Virginia Mayo/AP Photo
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff U.S. Air Force General C.Q. Brown, center, arrives for a meeting of NATO defense ministers at NATO headquarters in Brussels, October 11, 2023.
Disgraced former president Donald Trump, in between attending court proceedings for dozens of alleged felonies, has been laying out an agenda for a potential second term. I have already discussed his plan—reminiscent of the “parallel structures” of both Hitler and Mussolini—to purge the military and federal bureaucracy, replacing leadership with loyal toadies who will bend the government to his will.
Now we have a more concrete policy proposal, courtesy of Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley at Rolling Stone: Trump is planning to tear up NATO, in form if not in fact. “Trump, the sources say, has continued to express an openness to pulling the U.S. out of NATO altogether.” Apparently, he might consider not doing so if other members agree to sharply increase their military spending, and re-evaluate “the bedrock principle that an attack on one member is tantamount to an attack on all.” So either NATO will be destroyed, or it will no longer be an alliance.
I should first remind readers that, contrary to propaganda from the isolationist right and certain segments of the irritable contrarian left, Trump’s record in office was remarkably militarist and aggressive. Trump radically scaled up the drone war in various countries while also relaxing rules intended to reduce collateral damage, which caused a huge increase in civilian casualties. He tore up the nuclear deal with Iran, and subsequently assassinated the popular general Qassem Soleimani, which nearly led to war.
Trump’s hatred of NATO proceeds from his belief, in both business and politics, that there is no such thing as an honest, mutually beneficial bargain; either you are ripping off the other guy or he is ripping you off. The idea that the U.S. might provide a security umbrella over Europe as part of an alliance structure that broadly benefits both parties—America retains global hegemony, and Europe doesn’t have to worry much about security—doesn’t compute to Trump.
That’s why there is also a small grain of truth in his complaints that most European NATO members do not spend the required 2 percent of GDP on defense. That is true, and it is also true that the U.S. has provided far and away the bulk of NATO’s military power over its life.
But as economist Adam Tooze argues, focusing on money per se is misleading. Before Russia invaded Ukraine, EU members spent an average of 1.2 percent of GDP on their various militaries. That added up to nearly 200 billion euros per year—enough to fund a world-class army, air force, and navy on its own, and more than enough if it were scaled up modestly. The problem is that instead of being spent on one EU-wide force, each country has its own little military, ruling out economies of scale or unified command. The German Bundeswehr in particular is in notoriously poor shape despite costing tens of billions of euros. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz admitted this after the invasion, and his government passed a 100 billion euro supplement to re-equip and modernize its forces. But it’s been slow going.
So let’s consider the international situation. If Trump had torn up NATO in, say, 1993, the effects probably would have been negligible. At that point, it was an alliance designed to counter a country that no longer existed, and many questioned its usefulness.
If Trump yanks the NATO rug out from under the EU, European nations will have no choice but to carry out a full-scale rearmament program.
But Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has given it a new lease on life. Finland and Sweden spent the entire Cold War as neutral states, because they correctly thought they could survive and serve a role as rational diplomatic intermediators. But when a large neighboring country is ruled by a megalomaniac dictator bent on imperialist wars of aggression, neutrality starts to seem foolish, and after the invasion both countries rushed to get NATO protection. Conversely, the deep hostility to Russia from Soviet colonies like Poland and the Baltic states, which barged their way into NATO as quickly as possible—Polish officials met with Republicans in the mid-’90s to put pressure on President Clinton, who was quite hesitant about the idea—looks prescient today.
So if Trump yanks the NATO rug out from under the EU, European nations will have no choice but to carry out a full-scale rearmament program, with massive production of tanks, ships, planes, artillery, rockets, and so on. Without the security blanket of American protection, German dithering over the Bundeswehr will end. Poland is likely to go for a nuclear weapons program; it has already suggested hosting U.S. nukes. Theoretically, France or the U.K. could provide a nuclear guarantee, but having been burned once, Poles may conclude that it is best to have a domestic arsenal. And they might not be the only ones.
All this may come too late to save Ukraine, which currently depends heavily on American aid that Trump has already argued should be cut off. Should Putin defeat the Ukrainian military, the result will almost certainly be a grinding insurgency and shattering regional refugee crisis that will only escalate the urgency of European rearmament.
Some leftists view NATO as nothing more than part of an American empire that has never done any good. To be sure, it is certainly influenced heavily by the U.S. But one of its principal purposes, namely, preventing another continent-wide war in Europe, has been a success. And because its structure requires unanimous consent on major questions, member states have considerable influence; Turkey in particular routinely exploits this feature (for good or ill). By the same token, being a defensive alliance, NATO has not been involved in most of the worst atrocities of American imperialism, like U.S.-backed coups in Guatemala, Chile, and Iran, the wars in Vietnam or Iraq (where NATO only has had a training mission since 2004), or the U.S.-enabled mass butchery of communists in Indonesia.
In sum, a second Trump term would be a complete disaster for peace and security around the world. He would tear up a relatively benign structure of the global diplomatic order, and create another major military alliance bloc, armed to the teeth. This bloc would be rightly enraged by American betrayal, and potentially end up as outright hostile. At a time of rising global tensions all over the world, from brushfire conflicts to all-out ground wars, Trump would spark galloping rearmament and greatly destabilize international relations, for no reason other than his own callous selfishness and stupidity.
