Editor’s note: Peter Bergen is a national security analyst at CNN, vice president of New America, professor of practice at Arizona State University, and host of the Audible podcast “In the Room.” apple and spotify.he is the author of The price of chaos: the Trump administration and the world” The views expressed in this commentary are his own.read more opinion On CNN.
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President Donald Trump’s then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis said in 2017 that NATO is “the most successful and powerful military alliance in modern history.”
But President Trump said at a campaign rally over the weekend that he would not come to the rescue if Russia attacked a NATO member, which was the whole point of the alliance in the first place. President Trump said, “No, I won’t protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever they want to do.”
President Trump has long criticized European NATO members for not paying their fair share. The idea that foreign countries are freeloading from the United States sits well with Trump’s base, but does Trump not understand or choose not to understand how NATO works? Either.
In fact, all NATO members pay into the common fund that supports the Alliance’s day-to-day operations, and no country is in arrears on these payments.
Meanwhile, in 2014, all NATO members agreed to spend at least 2% of their GDP on defense by this year.
Every U.S. president since Barack Obama has pressed NATO countries to meet that spending level, but at the time of the agreement, only three NATO members had reached that level: the United States, the United Kingdom, and Greece. Ta.
Since Russian President Vladimir Putin, a foreign leader often admired by President Trump, launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, NATO countries, especially those that border Russia and Ukraine, such as Estonia, Lithuania and Romania, have European countries have increased spending by more than 2%. .
The war in Ukraine is also forcing Germany to end its longstanding policy of spending a relatively small amount of its gross domestic product on defense. Hours after President Trump’s NATO remarks, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Monday that the German government would fulfill its promise to spend 2% of GDP on defense this year.
European countries are concerned that Putin’s victory may not stop with Ukraine and could put NATO in grave danger if Trump becomes president for the second time. ing.
In fact, defense spending in NATO countries is increasing rapidly. In 2017, NATO European countries and Canada spent about $270 billion on defense, and the United States spent about $626 billion. According to NATO, as of 2023, European countries and Canada spent $356 billion on defense, while the United States spent $743 billion. Of the 31 NATO member countries, 11 currently meet spending targets of 2% or more.
It is no coincidence that during NATO’s 75 years, the United States became the most powerful and wealthiest nation in history. But the idea seems not to have occurred to President Trump, who is always looking to attack countries he believes are exploiting the United States.
Indeed, Mr. Trump has held similar beliefs about America’s allies for nearly four decades. In 1987, President Trump told the New York Times, “For decades, Japan and other countries have taken advantage of the United States… We have forced Japan, Saudi Arabia, and other countries to pay us for the protection that we provide them as allies.” Let me pay.” Around the same time, President Trump spoke in New Hampshire, claiming that Japan and Saudi Arabia were “swindling from us.”
This attitude continued even when he was president. President Trump is angry that even though Germany is NATO’s second-largest economy, it spends only about 1% of its GDP on defense, while the United States spends only about 4%. erected. President Trump interpreted the Germans’ lack of defense spending as if he were a landlord collecting overdue rent. But in NATO, each country decides how much it wants to spend on its own defense, so even if a government chooses to spend less than the agreed-upon target of 2% of GDP, the U.S. doesn’t “owe” anything. .
In March 2017, when then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel arrived in Washington for her first official visit, President Trump’s staff produced a graph showing that Germany was probably $600 billion behind. President Trump waved a “bill” to Chancellor Merkel, who said, “Can’t you see this isn’t real?” According to my account of the meeting in the book I wrote about Trump’s foreign policy, “The Price of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World,””
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President Trump also doesn’t seem to mind that the only time NATO’s Article 5 was invoked, invoking the alliance’s right to collective self-defense, was after the 9/11 attack on his hometown of New York City. , and doesn’t seem to care that Britain was defeated. Of the 455 soldiers fighting in the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, Canada lost 158 soldiers, France lost 86, and Germany lost 54.
No matter how wrong the idea may be, aides say President Trump is very serious about leaving NATO. Last summer, when I spoke with President Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton for the podcast “In the Room with Peter Bergen,”” He told me that Trump would “fundamentally rethink the premise of NATO. That’s the premise of what I think a second Trump term would be, which is to pull the United States out of NATO itself.” .
That is a big mistake. Why the newly elected Trump would seek to undermine or even dismantle such a successful alliance is a confusing mystery.