Trump Teases Leaving NATO
Trump has discussed with aides the possibility of calibrating America’s NATO engagement in a way that favors members of the alliance that spend a set percentage of their gross domestic product on defense, the officials said.
As part of the potential policy shift, the U.S. might not defend a fellow NATO member that is attacked if the country doesn’t meet the defense spending threshold, the officials said. If Trump does make that change, it would mark a significant shift from a core tenet of the alliance known as Article 5, which says that an attack on any NATO country is an attack on all of them.
This comes as the administration increasingly distances itself from involvement in any Ukraine peacekeeping force, especially any attempt by NATO countries to draw the US into a wider Ukraine role:
Stating that the U.S. does not believe NATO membership for Ukraine would be a "realistic" outcome of any negotiated peace settlement with Russia, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, today, called on NATO allied countries to increase their defense spending and take the lead in providing for Ukraine and Europe's security.
. . . As an alternative to granting Ukraine NATO membership, Hegseth said that any security guarantees for Ukraine "must be backed by capable European and non-European troops."
"If these troops are deployed as peacekeepers to Ukraine at any point, they should be deployed as part of a non-NATO mission, and they should not be covered under Article 5 [of the NATO treaty]," Hegseth said, adding that there must also be robust oversight of the line of contact from the international community.
"To be clear, as part of any security guarantee, there will not be U.S. troops deployed to Ukraine," he said.
Most recently, over the weekend,
The United States has told its allies that it does not plan to participate in military exercises in Europe, according to reports.
The move, the latest in Donald Trump’s pivot away from the bloc, would see America pull out of exercises beyond those already scheduled for this year.
The withdrawal concerns exercises that are on the “drawing board”, according to Swedish newspaper Expressen.
It means that Nato countries will be forced to plan exercises without the participation of the US military, the largest in the alliance.
It seems pretty clear that the ongoing trend of expanding NATO has led to some actors, including the US intelligence community, into reckless schemes like staging a coup in Ukraine with the ultimate goal of bringing it into NATO. This has been a major departure from the original idea of NATO as a defensive alliance against Soviet expansionism:
[W]hen the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, East Germany was reunified with West Germany and Secretary of State James Baker made a promise to Mikhail Gorbachev that in exchange for German reunification, we would, quote, maintain a presence in Germany that is part of NATO.
But there would be no extension of NATO's jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east. Did that happen? Well, let's fast forward and take a look at what's happened with NATO over the last several years.
. . . The operative part of NATO begins after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1999, NATO did begin its expansion under Bill Clinton to the east.
It welcomed the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. But importantly, in 2004, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia joined NATO, many of those sharing direct borders with Russia. In 2009, Albania and Croatia joined in 17 Montenegro.
In 2020, North Macedonia. In 2023, again sharing a border with Russia, Finland joined NATO. And last year, NATO welcomed in Sweden.
It's been argued that no matter the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin or anyone else, they would see this expansion of NATO to the east as a threat to their security in Russia. So who is the one instigating this war? Who contains or maintains the moral high ground?
In other words, NATO has been pursuing expansionist policies that Russia views as provocative while insisting that the US maintain its posture as the guarantor of an anti-Soviet defensive alliance. But times have changed; there is no longer a Soviet Union trying to foster world revolution. At the same time, major NATO members want the benefits of having the US as the guarantor of their defense without paying the cost, especially when they favor the continued provocation in Ukraine:
President Trump suggested Thursday that members of the U.S.-led NATO transatlantic military alliance would not come to the aid of the U.S., should America come under attack. NATO members are bound to back each other militarily in the face of any aggression under the collective defense clause in the alliance's founding treaty.
"Do you think they're going to come and protect us? Hmm. They're supposed to. I'm not so sure," Mr. Trump said as he addressed reporters at the Oval Office.
. . . President Trump was speaking in response to a question about whether the U.S. would defend NATO partners if they were not paying what he deems to be their fair share toward their own defense.
The president has long argued that the U.S. carries an undue burden, spending more to help ensure Europe's defense than the NATO members on the continent, and he's pushing now for those members to boost their domestic defense spending to at least 5% of their respective GDPs.
Trump here is displaying a negotiating strategy that's been recognized in business literature:
Trump has exaggerated commonly used negotiation approaches to maximize his dominance over his counterparts. For example, the importance of knowing one’s alternatives has received significant attention in the negotiation literature (e.g., Fisher, Ury, and Patton 1991), and Trump, during the 2016 presidential campaign, likewise advocated having a viable “walk‐away” option (Trump 2016c). But Trump the performer has taken it a few steps further, advising negotiators to feign disinterest to determine just how desperate the other party is to strike a deal. “To speed up negotiations, be indifferent. That way you’ll find out if the other side is eager to proceed,” he wrote (Trump 2008: 168).
In The Art of the Deal he described how he employed this tactic when making the case to the New Jersey licensing commission that he should be granted a casino license. He wrote: “Much as I wanted to build a great casino on the great site I’d assembled, I said, I had a very successful real estate business in New York and I was more than willing to walk away from Atlantic City if the regulatory process proved to be too difficult or too time‐consuming” (Trump 1987: 207).
In addition to flaunting his ability and willingness to “walk away,” Trump the performer also anchors high – i.e., makes the first move and asks for a maximum possible value to get the most out of the negotiation. “My style of deal‐making is quite simple and straightforward. I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after. Sometimes I settle for less than I sought, but in most cases I still end up with what I want” (Trump 1987: 45). For example, “I went in and asked for the world – for an unprecedented tax abatement – on the assumption that even if I got cut back, the break might still be sufficient,” Trump wrote, describing one of his negotiations with the New York City government (Trump 1987: 131).
With NATO, he's identifying the members' vulnerability -- they need the US umbrella -- and stressing his willingness to walk away. Then he aims high -- 5% of GDP for defense. He may not get precisely that, but he'll get something. This is all classic Trump.