During his first presidential campaign in 2016, former president and current Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump berated NATO member counties for failing to increase their defense spending to 2 percent of GDP. He took some heat for his remarks but never seriously questioned the existence of the military alliance.
Now Trump has done it again — and then some. At a political rally earlier this year at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina, Trump recounted a conversation he allegedly had with an unidentified foreign leader of a NATO country — presumably when he was in office — regarding the United States coming to the defense of NATO members who fail to achieve their defense-spending targets:
One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, “Well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?” I said, “You didn’t pay, you’re delinquent?” He said, “Yes, let’s say that happened.” “No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay. You gotta pay your bills.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates responded that “encouraging invasions of our closest allies by murderous regimes is appalling and unhinged — and it endangers American national security, global stability, and our economy at home.” President Joe Biden commented that Trump’s remarks calling into question the U.S. “sacred” commitment to defend its NATO allies from attack were “dangerous,” “shocking,” and “un-American.” He then explained: “The promise of NATO — that an attack on one is an attack on all — keeps American families safe. It’s that simple. Any individual who calls into question the durability of that vow is a danger to our security.” “President Biden is absolutely right,” said former president Barack Obama. “The last thing we need right now is a world that is more chaotic and less secure; where dictators feel emboldened and our allies wonder if they can count on us. Let’s keep moving forward.” The head of NATO, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, warned that Donald Trump was putting the safety of U.S. troops and their allies at risk. He said in a statement: “Any suggestion that allies will not defend each other undermines all of our security, including that of the United States, and puts American and European soldiers at increased risk.”
Trump being Trump, he then doubled down on his comments about NATO countries having to “pay up” because they are “not paying what they should.” What is significant is not what Trump said about NATO, but what he didn’t say about NATO.
NATO
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was established in 1949 by the North Atlantic Treaty (known as the Washington Treaty) with 12 member countries: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
According to NATO’s official history, “The Alliance’s creation was part of a broader effort to serve three purposes: deterring Soviet expansionism, forbidding the revival of nationalist militarism in Europe through a strong North American presence on the continent, and encouraging European political integration.” Although the Treaty was initially made valid for a 10-year period, after which it could be reviewed, it has never been reviewed, and is now celebrating its 75th anniversary this year. This is why Dwight D. Eisenhower, NATO’s first supreme commander and future U.S. president said in 1949: “We cannot be a modern Rome guarding the far frontiers with our legions if for no other reason than that these are not, politically, our frontiers. What we must do is to assist these people [to] regain their confidence and get on their own military feet.”
Since its founding, NATO has been enlarged 10 times and now has 32 member countries. Greece and Turkey joined in 1952; Germany in 1955; Spain in 1982; Czechia (Czech Republic), Hungary, and Poland in 1999; Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia (Slovak Republic), and Slovenia (Republic of Slovenia) in 2004; Albania and Croatia (Republic of Croatia) in 2009; Montenegro in 2017; North Macedonia (Republic of Macedonia) in 2020; Finland in 2023; and Sweden in 2024. Thus, all of the former Warsaw Pact countries are now members of NATO, except, of course, for Russia. NATO membership is open to “any other European state in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area.”
According to NATO, as “an alliance of countries from Europe and North America,” it “provides a unique link between these two continents, enabling them to consult and cooperate in the field of defence and security, and conduct multinational crisis-management operations together.” NATO’s purpose is “to guarantee the freedom and security of its members through political and military means.” The organization is committed “to the principle that an attack against one or several members is considered as an attack against all.” This principle of “collective defence” is “enshrined in Article 5 of the Washington Treaty.
The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
This means that the United States — by virtue of its membership in NATO — is obligated to go to war to defend countries like Albania, Estonia, Latvia, Luxembourg, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Slovenia — all of which have armed forces that number less than 10,000 — and Iceland, which doesn’t even have a military. By contrast, the United States has about 1.4 million military personnel.
In 2006, NATO countries made a commitment to aim to spend 2 percent of their GDP on defense. According to the most recent (2022) NATO Secretary General’s Annual Report, “In 2014, only three Allies met the guideline. The United States accounted for 54 percent of the Allies’ combined GDP and 70 percent of combined defence expenditure.” Accordingly, NATO declared in 2014 that the countries that weren’t meeting the 2-percent goal would “aim to move towards the 2 percent guideline within a decade.” In 2022, NATO reported that seven member countries were meeting that obligation. The NATO secretary general now says that 18 member countries will meet the 2-percent standard this year.
What Trump didn’t say
Everyone has focused on what Trump said about NATO, but there are a number of things that Trump didn’t say about NATO that are noteworthy.
Trump didn’t say that others before him — including then-president Barack Obama — have told NATO countries to “pay up.” In 2010, then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates expressed concern about NATO members cutting back on their military spending and shifting the burden of defense onto the United States. He warned that NATO was confronting a “crisis” because its European members had spent too little on defense over the past decade. He predicted a “dim, if not dismal future” for NATO if the decline in European defense capabilities was not “halted and reversed.” He also said that he was “the latest in a string of U.S. defense secretaries who have urged allies privately and publicly, often with exasperation, to meet agreed-upon NATO benchmarks for defense spending.” In 2014, Obama gave several speeches urging NATO countries to increase their defense spending and pay their “fair share.”
Trump didn’t say that NATO is obsolete even though the destruction of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the deposing of the communist governments of Eastern Europe, the fall of the Iron Curtain, and the disbanding of the Warsaw Pact rendered NATO obsolete after 1991. No doubt Elon Musk spoke for many Americans when he wrote on his social media platform: “I always wondered why NATO continued to exist even though its nemesis and reason to exist, The Warsaw Pact, had dissolved.”
Trump also didn’t say that NATO should never have expanded. The main purpose of NATO was always to counter the threat posed to Europe by the Soviet Union. That ceased to be true after 1991. But instead of disbanding NATO, or at least withdrawing from it, the United States sought to expand it up to the borders of Russia. George Kennan (1904–2005), the famed author of the “containment” policy during the Cold War, warned that enlarging NATO would be the “most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.”
As explained by Jack Matlock, former U.S. ambassador to the USSR, in his 2010 book Superpower Illusions: How Myths and False Ideologies Led America Astray — And How to Return to Reality:
The Clinton administration’s decision to expand NATO to the East rather than draw Russia into a cooperative arrangement to ensure European security undermined the prospects of democracy in Russia, made it more difficult to keep peace in the Balkans and slowed the process of nuclear disarmament started by Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev.
Neither did Trump say that it is because of NATO that we have the current war between Russia and Ukraine. In 2008, NATO members made the fateful decision that at some point, Ukraine and Georgia would “become members of NATO.” Fiona Hill, an intelligence briefer under President George W. Bush, warned him that “Mr. Putin would view steps to bring Ukraine and Georgia closer to NATO as a provocative move that would likely provoke pre-emptive Russian military action.” Current CIA director William Burns, then American ambassador to Russia, said at the time:
Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In my more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.
That redline was crossed in 2002 when, in the words of Cato Institute scholar Doug Bandow, “the U.S. refused to negotiate with Russia over NATO’s pledge to induct Ukraine.” Then “the U.S. launched an expensive and increasingly bitter proxy war against Russia with outright victory as the goal,” and Ukraine formally applied for “fast-track” NATO membership in autumn of 2022. The result has been two brutal years of war, lost territory, bombed cities, and millions of displaced Ukrainians. Yet, according to Bandow:
Before the war, Ukraine likely could have kept its territory by agreeing to neutrality — without suffering tens or hundreds of thousands of casualties, enduring destruction of many cities and towns, deforming their land with mines, fortifications, and graves, and facing endless combat. The allies would have maintained non-military ties with the Ukrainian people while saving hundreds of billions of dollars and conserving their military arsenals. The West would not have pushed Putin and other Russian nationalists eastward into a tighter embrace with China. And the entire world would have been spared the severe economic dislocations caused by both combat operations and economic sanctions.
And, I might add, millions of American tax dollars would not have been wasted.
Trump didn’t say that U.S. membership in NATO was an entangling alliance warned against by the Founding Fathers, even though George Washington in his Farewell Address famously warned against “permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” He also said that “the great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible.” In both of those ideas, he was echoed by America’s third president, Thomas Jefferson:
I am for free commerce with all nations, political connection with none, and little or no diplomatic establishment. And I am not for linking ourselves by new treaties with the quarrels of Europe, entering that field of slaughter to preserve their balance, or joining in the confederacy of Kings to war against the principles of liberty.
And then there is the classic line from Jefferson’s first inaugural address of March 4, 1801, “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations — entangling alliances with none.”
Trump didn’t say that the United States should withdraw from NATO. The purpose of NATO, of course, has always been for the United States to come to the aid of Europe, again. But what is the purpose of the U.S. military? It seems pretty obvious that the purpose of the military should be to defend the United States from foreign attack — to patrol and protect American borders, coasts, shores, and skies. The purpose of the U.S. military is not to defend other countries — to patrol and protect their borders, coasts, shores, and skies. This means not only that the United States should withdraw from NATO but that the United States should never have joined NATO.
Trump also never said that the United States being a part of NATO could needlessly and foolishly result in the shedding of American blood and the loss of American lives and limbs. As a member of NATO, the United States could be drawn into a war over an incident between Russia and small and insignificant (as far as U.S. interests are concerned) countries like Montenegro, North Macedonia, Slovakia, and Slovenia — countries that didn’t even exist before 1991, countries that most Americans don’t care a whit about, countries that many Americans couldn’t locate on a map, and countries that some Americans may not even realize are countries.
Trump didn’t say that there is nothing wrong with European countries having a NATO alliance as long as the United States is not a member of it. But if the countries of Europe want to continue having a military alliance — whether it is called NATO or something else — then they can fund it, expand it, or reorganize it any way they choose. From the American standpoint, it doesn’t really matter what the Europeans do as long as the United States is not a part of it.
Natural national defense
When Trump doubled down on his NATO comments as he left a Manhattan courtroom, he made a reference to America’s natural national defense. Said Trump: “Add up the countries that make up NATO, it is about the same size as our economy. So we’re in for $200 billion, they’re in for $25 billion, and it is much more important to them because we have an ocean in between.” Trump never elaborated on his mention of the Atlantic Ocean, undoubtedly not realizing the significance of what he was saying. President Jefferson recognized the significance of the Atlantic Ocean over 200 years ago: “At such a distance from Europe and with such an ocean between us, we hope to meddle little in its quarrels or combinations. Its peace and its commerce are what we shall court.” He also made reference to both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans functioning as a natural national defense: “The insulated state in which nature has placed the American continent should so far avail it that no spark of war kindled in the other quarters of the globe should be wafted across the wide oceans which separate us from them.”
According to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, “the United States spends more on national defense than China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, United Kingdom, Germany, France, South Korea, Japan, and Ukraine — combined.” It ought to be spending much less. Because the United States has been blessed with an ocean on both sides, it should not only withdraw from NATO but should also close all of its foreign military bases and bring all of its troops home.
In his inaugural address in 2017, Donald Trump stated, “From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first, America first.” Withdrawing from NATO will put America first. But don’t expect Trump to do it should he get reelected.
This article was originally published in the June 2024 issue of Future of Freedom.
