Trump's threats cast dark clouds over this year's NATO summit

The Hill

2 days ago

That was the assessment of the Trump administration recently offered in a private conversation with a senior European diplomat from a major NATO country. That gloomy view of transatlantic relations is widely shared in Europe, and not just because a leaked Signals chat revealed that the U.S. vice president and secretary of defense privately described Europeans as 'pathetic' geopolitical freeloaders.
Or because of the administration's brusque treatment of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, and relative coddling of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. Nor is it simply about Trump's unilateral imposition of tariffs or recent insistence that the European Union was 'formed in order to screw the United States.'
The gloom is not even primarily about Trump's threats to take Greenland from Denmark by force if necessary or to make Canada the 51st U.S. state, even though those comments were deeply insulting to both NATO allies.
At core, the profound unease that has descended over European capitals is about being left largely leaderless at a time of vulnerability and great peril, with the Russian bear on the prowl on the continent, Chinese mercantilism threatening the European economic model and Washington constantly casting doubt over the future of the alliance they have relied on for decades.
The Trump administration has been so slow to appoint senior State and Defense Department officials to key positions in Europe, and so unwilling to issue definitive guidance on a host of major issues, that some senior American military officers on the continent have reportedly taken to asking their European counterparts for insights into what is actually happening back in Washington, D.C.
For all those reasons, the upcoming June 24 to 25 NATO Summit in The Hague is shaping up as one of the most consequential and uncertain in the alliance's history. America's closest allies have a host of questions and the Trump administration is providing few answers.
Will the U.S. follow through on rumored troop withdrawals from Germany, or even from Europe writ large? Will it surrender the position of Supreme Allied Commander-Europe, always held by a senior U.S. military officer in the past, further eroding American leadership in Europe?
Will Trump offer critical backing for a European coalition willing to put troops on the ground to guarantee Ukraine's sovereignty in the event of a peace deal with Russia? How will the Trump administration react if a settlement is reached and Russia repositions hundreds of thousands of battle-hardened troops on NATO's eastern border? Can Europe even still trust in the American nuclear umbrella?
What NATO allies most fear at the upcoming summit is that President Trump, in a fit of made-for-television pique similar to his Oval Office dressing down of Zelensky, might upend the geostrategic chessboard and walk away.
They recall his outburst last year, encouraging Russia to do 'whatever the hell they want' to any NATO member nation that doesn't meet the alliance's target of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense. Trump has more recently doubled the ante, saying allies should be spending 5 percent of GDP on defense, even though the U.S. does not even reach that thresholdm spending roughly 3.4 percent of GDP on defense.
Certainly, European allies have not forgotten the havoc Trump unleashed at his first NATO summit in 2018 when he publicly berated allies and threatened to pull the U.S. out of the alliance altogether if they didn't increase defense spending. That pressure, combined with the growing threat of Putin's Russia, has resulted in 23 out of the 32 NATO countries reaching the 2 percent target today, up from three in 2014.
The larger issue is that the transatlantic alliance and its 'one for all, and all for one' commitment, expressed in somewhat vague terms in Article V of NATO's treaty, is built on a foundation of trust. The cracks in that foundation are widening, especially given the disruptions of recent months.
John Bolton, Trump's former national security adviser, has stated publicly that Trump's ultimate goal remains laying the groundwork for withdrawing the U.S. from NATO.
'Trump has essentially said that the nation was stuck with this consensus since 1945 that the U.S. was going to carry the world on its back, and it turns out that status quo was very brittle,' said author and historian H.W. Brands Jr., speaking recently at an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations.
After just a few months back in office, he noted, Trump has already upended the expectations other nations have in terms of U.S. foreign policy and security guarantees.
'Other nations that had the expectation that U.S. presidents will all value past commitments, and that they can rely on the United States to the extent that some don't need their own independent foreign and defense policies, like Germany and Japan, are now hearing from the White House that we're not interested in defending the rest of the world,' said Brands.
'When U.S. voters elect a president who insists he wants to make Canada the 51st state, I'm not sure you can ever get back that trust.'
James Kitfield is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress, and a three-time recipient of the Gerald R. Ford Award for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense.