How Donald Trump Got NATO to Pay Up

The siege of the organization of the North Atlantic Treaty in Brussels, with eight gleam wings and crisscrossed steel, was designed to look like a set of nested fingers – a reference to what its architect called “the gathering of all nations in a common space”. Inside, the attribution of this space reflects certain geopolitical realities. The delegation of nine people from Iceland, the only member of the alliance without permanent army, occupies half a dozen offices; France has an entire floor; Germany has two. The American mission, with staff of more than two hundred, representing a world force deployed in nearly one hundred and fifty countries, occupies an entire five -story wing.

One morning this spring, on an outdoor bridge which leads to what is called the public square of the building, I passed a twisted node of rusty steel, a rest of the northern tower of the World Trade Center which was collected after the terrorist attacks of 2001. NATO Nicknamed the Memorial Artifact of September 11 and article 5, a testimony of the only body in the history of the Alliance in which its leaders invoked the collective-defense clause in its founding charter. Article 5 is the fundamental principle of the Alliance, declaring: “The parties agree that an armed attack on one or more in Europe or North America will be considered an attack on them.” During the following two decades, twenty-ninth non-American NATO The soldiers deployed soldiers in Afghanistan, more than a thousand of whom died.

When NATO The building was officially unveiled, in 2017, Donald Trump, as a recently elected American president, made a discourse of dedication for the memorial of article 5. During his presidential campaign, he had seized the fact that, although NATO The members had committed to spending 2% of their GDP on the defense, and only five of them reached this objective. Trump called on the situation “unfair”, saying during a rally: “We protect the countries of which most of the inhabitants of this room have never even heard.” In Brussels, he made a gesture on “the commitments which bind us as one”, but never explicitly approved article 5. In private, he expressed the disapproval of the NATO Build yourself. John Bolton, who was then Trump’s national security advisor, said the president saying once: “All this glass – a stroke of a reservoir, all would collapse.”

In 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, NATO officially identified Russia as “the most important and direct threat to the security of allies and peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic region”. In response, its members have promised hundreds of billions of dollars in additional defense expenses and deployed tens of thousands of soldiers that the Alliance calls its eastern flank – countries near the borders of Russia. The United States alone has moved twenty thousand additional soldiers in Europe. But Trump has often expressed a more complicated vision of Russian assault, sometimes even seeking to treat Russian president Vladimir Putin, more as a potential partner than a threat. On the campaign of the campaign last year, he suggested that if a NATO Ally underdetermine about defense, the United States would not provide military support in the event of a Russian attack. “I encourage them to do what they want,” he said about Russia. “You don’t pay your bills, you don’t get any protection. It’s very simple.”

Since his return to the presidency, Trump has sought to considerably rewrite the terms of America’s commitment to European security. He is now putting pressure for the Member States to spend five percent of their GDP in defense. In February, during a visit to NATOIts defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, said that European leaders “should assume the main responsibility for the defense of the continent”. This spring, NBC News reported that the Trump administration was preparing to move a large part of the American forces stationed in Europe in Asia and other regions, and that it might not fill the position of the Supreme Commander Allied Europe, or Saceur,, NATOThe first military position, which was occupied by an American since the Foundation of the Alliance.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former Prime Minister of Denmark, who was NATOThe Secretary General from 2009 to 2014, told me that the Alliance was in an “existential moment”, tied with what it crossed at the end of the Cold War. It is only now, he said, “the tectonic plates moving under our feet are above all in Washington, DC”

Trump’s chief interlocutor in NATO is its current secretary general, Mark Rutte, who took the post in October, after fourteen years as Prime Minister of the Netherlands. Rutte is fifty-eight, with without edge glasses, a radical lateral part and a large smile of a politician. He has long cultivated an image as a modest and hardworking official. Upon his arrival in Brussels, he refused to live in the house of Grand Town which was the residence of the secretary general for the nineteen years, preferring to stay in an apartment elsewhere in the city and use the official residence for meetings and receptions. Rutte’s relationship with Trump is informed by his instincts for cautious disagreement and diplomatic finesse. One of his advisers told me that the secretary general thinks that his main responsibility was to “keep the family together”. The United States, the advisor continued: “The family member we all need to stay safe”.

“I think I would like to have a baby, if it was the right baby.”

Cartoon by Barbara smaller

Rutte agreed to speak to me at the city of the city this spring, while he was preparing for a meeting with Kaja Kallas, the best diplomat in the European Union. I joined it on a cream -colored sofa in a sunny room facing a garden. A selection of cookies has been fixed; The coffee was poured by a silver carafe. I asked Rutte how he planned to satisfy an American president who seems to make fun of the whole concept of collective security. Rutte was, as usual, in a shredded and floating mood. After taking a self -efficiency of his own work (“I always laugh at me when someone calls me secretary general – it is a title usually reserved for communist parties”), he repeated a line that he used several times, in various forms, in recent months. Trump, he assured me, is “totally determined to NATO. “”

The president, he continued, simply said something that Rutte himself has often said NATOThe United States said: “If we want to be safe from threats and adversaries like Putin, China or North Korea or Iran, we must spend more.” Washington pressure said Rutte is an “opportunity” to NATO Members to strengthen the defense capacities they have neglected for decades. “There is an awareness in Europe that we must move part of the burden between what the United States does and what Europeans can do more of themselves.”

At the end of June, Rutte will chair a summit NATO The leaders of The Hague, his hometown. The main subject will be new targets for defense spending, but European leaders hope that the Americans will clarify their own commitments to the Alliance. At the official residence, I told Rotte that many of them had expressed concerns about the speed and the scale with which the Trump administration could lead to forces in Europe. “We agreed with the White House that there will be no surprise,” he said. “We will do it in a structured way.” He added: “I am not responsible for the anxieties of everyone. I can take them into account, but I am not led by them. ”

However, Rutte has tried to minimize the opportunity for drama at the top – the procedures will be kept short, and the final press release, expressing a agreed conclusion, will be limited to a few paragraphs. The narrow objective is the way of a rotte to recognize the issues modifying the world. “It will be one of the most substantial NATO Summits since the fall of the Berlin Wall, “he said.” Using Trump’s language, “huge”. “”

The idea of ​​a defensive alliance connecting the United States and Europe began to percolate itself in the aftermath of the Second World War. European cities had been destroyed, their populations dispersed; Whole savings were on the verge of collapse. Through the Atlantic Ocean, however, the United States had become European de facto hegemon. In 1946, Winston Churchill spoke of the United States as “at the top of the world power”, an accompanied position “of impressive accounts towards the future”.

The following year, President Harry Truman underlined the principles of what would become known as the Truman doctrine, calling on “the United States to support the free peoples who resist the attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by external pressures”. The Soviet Union, in the confusion and the wrecks left by the war, lost shortly to install customer regimes in Eastern Europe. Truman hoped that with American military and economic support, a fractured continent and weary of war could both reach peace and retain the communists. General Hastings Ismay, Churchill Military Military Advisor during the War, who became NATOThe first secretary general is credited with a remark that has captured the initial objectives of the Alliance: “Keep the Soviet Union outside, the Americans and the Germans.”