term, 10-year defence pact. NATO evolved into a lynchpin of the international rules-based order, providing its members unprecedented security through cooperation and burden sharing and drawing in 20 new members over the years and 40 partners through its power of attraction. It was the handiwork of a group of American giants who had vision, a real grasp of the long-term interests of the US and the role of friends and allies in sustaining the US as the leading world power. They were up against significant opposition among the isolationist wing of the Republican Party. But they used political courage, persuasiveness and perseverance to win their argument and build not just NATO, but the other key institutions of the rules-based order too: the UN, IMF, World Bank, OECD and many others. Although never perfect, those institutions stood the test of time and helped to build the security and economic integration on which the European project was founded. Names like Dean Acheson, Ted Achilles, John Hickerson and George Marshall are among the finest diplomats and political architects that any democracy, not just the US, ever produced.

Donald Trump likes to goad Keir Starmer that he is “no Winston Churchill” but the current US President is certainly no Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman or Dwight Eisenhower – Presidents who had been tested in gigantic conflicts against truly existential threats.

The current generation of US statesmen and women seems to believe that America’s interests and power lie in its ability to intimidate and punish others rather than inspire them and cooperate with them. The American political scientist, Stephen Walt, has called this approach to global affairs “Predatory Hegemony”. Like our politics, our horizons have narrowed as performance and emotion have superseded rationality and perspective.

NATO was not ordained to last forever. Like Shelley’s Ozymandias, all great ventures, even the most glorious and successful, eventually bite the dust in the endless cycle of rise and fall. But NATO is one of history’s great success stories of the more noble and far-sighted dimensions of human endeavour. As such, it deserves a more dignified and justified ending than the one that it is currently receiving from the Trump administration.

The views expressed in this #CriticalThinking article reflect those of the author(s) and not of Friends of Europe.