"NATO Has Dodged Collapse Before. It’s Never Been This Close
June 24, 2025
Why is the globe’s greatest military alliance so often in crisis? President Donald Trump’s reelection last November, and Vice President JD Vance’s deliberately insulting speech in Munich in February, cast the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into grave anxiety. But it’s hardly the first time the alliance has been at risk of falling apart... Trump sometimes seems downright hostile to NATO, but previous US leaders threatened to leave the alliance or simply looked forward to the day when Europe could take care of itself. NATO’s history is an odd combination of epic, history-changing achievements and existential crises...
NATO is America’s gold-standard alliance, but it wasn’t America’s idea. The US had no tradition of peacetime security commitments in Europe before World War II. It had no intention of making them after that war ended. But Washington ultimately stayed, and led this enduring alliance, because there was no other solution to the strategic problem of anarchy in the Old World.
Europe had destroyed itself twice in a generation. Both conflicts sprawled across oceans and ensnared the US. After World War II, old antagonisms lingered and new radicalisms threatened. The French feared German resurgence; the Soviet Union dominated Eastern Europe with ample opportunities to expand to the west.
Only the US had the power to secure Western Europe against external threats, while also smothering the internal animosities that might again set things alight. So the Truman administration agreed to join an alliance proposed by its weaker members — whose goal, NATO’s first secretary general quipped, was to keep the Americans in, the Germans down and the Soviets out.
NATO succeeded outlandishly in that mission. It helped the transatlantic community contain and outcompete the Soviet Union. It provided the security in which old enemies could become allies and Europe’s killing fields could become a democratic zone of peace. NATO became the core of America’s free-world coalition and a pillar of the expanding liberal order. The alliance performed so brilliantly that it endured after the Cold War ended: NATO took in new members from across the old Iron Curtain to expand the geography of Europe’s peace...
NATO seemed like it might fracture during the painful debate over West German rearmament in the 1950s, or the bitter disputes about Iraq in 2003...
France quit the NATO military command in 1966 and insisted that all US troops leave its territory. “Does that include the dead Americans in military cemeteries?” Secretary of State Dean Rusk acidly replied. He wasn’t the only US leader to wonder if the alliance was worth the headaches involved.
Dwight Eisenhower asked when Western Europe could get its act together so America could “sit back and relax somewhat.” During intra-alliance brawls in the 1950s and 1960s, US officials threatened, albeit implicitly, to bring the troops home. Some things never change: In 2011, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates warned that freeloading friends might eventually be on their own. Trump is ruder and crasser about these issues. But he’s not the first to question whether NATO is a good deal for the US...
Despite all this, NATO persisted because it always had enemies — the Soviet Union, Islamic radicals, Vladimir Putin’s Russia — noxious enough to keep its members together. The democratic values shared by most of those states provided ideological cohesion and a shared commitment to making a world where liberalism could thrive...
After the Cold War, NATO grew more geographically ambitious: It intervened “out of area,” in locales from the Balkans to Afghanistan. But it became less militarily capable, thanks to a quarter-century peace dividend. By the mid-2010s, German troops were, ridiculously, exercising with broomsticks in place of guns.
Weakness was a testament to success: NATO had created a cocoon of security that allowed European states to disarm. But that weakness intensified accusations of free riding by Washington and left the alliance ill-prepared to confront a resurgent Russian threat...
Europeans have always wondered whether the US will be there when it matters. How could those fears not be turbocharged in the age of Trump?
Trump isn’t original in questioning the value of NATO. But Europe never had to deal with a US president who threatened to violently seize territory from allies, or so gleefully threatened to abandon those allies if they are attacked. Economic disputes are normal, but no American president has so wantonly jeopardized global prosperity — or seemed so much happier in the company of aggressive autocrats than longtime democratic friends.
What’s more, Trump did temporarily sever US support for Ukraine, leaving European countries wondering who might be next. His subordinates sometimes talk (or text) like they’d prefer the Europeans just drop dead. So Trump is now magnifying NATO’s other crises, and leading analysts, on both sides of the Atlantic, to wonder if the alliance might crumble after all...
Asia Firsters in Washington might think European weakness doesn’t matter, so long as the US is strong in the Western Pacific. They ought to think again. Europe and the UK account for about 20% of world gross domestic product: It’s hard to believe that cutting the continent loose will somehow make America more competitive, economically and technologically, against Beijing. And if the US does turn its back on Europe, it may struggle to remain a successful global power.
Europe still represents America’s entry point into Western Eurasia, the supercontinent where so much of the action happens, and its staging point for Africa and the Middle East — where Trump has now become embroiled in exactly the sort of war he pledged to avoid. With a European foothold, the US is positioned for influence across several important regions. Without it, America risks being locked into the Western Hemisphere — on one side, at least — and locked out of the struggle for wide swaths of the world. Then there’s the possibility that a post-American Europe could return — not immediately, but eventually — to the darker patterns of its past...
It’s easy to envision a scenario in which Trump cripples the alliance, because we may already be living through it. In this scenario, Trump continues to pervert NATO by threatening the territorial integrity of its members. Unresolved trade wars create a poisonous transatlantic climate.
Trump withdraws large contingents of US troops, to punish European countries or shift focus to Asia. He worsens Europe’s crisis of security by abandoning Ukraine and palling around with Putin. A new, illiberal alliance emerges as Trump elevates right-wing figures — like Hungary’s Viktor Orban or the AfD in Germany — with more sympathy for Russia than for NATO’s core ideals.
In this scenario, Trump wouldn’t have to formally withdraw from NATO. He would make the alliance a dead letter by destroying its strategic cohesion and trust.
Trump may not be the sole source of NATO’s crisis, but he certainly has the power to make it fatal. Fortunately, there’s a more constructive scenario, which isn’t out of the question yet.
In this scenario, Trump eventually shuts up about annexing Greenland and Canada; he settles for greater cooperation on Arctic security and his missile shield, Golden Dome, instead. A trade truce soothes the US-EU relationship. An administration consumed by Middle Eastern crises comes to see the value of the military access and diplomatic support the European allies provide...
Whether Trump can deliver this second scenario is deeply uncertain. His approach to NATO has become less combative in recent months. The danger of a total American sellout of Ukraine has, for the moment, faded.
Yet suspicion of NATO is core to Trump’s worldview. A president who can’t resist tormenting perceived opponents may find it hard to shift from disruption to the reassurance that is required to make a new transatlantic bargain stick. Our era is rife with crisis. But the most critical question of the coming years may be whether Trump finally accepts the argument that persuaded his predecessors — that NATO, for all its burdens and frustrations, really is indispensable for the world, and for America, too."
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