WASHINGTON, July 6 — The technical reality of NATO’s defence planning has always rested on a simple assumption: the United States is the backbone. That assumption, as ever, is now under the hood of a fresh political debate as Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential election, continues his campaign for a return to the White House. Trump’s relationship with the alliance has been a matter of record since his first term.
In 2016, he described NATO as ‘obsolete,’ a characterisation that sent a jolt through diplomatic and military circles. The detail that matters is that he did not simply voice the criticism and move on.
During a 2018 summit, Trump reportedly threatened to withdraw the United States from the alliance altogether. The pressure he applied was not abstract. Trump repeatedly pushed member states to meet the alliance’s defence spending target of 2% of GDP.
That figure, a benchmark many European capitals had long treated as aspirational rather than binding, suddenly became a live political issue. Several nations began to increase their budgets, though the full picture remains uneven.
Beyond the mechanics of NATO funding, Trump’s foreign policy posture has raised deeper questions. He has expressed admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin, a stance that sits uneasily alongside the alliance’s core mission of deterring Russian aggression. He has also questioned continued U.S. aid to Ukraine, a conflict that has defined the alliance’s renewed purpose since 2022.
For NATO planners, the prospect of a second Trump term is not a hypothetical. The alliance’s internal briefings, one imagines, now include a section on how to manage a Washington that may be less willing to lead. The technical reality of European defence — from command structures to intelligence sharing — has long assumed American primacy.
Removing that assumption would require a fundamental redesign. European allies have already begun to talk, quietly, about what a post-American NATO might look like.
But the conversation is delicate. Publicly, officials insist the alliance remains united. Privately, the concern is that the next U.S. president could decide, as Trump reportedly contemplated in 2018, that the costs of membership outweigh the benefits.
What to watch next is the campaign trail itself. Trump’s rhetoric on NATO, on Putin, and on Ukraine will be parsed by allied capitals for any shift in tone.
The detail that matters is not the broadsides — those are familiar — but the fine print. A single sentence in a rally speech, a single answer in an interview, could signal whether the next administration intends to stay or to walk. For now, the alliance waits.
The machinery of NATO continues to turn, but the political weather is changing. And as ever, the most important component in that machinery — the American commitment — remains the least certain.
