Fears of a NATO Withdrawal Rise as Trump Seeks a Return to Power
Fears of a NATO Withdrawal Rise as Trump Seeks a Return to Power
Current and former European diplomats said there was growing concern a second Trump presidency could mean an American retreat from the continent and a gutting of NATO.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman Dec. 9, 2023
For 74 years, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has been America’s most important military alliance. Presidents of both parties have seen NATO as a force multiplier enhancing the influence of the United States by uniting countries on both sides of the Atlantic in a vow to defend one another.
Donald J. Trump has made it clear that he sees NATO as a drain on American resources by freeloaders. He has held that view for at least a quarter of a century.
In his 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” Mr. Trump wrote that “pulling back from Europe would save this country millions of dollars annually.” As president, he repeatedly threatened a United States withdrawal from the alliance.
Yet as he runs to regain the White House, Mr. Trump has said precious little about his intentions. His campaign website contains a single cryptic sentence: “We have to finish the process we began under my administration of fundamentally re-evaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission.” He and his team refuse to elaborate.
That vague line has generated enormous uncertainty and anxiety among European allies and American supporters of the country’s traditional foreign-policy role.
European ambassadors and think tank officials have been making pilgrimages to associates of Mr. Trump to inquire about his intentions. At least one ambassador, Finland’s Mikko Hautala, has reached out directly to Mr. Trump and sought to persuade him of his country’s value to NATO as a new member, according to two people familiar with the conversations.
In interviews over the past several months, more than a half-dozen current and former European diplomats — speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from Mr. Trump should he win — said alarm was rising on Embassy Row and among their home governments that Mr. Trump’s return could mean not just the abandonment of Ukraine, but a broader American retreat from the continent and a gutting of the Atlantic alliance.
“There is great fear in Europe that a second Trump presidency would result in an actual pullout of the United States from NATO,” said James G. Stavridis, a retired four-star Navy admiral who was NATO’s supreme allied commander from 2009 to 2013. “That would be an enormous strategic and historic failure on the part of our nation.
Formed after World War II to keep the peace in Europe and act as a bulwark against the Soviet Union, NATO evolved into an instrument through which the U.S. works with allies on military issues around the world. Its original purpose — the heart of which is the collective-defense provision, known as Article V, that states that an armed attack on any member “shall be considered an attack against them all” — lives on, especially for newer members like Poland and the Baltic States that were once dominated by the Soviet Union and continue to fear Russia.
The interviews with current and former diplomats revealed that European officials were mostly out of ideas for how to deal with Mr. Trump other than returning to a previous playbook of flattery and transactional tributes.
Smaller countries that are more vulnerable to Russian attacks are expected to try to buy their way into Mr. Trump’s good graces by increasing their orders of American weapons or — as Poland did during his term — by performing grand acts of adulation, including offering to name a military base Fort Trump in return for his placing a permanent presence there.
At this point in the campaign, Mr. Trump is focused on the criminal cases against him and on defeating his Republican primary rivals, and he rarely talks about the alliance, even in private.
As he maintains a broad lead in his campaign to become the Republican nominee, the implications for America’s oldest and most critical military alliance are not clearly advertised plans from Mr. Trump, but a turmoil of widely held suspicions charged with unknowability.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/09/us/politics/trump-2025-nato.html
MY COMMENT
I’m in complete agreement with Mr Trump when he said NATO is a ‘drain on American resources’ and that it’s time that Europe provides its defences through its own resources. European countries are not trustworthy allies. They want American money and weapons but are always antiamericans, they vote against America all the time in UN. While American tax payers money is drained to European countries they spend their own money in welfare state to their citizens. If they want to be welfare states they must pay foir it. If they have to choose between welfare and defence they must make their choice. Besides NATO had a function when USSR was a real threat to Western countries as a whole. No more. NATO should be disolved when Warsaw Pact dissolved itself. Moreover, Europe is almost falling down to Muslims. Are Muslims deserved of alliance? Trump is right!