Politeness and convention dictate that European leaders try to sound noncommittal when asked whether a Donald Trump presidency would hurt Nato. But despite the rhetoric about “Trump-proofing”, Nato cohesion will be at risk from a hostile or isolationist Republican president, who has previously threatened to leave the alliance if European defence spending did not increase.
“The truth is that the US is Nato and Nato is the US; the dependence on America is essentially as big as ever,” said Jamie Shea, a former Nato official who teaches at the University of Exeter. “Take the new Nato command centre to coordinate assistance for Ukraine in Wiesbaden, Germany. It is inside a US army barracks, relying on US logistics and software.”
US defence spending will hit a record $968bn in 2024 (the proportion the US spends in Europe is not disclosed). The budgets of the 30 European allies plus Canada amount to $506bn, 34% of the overall total. It is true that 23 out of 32 members expect to spend more than 2% of GDP on defence this year, but in 2014, when the target was set, non-US defence spending in Nato was 24%. Lower than now but not dramatically so.
There are more than 100,000 US personnel stationed in Europe, more than the British army, a figure increased by more than 20,000 by Joe Biden in June 2022 in response to Russia’s attack on Ukraine. US troops have long been based in Germany, but a 3,000-strong brigade was moved by Biden into Romania, a forward corps command post is based in Poland, and US troops contribute to defending the Baltic states, while fighter and bomber squadrons are based in the UK and five naval destroyers in Spain.
Boris Pistorius, Germany’s defence minister, was recently asked whether Nato was ready for Trump. “Elections will have a result whatever,” he began, before acknowledging that much of Europe had been slow to increase defence budgets, missing the warning of Russia’s capture of Crimea in Ukraine in 2014 and only reacting substantively in 2022 after Russia’s full invasion. “What we did was push the snooze button and turn around,” Pistorius said.
In office, Trump hinted at leaving Nato at a chaotic summit in Brussels in 2018, in order to force other allies to increase defence spending.
During the 2024 election campaign Trump has not quite gone as far in public, though the blustering tone has been similar. In February, the Republican suggested he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any country that was “delinquent” because it had “failed to pay” its dues.
It could be argued that Trump is simply in campaign mode. But there are expected to be discussions before the next Nato summit about setting a higher defence spending target, most likely at either 2.5% or 3%, partly driven by Russia’s overt aggression in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Trump’s love of attention, tolerance for chaos and last-minute decision-making mean it is unlikely Nato’s annual summits during a four-year presidency will be smooth affairs.
Shea said that Jens Stoltenberg, Nato’s recently departed secretary general, was successful at “appealing to Trump’s ego and vanity” by persuading him that his complaints had led to other alliance members increasing defence spending. A year after the debacle of Brussels, the 2019 Nato summit was relatively uneventful, partly because Trump said he had been persuaded that Nato had become “more flexible”.
The task for Stoltenberg’s replacement, the former Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, will be similar if the Republican wins, Shea added. “Rutte knows Trump and can appeal to him as a solid European on defence spending,” he said. On a recent trip to London, however, Rutte took a different tack – wondering if Trump would want to risk isolation in “a harsh, uncompromising world” if the US to actually withdraw from Nato.
There are two significant differences now compared with Trump’s first term. Most obvious is the effect of the war in Ukraine on the eastern flank, where Finland and Sweden have joined and frontline countries have sharply lifted defence spending, most notably in Poland, whose budget has risen above 4% of GDP. Among the weapons Warsaw is in the process of buying are 1,000 K2 tanks from South Korea and more than 350 M1A1 Abrams tanks from the US.
Przemysław Biskup, from the Polish Institute of Foreign Affairs, said: “Increasing defence spending is not a controversial issue in Polish politics. The general approach is there is homework to be done, and we have to do it.” At the same time, fears that Trump might try force Ukraine into a humiliating peace by cutting off military aid to Kyiv are “very worrying” for eastern alliance members – leaving them little choice but to carry on spending and hoping Russia does not seek to cause havoc elsewhere.
Biskup also cautioned that there is “an obvious regional divergence emerging”, with eastern frontline nations spending well over 2% of GDP. Others farther west – most notably Italy, Canada, Belgium and Spain – spend less than 1.5%, though the advantage for a country like Poland is that it is gaining a “growing relative power” within the alliance framework.
A second difference is there is more sophisticated thinking in US conservative circles which, drawing on Trump’s instinctive complaints about European defence spending, gives retreating from Nato intellectual ballast. A widely cited article from February 2023 by Sumantra Maitra advocating the idea of a “dormant Nato” essentially argues that the US needs to pivot decisively to face the rising military power of China and as a corollary “to force a Europe defended by Europeans with only American naval [support] and as a logistics provider of last resort”.
That would imply significant US troop withdrawals, though the opportunity for Russian aggression is limited by the fact that the Kremlin is heavily employed in Ukraine. Even if that war were to halt on favourable terms to Moscow – if Trump could actually force a peace on Ukraine – the estimated 600,000 casualties Russia has suffered and the destruction of military materiel would probably mean it would take perhaps a decade or more to recover further offensive potential.
Viljar Lubi, Estonia’s ambassador to the UK, argued it may be possible to link the importance of Nato supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia to longer-term US concerns about China articulated by American conservatives. “I wonder if [seeing] North Korean troops on the soil of Ukraine will change the calculus. Already we’ve seen Iranian weapons ending up in both Ukraine and the Middle East,” he said. “What if it’s a proxy war in Ukraine – and Russia is a proxy, a Chinese proxy,” he asked.
It is a neat, if chilling argument, and one that was made by Pistorius and his British counterpart, John Healey. The entry of North Korea on Russia’s side of the Ukraine war showed there was an “indivisible link with security concerns in the Indo-Pacific as well”, Healey argued. But whether it will be persuasive enough for Trump, whose politics are largely instinctive and personality-led, is less certain.
With tough spending decisions looming, and a war continuing on the edge of Europe, a Trump presidency promises, at the very least, to be bumpy. Meanwhile, the alliance’s post-cold war relevance has never been higher.
