NATO has dodged collapse before. It’s never been this close

By Hal Brands

Why is the globe’s greatest military alliance so often in crisis? President Donald Trump’s reelection last November, and Vice President JD Vance’s deliberately insulting speech in Munich in February, cast the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into grave anxiety. But it’s hardly the first time the alliance has been at risk of falling apart.

NATO remade Europe, and the world, in the decades after its founding in 1949, by bringing peace and security to a continent that had repeatedly touched off global wars. Yet from the beginning, NATO has been a contentious coalition: Its members have been at each other’s throats even as they have also locked arms.

Yes, Trump sometimes seems downright hostile to NATO, but previous US leaders threatened to leave the alliance or simply looked forward to the day when Europe could take care of itself. NATO’s history is an odd combination of epic, history-changing achievements and existential crises.

Transatlantic angst is currently surging, as Trump travels to The Hague for a NATO summit this week. He almost withdrew from NATO in his first term; his second has raised serious questions about its survival.

But NATO’s current crisis isn’t solely Trump’s doing. And if his presidency stands a real chance of rupturing the alliance, it could, ironically, still renew it instead. For decades, the flip side of crisis has been resilience. NATO will need every bit of that resilience to meet its current challenge — and avoid a breakup that could be disastrous for Europe, America and the wider world.

NATO is America’s gold-standard alliance, but it wasn’t America’s idea. The US had no tradition of peacetime security commitments in Europe before World War II. It had no intention of making them after that war ended. But Washington ultimately stayed, and led this enduring alliance, because there was no other solution to the strategic problem of anarchy in the Old World.

Europe had destroyed itself twice in a generation. Both conflicts sprawled across oceans and ensnared the US. After World War II, old antagonisms lingered and new radicalisms threatened. The French feared German resurgence; the Soviet Union dominated Eastern Europe with ample opportunities to expand to the west.

Only the US had the power to secure Western Europe against external threats, while also smothering the internal animosities that might again set things alight. So the Truman administration agreed to join an alliance proposed by its weaker members — whose goal, NATO’s first secretary general quipped, was to keep the Americans in, the Germans down and the Soviets out.

NATO succeeded outlandishly in that mission. It helped the transatlantic community contain and outcompete the Soviet Union. It provided the security in which old enemies could become allies and Europe’s killing fields could become a democratic zone of peace. NATO became the core of America’s free-world coalition and a pillar of the expanding liberal order. The alliance performed so brilliantly that it endured after the Cold War ended: NATO took in new members from across the old Iron Curtain to expand the geography of Europe’s peace.

NATO is truly the most successful standing alliance in history. But it has been tested, repeatedly and severely, along the way.

75 Years of Bickering

The alliance’s founding document, the North Atlantic Treaty, was signed on April 4, 1949. The internal fights — over military strategy, trade and nearly everything else — started soon thereafter.

NATO seemed like it might fracture during the painful debate over West German rearmament in the 1950s, or the bitter disputes about Iraq in 2003. The Suez affair of 1956 — in which Washington refused to back a Franco-British bid to seize the Suez Canal — brought the alliance to the breaking point. The financial and monetary fights of the 1960s and 1970s, the arguments over arms races and arms control in the 1980s, all shook NATO to its core.

France quit the NATO military command in 1966 and insisted that all US troops leave its territory. “Does that include the dead Americans in military cemeteries?” Secretary of State Dean Rusk acidly replied. He wasn’t the only US leader to wonder if the alliance was worth the headaches involved.

Dwight Eisenhower asked when Western Europe could get its act together so America could “sit back and relax somewhat.” During intra-alliance brawls in the 1950s and 1960s, US officials threatened, albeit implicitly, to bring the troops home. Some things never change: In 2011, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates warned that freeloading friends might eventually be on their own. Trump is ruder and crasser about these issues. But he’s not the first to question whether NATO is a good deal for the US.

NATO is frequently seized by crisis; Americans have long been seized with ambivalence about that pact. So why is the alliance so troubled, and why has it endured?

Outrageous Ambition

NATO’s fractiousness might as well be written into its charter. The organisation spans an ocean and two continents; it stretches from the Arctic to the Mediterranean. Its members — 12 initially, 32 today — have tremendously diverse interests, histories, geographies and levels of power.

NATO includes a superpower and microstates, prosperous and comparatively poor societies, countries with tremendous physical security and states that have repeatedly been invaded. At its start, it featured both dictatorships and democracies. Its members included fading colonial empires as well a leader that styled itself an opponent of colonialism despite building a mostly informal empire of its own. Add in the inevitable personality clashes — between French President Charles de Gaulle and US President Lyndon Johnson, between Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and other toxic twosomes — and it’s no wonder that internal fights are frequent affairs.

Those quarrels also flow from NATO’s outrageous ambition. From the outset, the alliance required the US to defend countries thousands of miles from its borders. That, in turn, required massive overseas troop deployments backed by threats of nuclear escalation. The US built an ocean-bridging complex of power and commitment to defend Western Europe. But the European allies were never fully convinced that a far-away superpower would risk national suicide to defend them — and US leaders were never persuaded the allies were bearing their share of the load.

Despite all this, NATO persisted because it always had enemies — the Soviet Union, Islamic radicals, Vladimir Putin’s Russia — noxious enough to keep its members together. The democratic values shared by most of those states provided ideological cohesion and a shared commitment to making a world where liberalism could thrive.

NATO also survived because it fostered deep, institutionalised ties between militaries, governments and societies. And over time, NATO’s longevity enhanced its resilience: The longer it existed, the less its members could imagine doing without it.

These attributes gave NATO a remarkable ability for adaptation, even reinvention. The alliance made the transition from the US nuclear monopoly of the 1940s to the era of mutual assured destruction; from American economic dominance to a world in which European countries became Washington’s commercial competitors. It navigated periods of higher and lower Cold War tensions. Once the Cold War ended, it went from policing to bridging to East-West divide.

NATO’s real superpower is its ability to thrive amid changing circumstances, an ability it must summon amid the crisis now underway.

Four Big Threats

That crisis isn’t wholly about Trump, despite his inimitable ability to make nearly everything about himself. NATO is currently being tested by four convergent crises that run deeper than Trump’s disruptive effects.

First, a crisis of security, created by Russia’s serial aggression in the East. Since 2022, NATO has responded by supporting Ukraine’s fight for survival; the alliance expanded to include Finland and Sweden, and its members ramped up spending on defense. But European defense chiefs fear that if Moscow wins in Ukraine, it might test NATO militarily, perhaps in Baltic states that are half-ringed by Russian power. Even if it doesn’t, NATO will face an angry, hyper-militarised adversary, one that is already waging hybrid warfare — subversion, sabotage, political meddling — from one end of the continent to the other.

Second, a crisis of preparation. After the Cold War, NATO grew more geographically ambitious: It intervened “out of area,” in locales from the Balkans to Afghanistan. But it became less militarily capable, thanks to a quarter-century peace dividend. By the mid-2010s, German troops were, ridiculously, exercising with broomsticks in place of guns.

Weakness was a testament to success: NATO had created a cocoon of security that allowed European states to disarm. But that weakness intensified accusations of free riding by Washington and left the alliance ill-prepared to confront a resurgent Russian threat.

Third, a crisis of shifting priorities. Europe was Washington’s top priority in the Cold War because it was the crucial swing region, economically and militarily, in the Soviet American contest. Since then, however, the world’s center of economic gravity has moved to the east. The primary military danger zone is not the Fulda Gap but the Taiwan Strait.

American attention is shifting, fitfully but inevitably, to the Pacific. “Asia Firsters” are asking whether the US should still underwrite European stability in an Indo-Pacific age.

Finally, there is the crisis of credibility. Europeans have always wondered whether the US will be there when it matters. How could those fears not be turbocharged in the age of Trump?

Trump isn’t original in questioning the value of NATO. But Europe never had to deal with a US president who threatened to violently seize territory from allies, or so gleefully threatened to abandon those allies if they are attacked. Economic disputes are normal, but no American president has so wantonly jeopardized global prosperity — or seemed so much happier in the company of aggressive autocrats than longtime democratic friends.

What’s more, Trump did temporarily sever US support for Ukraine, leaving European countries wondering who might be next. His subordinates sometimes talk (or text) like they’d prefer the Europeans just drop dead. So Trump is now magnifying NATO’s other crises, and leading analysts, on both sides of the Atlantic, to wonder if the alliance might crumble after all.

The US Still Needs Europe

For some NATO skeptics, that outcome wouldn’t be so bad: They hope that a US departure might force Europe to get its act together and become an equal partner in defense of the democratic world. In reality, a Europe that no longer enjoys US protection wouldn’t be as accommodating of US interests, on issues from dollar dominance to the security of the Western Pacific. And the reason that US officials never walked away from the alliance, is that doing so could be disastrous for everyone involved.

In the near term, a transatlantic split would rip the guts out of NATO. It would leave European countries, even ones now arming themselves with urgency, struggling to project power to the edge of the continent and counter the Russian threat. It would deprive Europe of the patron whose support produces firmness against autocratic pressure — and whose leadership helps reconcile divergent interests into a coherent transatlantic agenda. The result, most likely, would be a weaker, more fractured continent that becomes a source of debility for the democratic world.

Indeed, there’s a reason that strategic autonomy — the idea that Europe can do without the US — is taken more seriously in the sheltered western part of the continent than in Poland, Finland and other countries in the imperiled north and east. The European defense industrial base is feeble and splintered. The continent can’t quickly replace NATO’s American-led command structures. Nor can the French or British take over America’s nuclear responsibilities: They lack the big, flexible arsenals, the extensive forward troop deployments, and the damage-limitation capabilities that have typically been required to make extended deterrence work.

Asia Firsters in Washington might think European weakness doesn’t matter, so long as the US is strong in the Western Pacific. They ought to think again. Europe and the UK account for about 20 per cent of world gross domestic product: It’s hard to believe that cutting the continent loose will somehow make America more competitive, economically and technologically, against Beijing. And if the US does turn its back on Europe, it may struggle to remain a successful global power.

Europe still represents America’s entry point into Western Eurasia, the supercontinent where so much of the action happens, and its staging point for Africa and the Middle East — where Trump has now become embroiled in exactly the sort of war he pledged to avoid. With a European foothold, the US is positioned for influence across several important regions. Without it, America risks being locked into the Western Hemisphere — on one side, at least — and locked out of the struggle for wide swaths of the world. Then there’s the possibility that a post-American Europe could return — not immediately, but eventually — to the darker patterns of its past.

Peace isn’t Europe’s natural condition: America’s presence transformed a tortured continent. American absence could rip the crucial safeguards away.

After a US departure, political and economic rivalries might take on menacing undertones.

The illiberalism and hypernationalism of earlier eras, never fully buried, could force their way to the surface. Border disputes and revisionist grievances might intensify. As arms races resume and nuclear proliferation becomes more common, a conflict-prone Europe could again export instability and violence to the world.

The fact that this scenario seems unthinkable today only reveals how dramatically Europe changed under US leadership. It could change dramatically, for the worse, in a post-American age.

Allies Are Paying Their Dues

So is NATO’s long run finally over? Or can the alliance be renewed once more? The answer has epic global implications, and it will hinge heavily on the leadership of Donald Trump.

It’s easy to envision a scenario in which Trump cripples the alliance, because we may already be living through it. In this scenario, Trump continues to pervert NATO by threatening the territorial integrity of its members. Unresolved trade wars create a poisonous transatlantic climate.

Trump withdraws large contingents of US troops, to punish European countries or shift focus to Asia. He worsens Europe’s crisis of security by abandoning Ukraine and palling around with Putin. A new, illiberal alliance emerges as Trump elevates right-wing figures — like Hungary’s Viktor Orban or the AfD in Germany — with more sympathy for Russia than for NATO’s core ideals.

In this scenario, Trump wouldn’t have to formally withdraw from NATO. He would make the alliance a dead letter by destroying its strategic cohesion and trust.

Trump may not be the sole source of NATO’s crisis, but he certainly has the power to make it fatal. Fortunately, there’s a more constructive scenario, which isn’t out of the question yet.

In this scenario, Trump eventually shuts up about annexing Greenland and Canada; he settles for greater cooperation on Arctic security and his missile shield, Golden Dome, instead. A trade truce soothes the US-EU relationship. An administration consumed by Middle Eastern crises comes to see the value of the military access and diplomatic support the European allies provide.

Most fundamentally, Trump takes yes for an answer on burden-sharing: The alliance is coalescing, albeit haltingly and with plenty of caveats, around agreement on a major jump in military spending (3.5 per cent of GDP on defense, 1.5 per cent on infrastructure and related investments). Those outlays will help NATO adjust to an era in which its strength must be focused on defending its most vulnerable borders. European states will bear more of that burden, even as Washington anchors the European defense with its unique capabilities — dominant airpower, lift and logistics, command and control, and a powerful nuclear deterrent — along with enough of a frontline presence to demonstrate it will be in any fight from the start.

The result of this scenario would be a stronger, if somewhat scarred, Europe that bolsters the free world while retaining the vital transatlantic tie. The opening months of Trump’s second presidency might be remembered as an ugly moment that contributed to the latest, needed renegotiation of the transatlantic compact.

Whether Trump can deliver this second scenario is deeply uncertain. His approach to NATO has become less combative in recent months. The danger of a total American sellout of Ukraine has, for the moment, faded.

Yet suspicion of NATO is core to Trump’s worldview. A president who can’t resist tormenting perceived opponents may find it hard to shift from disruption to the reassurance that is required to make a new transatlantic bargain stick. Our era is rife with crisis. But the most critical question of the coming years may be whether Trump finally accepts the argument that persuaded his predecessors — that NATO, for all its burdens and frustrations, really is indispensable for the world, and for America, too.